SASHA CHAPMAN, Special to The Globe and Mail, July 12, 2008
Toronto has all the ingredients for the world’s best street food outside of Asia. We have the know-how: recently arrived cooks from places like Taipei, Hong Kong and Singapore, where street food is elevated to an art form. We have excellent raw ingredients: high-quality meat, along with family-run businesses that make their own tofu and kimchi. We even have Greenbelt farmers growing Chinese herbs and greens. Most importantly, we have a large Asian population hungry for the foods they ate back home.
This weekend, more than 60,000 people will get a taste of those foods at Markham’s Toronto Night Market. Think fluffy pancakes filled with savoury peanut sauce. Beijing’s skewers of candied hawthorns and other fruits. Cumin-scented lamb skewers from China’s remote Xinjiang province, grilled over charcoal. The closest thing to a hot dog is a slightly sweet, cured Taiwanese sausage.
Held in the parking lot of Metro Square shopping mall at Kennedy and Steeles, the two-night event is organized by Power Unit, a volunteer group of mostly twentysomething university students. It raises money for local grassroots charities by collecting rent from its 80-odd vendors.
“We wanted to recreate the dynamic, chaotic atmosphere of the night markets back home,” says May Choi, the 23-year-old president of Power Unit. Ms. Choi’s family immigrated to Canada from Hong Kong in 1993.
Part carnival, part festival, the event stages three-on-three basketball games, martial arts and musical performances. But while you might stumble across Chinese opera in Hong Kong’s Temple Street, you’re more likely to hear hip-hop on the main stage at the Toronto Night Market.
SOMETHING STINKS
While the market bills itself as pan-Asian, about half the plates are typically Taiwanese; there’s also a smattering of street foods from mainland China, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Singapore and other Asian cities.
Many vendors are simply amateurs armed with an old family recipe. So along with peanut-slathered satay skewers, you can find exotic drinks like iced chrysanthemum tea or Taiwan’s honey water flavoured with basil seeds.
The most popular – and authentic – dishes may be cheap (they average $2 or $3 a plate) but they demand patience; visitors will line up for an hour just for a taste of Osaka’s takoyaki balls of battered, deep-fried octopus and ginger.
The most infamous – and unusual dish – is chou dofu, or smelly tofu, a Chinese specialty of fermented tofu that stinks like a barnyard.
Deep-fried, the taste is surprisingly mild, but homesick Taiwanese will line up for hours – enduring the stench as the wind shifts – just for a taste of the stuff.
Husband and wife Kang-Ling and Sharon Wei have been frying up smelly tofu at the Toronto Night Market since it first launched in 2002. The dish was so popular that they eventually launched their own restaurant at Birchmount and Sheppard, Wei’s Taiwanese Foods. “The customers couldn’t wait to have it only once a year,” explains Mr. Wei.
DOWNTOWN VERSUS THE SUBURBS
It makes sense that Toronto’s first night market would spring up in Markham, not downtown: The best Chinese food is no longer found in our city centre.
While there are exceptions – the family-run Yung Sing Bakery on Baldwin, which turns 40 this year, still makes some of the flakiest red-bean pastries on this side of the Pacific – a lot of Asian delicacies have followed well-heeled Asian immigrants to Markham.
But the northward tide may yet turn. City councillor Shelley Carroll has been trying to find a way to bring the night market downtown. “We looked seriously at Dundas Square, but the night market is just too darn successful – it’s too big for the square,” Ms. Carroll says.
The obvious site for a truly Toronto night market would be Nathan Phillips Square, built on the remains of Toronto’s first Chinatown, which celebrates its 130th anniversary this year.
Some vendors wonder whether downtown is ready for authentic Asian. Until last summer, Mr. Wei avoided the downtown core, assuming the food would be too smelly for the city. “We didn’t want to ruin Toronto!” But last year, he brought the specialty to Broadview and Gerrard for a special event. To his astonishment, it was extremely popular. He and his wife will be taking the tofu to Spadina later on Aug. 9 and 10 for the annual Chinatown Festival.
THE NIGHT-MARKET TRADITION
Night markets are a fixture of public life in Asia. Although they have been around for thousands of years – the Tang Dynasty began regulating its night markets in the year 836 – they became especially vibrant in Taiwan after the Second World War, as that island prospered. Night markets typically get busy around dusk – after the hot sun has set – and often stretch into the early hours of the next day.
“The trick is not to go too early,” says Shirley Lum, a Chinatown expert and amateur historian who leads food tours in Toronto. “The whole concept behind any night market in Hong Kong or Beijing is the concept of ‘sui yeah,’ which literally translates as ‘cook late.’ “
“The later you go, the cheaper the food,” says Frankie Hung, Power Unit’s director of communications. “Vendors charging $2 or $3 at the beginning of the night often discount their plates by midnight.”
FAIR’S FARE
Until Councillor John Filion can convince someone to pay for his pilot project to launch some alternatives to hot dogs on the streets of Toronto, the best (legal) street food in this city will be limited to summer food festivals like the Toronto Night Market. That’s because the regulations for festivals are much looser than they are for regular street-food vendors, says Mr. Filion.
The councillor is staging his own street-food festival every Friday this July in Mel Lastman Square. “We hope to launch a pilot street-food project next summer,” says Mr. Filion, who is looking for donors or interest-free lenders to fund the new vending carts.
In the meantime, the best bet for decent street food this summer is the many food festivals. But tonight’s night market offers some of the best. It’s also the most fun.
