What happened to food trucks?
CBC has a brief video answering the question what happened to food trucks? with the answers we all know – too much official control, and fancy rather than fast affordable food.
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DeWolf 12:52 on 2024-12-28 Permalink
Street food should be inexpensive and it should provide a leg up to small entrepreneurs. Cities around the world are full of successful restaurants that started as a little stall on the street. As usual we did it all backwards and only allowed established restaurateurs to run food trucks.
But there’s an interesting wrinkle to the story. When many boroughs loosened their terrasse regulations in 2021, they began allowing restaurants to cook food outdoors. Over the summer, Social Club on St-Viateur took advantage of this to set up a sausage and sandwich stall almost every weekend, and on St-Hubert there’s a Mexican deli that has a big flat-top out front to cook meat for tacos, which you can buy for cash right on the street, even in the middle of the winter. Another Mexican mini-market down the street does the same for people selling tamales and other snacks.
It’s like a regulatory back door to having street food as it’s meant to be.
Ian 16:51 on 2024-12-28 Permalink
There’s a couple of places like that in Jean Talon market, too.
The food trucks really were pathetic, like 12 bucks for a crappy tiny “lobster roll” that was just a miniature pollock salad guédille with a couple of sad shreds of pickled onion or an 8 dollar “fusion” bao the size of a cue ball twith a thimble of pulled pork buried deep in its doughy heart that tasted like nothing whatsoever, etc.
There’s not many cities in the world worth visitng that don’t have street food. Even Toronto has chip trucks that sell poutine. Of course our naysayers like to claim it’s a public health issue but for real, it’s the restaurant lobby not wanting anyone to be on their turf. That said …if some sit-down restaurant can’t compete with some guy with a cart selling falafel pita or poutine in the park, well… they aren’t a very good restaurant.
Roman 21:40 on 2024-12-28 Permalink
Street food would be a fantastic addition to Canada, and Montreal. It’d be so awesome! Street food is my favourite way to eat anywhere in the world. I literally got sick less eating Thai street food than I was eating at proper sit down restaurants in some European cities. Agreed that food trucks in Montreal are totally pathetic.
Kate 23:24 on 2024-12-28 Permalink
That’s because Drapeau hated them, along with newspaper kiosks and other sidewalk paraphernalia.
jeather 23:32 on 2024-12-28 Permalink
He’s been dead for twenty five years and out of politics for forty, we could have fixed it if we wanted to.
Kate 13:28 on 2024-12-29 Permalink
Maybe, but it explains why we completely lost that bit of our food culture, which we did have at one time (for example). If food trucks had been allowed to continue and evolve, we wouldn’t have had to reinvent them in the unsatisfactory form we have now.
DeWolf 13:51 on 2024-12-29 Permalink
Drapeau represented a certain strain of autocratic fussiness that is still very much present in Montreal. There are a lot of people who would be appalled by the idea of real street food, not for any good reason, just because they think it’s messy and disorderly and somehow wrong.
Kate 17:46 on 2024-12-29 Permalink
On the other hand, a thing I’ve read about existing in both the US and UK that I don’t think we’ve ever had here in Montreal is the ice cream truck. Maybe it’s that they’d only be a viable business proposition for half the year or less?
JP 18:45 on 2024-12-29 Permalink
When I was visiting family in Toronto (not a suburb but Toronto proper) in the summer in the 90s, there was an ice cream truck that passed by regularly…as a kid it was definitely something that struck me as a difference between here and there.
Ian 19:02 on 2024-12-29 Permalink
I’m from Ontario, lived in Toronto for 5 years and yeah they only run in summer. Most of them seemed to be run by the same distribution company, they had all the same stuff. And the same creepy ice cream truck music haha
In Hamliton we didn’t have ice cream trucks in most neighbourhoods but there were Dicke Dee’s three wheel bicycles that teenagers would drive around as a summer job, not unlike the ones you see in Parc Mont Royal.