Last spring, on an Easter weekend trip to Miami to research the area’s thriving food truck scene, Suresh Doss had a revelation. Mr. Doss, a 34-year-old computer systems engineer who runs a popular food and drink website called Spotlight Toronto, is the de facto face of street food in Toronto. He’s a born organizer. When somebody wants to start a food truck, or work through the city’s all-but-impossible street-food regulations, or even just to find a street-food seller at lunchtime, they turn to Mr. Doss, typically. He grew up surrounded by the stuff.
As a child in Colombo, Sri Lanka, he’d often buy a bowl of poori slathered with curry, or a paper cone filled with mango, pineapple and hot sauce from a street-side hawker on the way to school in the morning. He even worked as a chutney boy on the days when his mother, Bernadette, made her fermented rice and lentil dosas at fundraisers held outside one of Columbo’s Catholic cathedrals.
Toronto, where his family moved when he was 12, was a shock to his system. Save for a shrinking band of hot-dog carts and the tired, diesel-belching chip trucks grandfathered into prime spots outside Nathan Phillips Square, food vendors weren’t welcome on public streets in Toronto. The issue was stalled, too, for the most part. As for the new generation of food trucks springing up outside the city, in St. Catharines and Hamilton, Toronto city hall wasn’t about to welcome something it had never seen...read more.
—Image courtesy of The Globe and Mail