A smorgasbord of international flavours @ Smorgasburg

Dude, Toronto food festivals are back with a vengeance like Simon Gruber this summer… but not all food festivals are created equal. I gotta say, I was so disappointed in the Food Truck Festival that I didn’t even blog about it. Seemed like 75% of the food was burgers, fries and tacos — and yes, those are a few of my favourite things — but I was looking for something funky, and I didn’t really find it.

On the other hand, Smorgasburg Toronto, which is going down on the waterfront every Saturday until mid-September, has a list of vendors that better reflects the culinary diversity of this city. You’ve got Jamaican, Sri Lankan, Salvadorean, Japanese, Filipino, Indian, Argentinian… I think I even saw a Somali samosa stand. But you KNOW I love the smell of sizzling meat in the summer, so my first stop was the great big grill at Baan Authentic Thai Cuisine, where I snagged me some pork skewers:

You don’t need need a fork to eat this pork! Meat is nicely grilled, with some good char, and they come three to an order, which is a nice light snack in Flavourtown. But if you don’t like it hot, stay away from the green sauce — that shit’s so spicy, I actually ate some of the cucumbers that came as a garnish just to cool things down!!!

But you KNOW we can’t go to Smorgasburg and only eat one thing, bro! This jerk shrimp po’boy packs a fistful of crispy shrimp into an irie cocoa-bread roll, with some plantain chips on the side for snacking. Yeah, we be jammin’ this… straight down my piehole!!!!!!

Don’t get me wrong, some of the stuff at Smorgasburg is expensive — that shrimp sammy was like 13 bucks, bro! But if you want more bang for your buck, you can’t go wrong with a five-dolla empanada. The pulled beef was nice and tender, the shell was flaky, and the whole thing was piping hot, even though they just pulled it out of a warming station. Dude, I could crush at least four of these…

…but you know I gotta save room for dessert, right? There are some pretty funky dessert stands at this festival, but on a hot summer day like last Saturday, I could really go some ice cream. Turns out Pandoughra’s Box sells both cookies AND ice cream, and combining these two things into an ice cream sandwich is sooo the way to go, bro!!!!