The street is packed. It’s a glorious Saturday, and I’m lost in the festival crowd, basking in the sun-drenched splendour of a summer afternoon. The faces and families number in the thousands — the mosaic of races and ethnicities that define a multicultural metropolis. Closed to traffic, the busy thoroughfare is animated by some 130 vendors as aromas of falafel, roasted corn, Hawaiian barbecue, Hakka, gyros and jerk waft sweetly through the air. On either side of the festivities, some of North America’s best restaurants line the street, their outdoor tables melding with the throng. Over 250,000 people gather here over the course of the three-day fair. This is Toronto’s beating heart.
Not everyone would agree. The annual Taste of Lawrence plays out well away from the city’s downtown, in the Wexford Heights neighbourhood within the suburban district of Scarborough. From behind a windshield, the 850-metre stretch that hosts the festival can flash by in a blur of eclectic strip malls lined with restaurants, nail salons and grocery stores, as well as churches and parking lots interspersed with the occasional apartment building. It’s far from the city’s largest galleries and museums, financial towers and upscale fashion boutiques — or a subway station. And the culinary scene is an approachable counterpoint to the high-end downtown destinations recently anointed with the city’s first Michelin stars.
For all that, it’s also a far cry from the white, upper-middle-class enclaves that still shape cultural perceptions of North American suburbs. As Taste of Lawrence demonstrates, the neighbourhood is anything but sterile and boring. “Our festival
