City Hall's street vendor picks get thumbs down from foodies
10 Jul 2010
Post by Mike Klassen in Editorial
According to foodies, City Hall picked some real lemons in their food cart trial
The food cart issue brought about by Vancouver city council struck me as a goldmine of populist politics. Who doesn't like food, right? There were some initial concerns raised by the DVBIA, who rightly pointed out that it would be grossly unfair to position the carts in the vicinity of already rent and property tax burdened retail restaurants. For the most part, however, the suggestion by Charles Gauthier to model the program after Portland's successful street food cart system was ignored.
For average folks who just want some good eats, they don't worry that much about how economically viable a sushi or wraps restaurant is. The City pulled out the bugles to announce their list of food cart selections whittled down from a massive 800 applications. How did they do it? Did they conduct a cook-off, a Canadian Idol of sorts as myself and Frances Bula proposed on last week's civic affairs panel?
No. What City staff did was throw a dart, and if your name got hit you were it. By using a lottery to pick who got the cart locations rather than on inventiveness or merit, there are a LOT of foodies around town who are miffed. Foodie columnist Andrew Morrison of the excellent Scout Magazine sums up what many are thinking in this great post:
"While I’m glad the city recognized that they were unqualified to choose which food businesses would suit our streets best (their track record on this is pretty bad), they could have just asked around, perhaps even called in a couple of independent consultants who knew a thing or two about food. Better yet, they could have actually interviewed the applicants to discern whether or not they were serious. I certainly would have advised them to the best of my ability for free, as would (I’m sure) other local food writers, chefs’ associations and so on…but no.
In an effort to be democratic (which can be interpreted as ‘blameless’), they basically drew names from a bingo barrel as if the vendors would be selling scarves, toques and glow sticks. This, according to Grant Woff, acting manager of street administration, was “the fairest method as everyone was given the same odds”.
Big mistake.
"
http://www.citycaucus.com/
Not that I would support this....a lack of regulation and the free market will wean out those carts of less calibre.
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