street eats festival toronto

Food vendor goes off on Street Eats Market organizer after disastrous Toronto event

The weather made a lot of events disastrous this past weekend, but one food vendor went off on the organizer of Toronto's Street Eats Market because of way more than just the storm.

Hamilton-based vegan fast food vendor Bring Me Some posted a lengthy diatribe to social media following what was a nightmare weekend at the festival for them.

They describe problems with a deceptive portrayal of the number of people they should have expected, sudden cover charges for people attending and an overall lack of organization.

"We don't like to share things like this but felt it was necessary to hopefully prevent this from happening to someone else," they wrote in a caption.

The post refers to past events by Street Eats Festival organizer Philip Suos, a mac n' cheese festival and Markham public market that also apparently did not go to plan. Bring Me Some also says it cost them thousands of dollars to participate in the festival.

"There was one bouncy castle, one ride and no attendees," reads the post. They say they were promised crowds of up to 20,000, but that only 300 people showed up the first day, and that they weren't even confident, after viewing the setting, that it would have been able to hold that many people.

"There were three port-a-potties which were filthy by the second day."

When Saturday's terrifying storm hit, many other vendors were safer inside trucks, but Bring Me Some had their tent setup completely destroyed.

"A brutal storm and a perfectly legal scam," reads their post, which also contains photos of the damage to their tent and what appear to be screenshots of texts from Suos (promising crowds of thousands) and a fellow vendor.

"He just rips vendors and attendees off," reads the screenshot. "The day of, he just pretends everything is fine and ignores people's concerns. He is truly a scam artist who doesn't care about the experience of the vendors or the attendees. Feel like a mini Fyre festival disaster every few months he is organizing."

Suos, on the other hand, says other vendors don't agree with Bring Me Some about their experience at the festival.

"They weren't as popular at our Street Eats Festival over this past long weekend compared to our other vendors and took it upon themselves to lash out making false claims about our festival," Suos tells blogTO.

"I can confirm that all vendors at the festival are not on their side and are against her actions. Our vendors can confirm that there was a lot of traffic with many vendors selling out, despite fighting the rain."

Suos says that in response to the cover charge, Bring Me Some tried to sneak people into the festival, which he says also ended up compromising the safety of their tent setup.

He says the event was never advertised as free although it has been in the past, and that door admission was $10 but online admission was $5, a tactic to reduce long lines.

"They also tied their tent to our fence as well which they were told not to and put proper weights instead," says Suos.

"After ignoring our warnings, when the storm hit, it blew over hitting their vehicle. None of our fencing around the entire grounds came down after that storm, only the fencing where that vendor was because they unhooked it to allow guests to bypass our entrance."

He says although the weather was an extreme challenge, the festival attracted around 9,000 guests over the four days of the long weekend. 

"Our entire team, including myself, were on the grounds fixing things and sending communications," says Suos.

After the storm hit everyone was allowed to enter for free for the remainder of Saturday to make up for losses due to the storm, with Saturday ticket holders given the option to return any following day.

"The vendor has also verbally abused our staff and racially called out the 'N' word which we absolutely don't condone. Our other vendors can also attest to this vendor acting this way," says Suos.

"This case is now a defamation lawsuit as all the information written was false and some information that has nothing to do with this event."

Lead photo by

Bring Me Some


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