Toronto is still cool and a music and food festival this weekend is proof
Back for its second year after an eagerly attended 2025 debut, Toronto's On The Way Festival is all the evidence you need that the city's music, event, and food scenes can stand up to any New York, Berlin or London naysayers.
Standard Time programming director Malcom Levy and Community Wines co-founder Blake Pearson already had plenty of collaborations under their belts when, in 2025, the idea to create a music, art and food festival dawned on them.
It's a match made in multisensory heaven, really. Geary's Standard Time has a reputation for curating some of the city's best emerging electronic acts, putting them under the same roof as burgeoning culinary pop-ups and installments from local visual artists.
Community Wines, a collective that started as a natural wine bottle share club and blossomed into an event series for which tickets are some of the city's most sought-after, occupies a similar cultural cache.
With the market cornered on blending and showcasing Toronto's food, music and art in the form of smaller-scale events, Levy and Pearson realized that the local festival circuit had a gap that needed to be filled, and it was shaped just like them.
Within a few weeks, they had secured The Bentway and an impressive lineup of musical acts, wine producers and restaurants, and the inaugural On The Way Festival was announced. Tickets flew out the door, and by the time the dust settled, fans were already begging for word on the next installment.
"We know that there's so many great clubs, there's so many great collectives, there's so many shows going on, but when it comes to the festival circuit outdoors, it's fairly thin in Toronto. We do have our big major ones, but compared to other cities like New York, Berlin, Montreal, even, there's way less here, and we wanted to bring everything that makes Toronto so special together under one roof," Blake Pearson tells blogTO.
For them, that looks like a carefully curated lineup of emerging local electronic and pop acts, woven in with artists from around the world to show that our own musicians have what it takes to contend — and mesh — with the rest of the world's.
But, unlike your standard music festival, just as much care goes into the non-sonic elements of the festival, too.
"For so long, Toronto's had so many interesting creatives; artists, designers, technologists, culture makers in the city, foodies, that have been creating all these interesting microcultures, and there's very few places where people can just go out from all those communities and actually celebrate and really get into it," Malcom Levy says.
"I think with On The Way, it becomes a space where that all happens, and the music really resonates around that."
Now, with the festival's second installment on the horizon (this Saturday, Aug. 15), Levy and Pearson are prepared to make good on their mission to highlight Toronto's value as a cultural centre once again, embarking on bigger and better means to do so.
"What we really want to do is create a space where you go in, and you have a full experience through the day into the night with incredible art, visuals, music, food, and of course wine. Really, it's a place for people to hang out, have fun, and get to know the city in a different way," Levy tells blogTO.
The festival landscape will feature a large-scale fabric art installation that interacts with the architecture of The Bentway, while smaller-scale artists will make surprise appearances over the festival's 10-hour runtime. Airbrush artist Zephyr, for example, will do custom airbrush art on festival merch or items attendees bring themselves.
As for food, the lineup is heavy-hitting. Rizzo's House of Parm, Matty's Patty's, Ruru Baked and Rooms Coffee are all slated to sate festivalgoers' appetites, alongside a suite of beverages replete with certified cool-person sips like chilled red and orange wines, Modelo and, what the hell, sure, Cut Water.
The musical lineup is nothing to scoff at. The Dare is headlining, evidence of On The Way festival's already-established weight, alongside other international acts like Ross from Friends (read: not David Schwimmer), local legends BadBadNotGood and rising Toronto stars like Young Teesh.
"I want it to be the day of summer that people remember. Everything, every element is very much Toronto or very much driven by things in Toronto that inspire us," Pearson says. "We wanted people to come away from this year — and you will — saying that this was one of the best days I had in the city all summer."
I don't doubt they'll succeed in their mission.
In the post-Drake-being-cool, post-Raptors-championship, pre-during-and-post-Covid slump of the late 2010s and early 2020s, "there's nothing to do in Toronto," or the simple-but-effective "Toronto is so lame," has become a common refrain.
But, as Levy and Pearson rightly point out, there's always something going on — and something cool, at that — in the city for those willing to look. Lucky for us all, you don't have to look too hard for On The Way Festival. It's unmissable, undeniable, not unlike Toronto.
There are still a few tickets available online for On The Way Festival, which runs from 1 to 11 p.m. this Saturday, Aug. 15. Trust me, you'll want to scoop them up.
