Toronto Underground Market calls it quits (for now)

Like the unfortunate female crab spider, the food festival appears to have been snuffed out by its own prodigious offspring. Last Friday, TUM’s organizers announced over social media that the fest’s three-year anniversary party on Saturday, September 27 will be “the last #TUM event as we know it.”   When it started back in 2011, the Toronto Underground helped revitalize the city’s culinary-events scene by luring food lovers to the Evergreen Brick Works to sample dishes prepped by aspiring chefs—several of whom went on to make big names for themselves. Naturally, the formula’s success gave rise to copycats, and, three years later, here we are—in a post pop-up city where it’s impossible to walk a block without tripping over an Asian street-food festival, and where TUM’s quarterly pig-outs no longer attract the hungry throngs they used to.   TUM’s final event at 99 Sudbury will reunite a bunch of the festival’s power-alumni, including La Carnita, Rock Lobster and Fidel Gastro. It’s not clear what will happen after that, but TUM fans may draw hope from this slightly cryptic note on the festival’s Facebook page: “Don’t worry, TUM is not going away after this celebration, just changing.”