Have you ever taken a food tour during a vacation? Read on to find out how the best food tours can enhance your food travel experiences and what you should consider when you research potential culinary tours.
Food tours are one of the tastiest ways to experience a new city for travelers on a dedicated food trip as well as for those on a weekend getaway. Not every trip is a “foodietrip” but every trip should involve great food.
This is why travelers should consider taking a city tour that focuses on what to eat in all food destinations that they visit. These city tours supplement independent restaurant tours which you can easily plan using our food travel guides.
As for us, we like to take walking food tours where we can try local food that we might not find on our own. These food crawls have often led us down alleys and into local markets with stops at independent food stalls for food tastings, providing us with opportunities to chat with local artisans and experience authentic food products.
Whether we take a street food tour or a more comprehensive culinary experience, we always learn a lot and have fun during quality food tours around the world. To us, these food tours provide a window to eating like locals in a new-to-us city.
Taking a good food tour provides us with a meaningful introduction to a city’s food culture and to the city itself. We often learn a lot during a gastronomic tour from art to architecture and of course food.
Beyond that, we enjoy interacting with knowledgeable food tour guides who double as enthusiastic city ambassadors – especially when they provide us with suggestions for local restaurants and coffee shops.
Pro Tip
Take a food tour soon after you arrive in a city. Not only will the tour make you smarter about the city’s food scene for the duration of your visit, but you will also have fun and make likeminded food-obsessed friends.
Recommended Food Tours
We thoroughly investigate food tours in advance to make sure that they’re a good use of our time and money for culinary vacations. Though we prefer personal recommendations from trusted sources, we also do a lot of online research. Plus, we seek out quality tour companies with reputations for offering well-curated food tours.
Athens Food Tour
Athens is filled with great food thanks to the abundance of fresh produce, fish and feta cheese. Though we spent a month exploring Athens on our own, we discovered some of the best food in Athens during a half-day food tour.
This food tour included local specialties like olives, koulouri and cheese pies, but it didn’t include souvlaki. We produced a YouTube video all about the fun Athens food tour.
Don’t worry! We found the best Greek souvlaki in Athens on a self-guided food tour. Watch our YouTube video for the full story as we count down our top ten favorites.
Recommended Tour Company in Athens
Greeking.me
We also took an awesome cooking class in Athens and learned how to cool moussaka, the ultimate Greek food classic. Booking the class through Cookly was easy and taking the class was loads of fun.
Recommended Cooking Class in Athens
Onion Athens
Bangkok Food Tour
Recommended Tour Companies in Bangkok
A Chef’s Tour
TakeMe Tour
Barcelona Food Tour
Catalonia’s largest city, Barcelona has it all from tasty tapas to modern gastronomy plus some of the world’s best wine to wash it all down. We’ve enjoyed taking a few different Barcelona food tours including where we’ve our way through a local neighborhood and a local market as well as another tour where we spent an evening sampling wine and tapas. Then there was that tour where we drank our way through Spanish wines…
Recommended Tour Company in Barcelona
Devour Barcelona
Bucharest Food Tour
Bucharest has an eclectic food scene with a mix of cool cafes and traditional restaurants. By taking a Bucharest food tour and digging deeper, we were able to find great places to eat local food and drink great coffee.
We didn’t stop at food tours during our visit to Bucharest. We also took a garlic class. Yes, a garlic class.
Recommended Tour Companies in Bucharest
Delish Experiences
My Secret Romania
Budapest Food Tour
Budapest, a city rich in both history and restaurants, buzzes with a café culture that fuels the city during the day and ruin bars that keep Budapest hopping at night. We chose to explore the historic Budapest Jewish quarter with a food tour – a banging start to our month-long food exploration in Hungary’s vibrant capital.
Recommended Tour Company in Budapest
Taste Hungary
Cape Town Food Tour
With a seemingly endless supply of stunning vistas, Cape Town would be an awesome city to visit even if it didn’t have great food. Luckily, as we found out during our epic ‘Foodie Thursdays’ Cape Town food tour, this is not the case. The food scene in South’s Africa southern gem has it going on from hip coffee shops to excellent restaurants and everything in-between.
Recommended Tour Company in Cape Town
Cape Food & Wine Tours
Girona Food Tour
Not settling to hide in nearby Barcelona’s shadow, Girona has an astonishingly solid food scene. Sure, the city hosts one of the world’s top restaurants within its borders, but it also has more than its fair share of top-notch restaurants, tapas bars and ice cream shops.
Recommended Tour Company in Girona
Girona Food Tours
During our month-long visit, we took a Girona food tour to familiarize ourselves with the city’s best markets and eateries. We also took a cooking class to learn how to prepare some of the Catalonian dishes we discovered during the Girona food tour.
Recommended Cooking School in Girona
Tots a Taula
Las Vegas Food Tour
Proving that there’s more to do in Las Vegas than gamble, our Downtown Las Vegas Food Tour provided a fun exploration of Sin City’s original neighborhood. Though we ate well during the tour, we especially enjoyed learning about the city’s colorful past during the Las Vegas tour.
Ljubljana Food Tour
We didn’t expect to fall in love with Ljubljana, but that’s exactly what happened when we visited Slovenia’s small but magical capital city. While in Ljubljana, we burned our candles on both ends by immersing ourselves in the local food scene with a Ljubljana walking tour, a wine tour, a cooking class and more.
Recommended Tour Company in Ljubljana
LjubljanaYum
This is a city with so many culinary charms that you don’t want to take a chance of missing a bite or sip. If you fall in love with the Ljubljana restaurants as much as we did, be sure to take a cooking class so that you can recreate the magic at home.
Recommended Cooking School in Ljubljana
Cook Eat Slovenia
London Food Tour
London called us and we answered by taking different London food tours to learn about the city’s classic foods and decadent desserts. We ramped our London exploration one step further with a self-guided tour through the best London food markets. Ironically, after multiple visits, we still have much to exploration to do of the London food scene.
Malmö Food Tour
Do you know much about the food in Southern Sweden? Neither did we until we visited Skåne and took a lively Malmö food tour. Not only did we taste some of the area’s best seafood but we also got to enjoy fika, one of our favorite Swedish inventions.
Naples Food Tour
Travelers either love or hate Naples. We’re firmly in the love category for the Neapolitan pizza alone. Add flaky sfogliatella, hand-pulled cappuccinos and hauntingly beautiful streets – and our love goes off the chart.
During our month-long visit to the love-it-or-hate-it city, we took an excellent Naples walking tour where we drank copious amounts of coffee and learned how to cook pizza. Yes, dreams do come true in Italy.
Recommended Tour Company in Naples
Context Travel
New York City Food Tour
Start spreading the word… We took a fun New York food tour that introduced us to new places to eat in the city that doesn’t sleep at night. Though this walking tour focused on the Greenwich Village neighborhood, we enjoy exploring NYC food around the city during quick visits as often as we can.
Recommended Tour Company in New York
Walks of New York
Old Delhi Food Tour
With hundreds, if not thousands, of street food vendors, the food scene in Old Delhi can be overwhelming to explore. That’s why it makes sense to take a food tour in the Chandni Chowk market so that you don’t miss a bite. At least that’s what Mindi did when she visited India for the first time.
Recommended Tour Company in Old Delhi
Travel with D
Paris Food Tour
Our Paris food tour turned us from food tour skeptics to food tour believers. It was that good.
During this Paris tour, we strolled around a Parisian neighborhood, stopping for baguettes, pastries, cheese and liqueur, while a trained pastry chef shared stories and recommendations along the way. Folks, you can’t have this same experience on your own.
Recommended Tour Company in Paris
Context Travel
Prague Food Tour
We spent much of our whirlwind weekend in the Czech Republic taking a Prague food tour – and we have no regrets about spending our limited time eating our way through Prague and filming a YouTube video. It didn’t hurt that our tour guide was a local Prague expert and an amazing person. The two stops for third wave coffee also didn’t hurt.
Saigon Food Tour
Deciding where to eat in Vietnam’s largest city can be a challenge. The Saigon food choices are overwhelming, with some blocks having more than ten spots to eat or drink coffee.
We woke up early to take the Pho Trail morning food tour but it was worth it slurp bowls of pho with a Ho Chi Minh local. More than just pho, this Saigon tour also included stops at a local market and temple.
Recommended Tour Company in Saigon
Saigon Street Eats
Shanghai Food Tour
Recommended Tour Company in Shanghai
UnTour Food Tours
Stellenbosch Food Tour
We expected to love our Stellenbosch wine tasting experiences and we were not disappointed. However, we arrived in the Cape Winelands without knowing much about the local food. Thanks to a fun Stellenbosch food tour, we soon discovered a happening Stellenbosch restaurant scene that we enjoyed exploring during our week in one of the world’s most beautiful wine countries.
Recommended Tour Company in Stellenbosch
Bites & Sites
Strasbourg Food Tour
Before we spent two weeks eating our way through the quaint Alsatian city, we first experienced Strasbourg food during a tour that we took during our romantic Rhine River cruise. The Strasbourg food tour managed to whet our appetite while satisfying our taste buds with its varied selection of great food and wine.
We’ll add more recommended food and wine tours as we experience them around the world.
Stay tuned and stay hungry!
About the Authors
Daryl and Mindi Hirsch
Saveur Magazine’s BEST TRAVEL BLOG award winners Daryl and Mindi Hirsch share their culinary travel experiences and recipes on the 2foodtrippers website. Since launching the site in 2012, they’ve traveled to over 40 countries in their quest to bring readers a unique taste of the world.