Walk This Way! Food Tours

FOOD — One of my favorite things to do on vacation.

Food is so much a part of our lives. You can’t get away from it. Not even on vacation. I’ve said before that I usually research the area we are visiting and find restaurants we may want to visit while there. I’d rather do that than get some place and when you are ready to eat you just go to whatever is close, missing some great local favorites.

When we travel to a city that is known for good food (or some kind of cooking class) we do a food tour of the city. Normally the tours are in the old historic part of the town where there is a high concentration of restaurants all within walking distance of each other. Most tours are about 3 – 3 1/2 hours in length and cover anywhere between 1-2 miles of walking. The tour guide will give you some local history of the area and when you get to the restaurant your group will sit and sample something from that restaurant. You eat, drink, enjoy new friends and think about what you might be sampling at the next stop.

All of the tours we have been on either have a oil tasting, salt tasting or honey tasting as one of the stops and the rest are restaurants.

Some of the tours we have done are Greenwich Village in New York (The Original Greenwich Village Food Tour), Savor Seattle in Seattle, WA, Asheville Food Tours in Asheville, NC, Savannah, Ga. (Culinary and Cultural Walking Tour), and our most current one on a girls trip to Santa Fe, NM where we did the Taste of Santa Fe tour.

If you decide you want to do a food tour of a city you are visiting, do it the first day or so of your trip, that way if you visit a restaurant that leaves you wanting more, you can always go back another day and enjoy a whole meal. You will eat plenty on the tour that will get you through lunch and still be able to fit in a late dinner that same night.

This food tour was a good way to start our girl’s trip with Judy, Pauletta, Terry and me. We met up with our guide, Carlos (whose a chef) and 10 ladies from Dallas and a couple from Clemson, SC around 11:00. We headed out for the day which ended after almost 4 hours of walking, talking and eating. We had three restaurants this time, an olive oil store and a chocolate shop. Our restaurants served us 2-3 courses, which was much more food than is normally tasted. So, here’s some pictures of the food tour and the wonderful food we had. As I said earlier go early in your trip, because you may want to go back to one of the tour stops.

BLAST FROM THE PAST: Looking for a new sweet treat to make this fall? Try my Almond Joy Candies. If you love Almond Joy Candy bars, these will be a favorite.

Our first stop and we had the dish below and margaritas included.

Delicious. Half of the enchilada had their red sauce and half their green sauce. The green was the hottest.

Our second stop was Eloisa and by the time we finished we knew we would return one night. Eloisa is in the Drury Hotel which use to be a seminary and hospital back in 1869.

These were soooo good from Eloisa. After having these and talking to these ladies in Chimayo, I decided to buy some blue corn flour from them and will make these and the chipotle butter for a blog post sometime this fall.

This little plate, along with the blue corn muffins was so interesting. The mini blue corn tortilla shell was filled with a homemade kraut and some pastrami with a jalapeño slice. The roasted pepper was on top of a smear of homemade hummus and stuffed with raisins, chorizo and some kind of cheese. Yummyyyyy!

Our third stop was at Santacafe and we had several courses here, three in fact.

A tomato basil soup.

Crispy fried calamari and look at those two cute little fried octopuses with a bowl of some kind of vinaigrette to dip everything in.

This was the third course — a little shrimp dumpling with a homemade tahini which I’m going to try to make. I’ve never seen tahini this color before.

Fourth stop was an olive oil store. The lady in the hat is our new South Carolina (Clemson) friend. I did buy some spelt pasta and some beautiful shaped and different color pasta called “leftover” pasta.

This was our last stop and quite a hike from where we started (we Uberred back — if that is a word.)

Here we had samples of their liquid chocolate and choice of a truffle or a chocolate drink. Of course, since I had not had any sweets for about 10 weeks, I chose the Key Lime Pie Truffle and bought some of the chocolate that has kind of a Thanksgiving flavor to use for T-Day.