Local food experiences!
 

Hi all-
Has anyone ever booked any local food experiences (food tours, wine tasting, cooking classes) when travelling/on vacation?
Thanks in advance,
Ryan

Only in Pyongyang.

I went to a soba (noodle) making class in Tokyo almost exactly 10 years ago. It was wonderful, an excellent and knowledgeable teacher who spoke English beautifullly and great value for money - included the lunch I made as well as the rest of the noodles to take and share with family .
The school is still running classes.
It was just over 3,000yen in 2009, it’s now 4,000yen. Remains very good value.

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Day class
http://www.edotokyosoba.com/c_oneday.html

Hanoi street food tour. I can't recommend it enough!

Wine tastings, always. Food tours, never (I believe you can always to better by researching on foodie websites on your own and that's more customizable). Cooking classes, depends on cost and what you get. I've done one in Bangkok that was fantastic, and a couple at home in Chicago. There was one I really wanted to do in Trogir, Croatia, but it wasn't offered the days I was there.

I've done all three, in fact I've turned tours that weren't supposed to be wine or food tours into wine tours. When I do it, I look for small personal ones, preferably where it's just me and maybe one or two other people. The more people involved the more it feels like a "if it's Tuesday it must be France" kind of tour rather than actually experiencing the food or wine.

I can't see the point of food or wine tours. They'll only take you to places popular with tourists. I suppose wine tours have the advantage of avoiding drink-driving issues but you are then limited to caves that cater to mass tourism.

I did a cooking class through my hotel (Anantara) in Chiang Mai a few weeks back. It was my wife and I plus four others and we went by tuk tuk to the local food market where we bought all our produce, though the chefs were also happy to just buy random bits and pieces of interest to show us, plus anything we wanted to try from the stalls was fair game too. We then went back to the kitchens where the ingredients were prepped and we made a five course meal, including dessert. Anything that we couldn't eat was boxed up and refrigerated and we could request it as room service whenever we wanted (though we had it as a late night meal that day)

I've done a food tour of NYC's West Village a few times when out of towners come over. What's good is that you might only get a smaller dish at each place rather than the full monty that you'd get if you researched and walked from place to place yourself....also the guide will provide information and tidbits of history and other things enroute, so you aren't just walking and eating. Generally I'm not a tour person at all but these ones (Foods of New York) are pretty good, IMO.

Interesting, coming from a New Yorker. I wouldn't say the same for Chicago. All the food tours I've seen here take you to tourist places. Certainly someone can find deep dish pizza (total tourist food), a hot dog, or Italian beef with about two minutes of internet research. Of course, we're also much less of a street food, window counter city than New York (disappointing).

We're also maybe a little more spread out in terms of specialty dishes. It's a long drive to get smoked fish in the south suburbs to authentic Indian food on Devon St.
Bottom line, I wouldn't recommend Chicago food tours :).

I'm not a New Yorker, just live here (5yr resident)

The places the Foods of New York tours take you are varied, some of them are more well known to locals (Joe's Pizza in Greenwich Village for example), but they stand up in their own right, they're not tourist traps (though NYers love to get snobby about pizza so some will no doubt scoff at Joe's!). It's not as if the tour is taking you to Katz's Deli!

I went on a winery tour in Medoza, Argentina where we were shuttled to each place by bus. It was convenient and not that expensive.

As for food, I did a multiday cycling tour that turned out to be just me and one other solo traveler. Our guide ordered dinner each night and the food was much different than the typical pad thai street food or anything I ordered in a restaurant on my own,

In Sri Lanka my tour group did a home stay where the couple prepared and served dinner home style. It was more interesting and simpler than the typical restaurant meal.

In Florence, Italy my group accompanied a truffle hunter and is dog to dig up truffles which we later took a local restaurant and learned a few steps in making pasta from scratch. The kitchen finished things off and served our mushroom truffle pasta with freshly grated truffle that "hunted" earlier that day.

In Japan I went to a Japanese tea ceremony to see how it was prepared and practiced whisking it ourselves. None of us met the exacting standards of the tea master. We were also served traditional sweets which consisted mostly of various cookies or wafers sandwiching red bean paste.

We shared a cruise tour with 2 other families when we reached port near Pisa. The tour was Pisa and Florence in a van. We wrapped up around noon and the driver suggested options for the afternoon. We chose a winery that fed us lunch: fresh bread, locally pressed olive oil, local salami and cheese, canned tomatoes and cannelloni beans. Accompanied by wine, of course. It was a small family run operations and the food was as good as the wine.

I've taken wine tours in California, Oregon, Tennessee and Alabama. None compared and the Alabama wine trail is downright scary.

Also toured multiple breweries on my own as well as taking a Brews Cruise of Asheville with friends.

I usually look for something local to do. I used to research sites such as Chow forums, road food and occasionally DDD but those sites are outdated now and there isn't much new or reliable content. Yelp and Trip Advisor are not reliable either. I also used to look on Groupon and Living Social, back when they actually had real tastings and cool tours. They sometimes still do, but you almost have to be a local to sort out which one is a real tasting at a decent place rather than a badly advertised singles event at a shady bar or in someone's garage.

I had excellent cooking classes in Phuket, Bangkok and Munich, attended a few good cooking demos at the Intercontinental Grand Stanford in Hong Kong (International Chef Series.)

For wine tours, Napa was ok. The Niagara Peninsula (Canada) and the Finger Lakes area also offer a good concentration of wineries, breweries, fromageries and distilleries. In some areas, there are tours that allow you to pick your own wineries/breweries within reason.

Beer tours varied from being shuttled on a bus with drunk frat bros to aspiring micro-brewers with analytical paperwork on ABV and hop variety and provenance.