Picnic in the field with berries, juice, cheese, sausage and sweet croissants. (liuntova (123RF))
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Despite being a somewhat picky eater, I still enjoy eating delicious food when on vacation! Back in the day, I painstakingly researched the best restaurants and saved them to my Tripadvisor or Pinterest lists. However, over the years, I’ve eased up on the obsessive planning and opted to find restaurants in the moment. Sometimes it works out well; sometimes we pick the next closest spot to avoid my hangry outbursts. (I don’t know why my husband still travels with me.…) One saving grace has been food tours.
On food tours, we just show up and a local guide takes us to a variety of spots, and we try delicious, local specialties. Over the course of our four years in Europe, we have been on some fantastic food tours that I would like to share with you. Click on the links in the names to learn more about booking these food tours.
Fika is the beautiful Swedish tradition that makes the seemingly mundane coffee break into a social ritual of enjoying a coffee and a sweet snack with friends or family. We booked a fika tour in Stockholm and ended up with a private tour. Our guide took us to a bunch of adorable cafes that we would not have found on our own. We tried the infamous salty licorice (definitely not my favorite), the Swedish classic cardamom buns and ice cream. The stroll around Stockholm with stops to pause and enjoy tasty treats was a day well spent!
When visiting Spain, you must eat tapas! But where??? Booking the tapas tour while visiting Barcelona took the guesswork out of that question. Our small group ventured to a variety of stops where we tried things like vermouth, Manchego cheese, crochets and, for my Southern friends, fried green tomatoes. The latter was my favorite bite of the tour!
Fried Green Tomatoes with breading flaking off tomatoes (Kristen Thoennes)
While stopped in Tallinn during a Baltic cruise, we booked a food tour to get a taste of the country we were visiting for the first time. I 100 percent recommend! The first bite of the tour was one of my favorites: lamb dumplings served with a cream made of garlic oil and sour cream. We also tried Sea Buckhorn juice, uniquely Estonian chocolate combinations, mini pancakes and locally brewed beer and cider. My mouth is watering just thinking about this tour!
Cyprus Wine Tour: Troodos Vino Venture
While visiting Cyprus, we opted not to rent a car and traveled by foot or ride share around Paphos. We booked the Cyprus Wine Tour partly because it included transportation up to the mountains. They picked us up right from our hotel (highly recommend Amavi MadeforTwo if you’re traveling without kids. The hotel property is gorgeous, and the service is phenomenal!). We were whisked away with our small group of travelers to a variety of wineries and concluded with a meze lunch. The guide made it extra special for me. We were traveling to Cyprus for my birthday and during the meze lunch she had arranged for the restaurant to bring out a birthday cake. It was a very sweet gesture and a delicious way to finish up our tour!
Pastries on white floral-printed plates next to a cup of coffee with spoon (Kristen Thoennes)
This was one of our first European food tours and was taken while Europe was still experiencing low numbers of tourists, so we ended up with a private tour! I took absolutely zero pictures during this tour, so it’s harder to remember all the delicious things we tried, but I took a few notes. We, of course, tried Czech beer at the local beer hall. One restaurant was in an old bank and had the best atmosphere and delicious food. The last stop was a place doing it all—coffee roastery, bakery, restaurant and gin distillery. The extra benefit from this tour is that they provided a complete Prague guide at the end, so we could have other recommendations for visiting the city.
There is a ton of new and delicious foods to try on your travels throughout Europe! If you want to make it easy, I recommend food tours. You’ll find delicious spots and meet new and interesting people along the way. Bon appetite!
