With Local Guides
Book Authentic Food Tours Across 13 Countries
Eat like a local across Southeast Asia and the Middle East. Small groups, real food, unforgettable experiences.
🇱🇧 Beirut, Lebanon
Beirut Mezze & Old Souks Tour
Lebanese food stands alongside French, Japanese, and Italian as one of the world's truly great cuisines — and Beirut is its spiritual capital. Despite the challenges this extraordinary city has faced, its food culture remains vibrant, joyful, and extraordinarily generous. This tour takes you through the colourful, mural-covered streets of Gemmayzeh and Mar Mikhael — Beirut's most creative neighbourhoods — to the family restaurants, neighbourhood bakeries, and market stalls that represent the real Lebanese table. The Lebanese mezze spread is one of the world's most civilised ways to eat: dozens of small dishes brought to the table in a continuous wave, designed to be shared, discussed, and savoured slowly. Over four hours and 12 tastings, your Lebanese guide will introduce you to the full depth of mezze culture, from the silken hummus bil lahme to the daring kibbeh nayyeh (Lebanese steak tartare, eaten only when the meat is from a trusted butcher). The tour includes a visit to Beirut's oldest manoushe bakery, where breakfast flatbreads are baked in a wood-fired oven at dawn, and ends with the ritual of arak — Lebanon's beloved anise spirit, mixed with water and ice, drunk slowly alongside food.
Tastings Included
- Gemmayzeh & Mar Mikhael neighbourhood walk
- Hummus bil lahme — smooth hummus with spiced ground lamb
- Fattoush — fresh herb salad with sumac & crispy bread
- Kibbeh nayyeh — raw minced lamb with bulgur wheat (Lebanese tartare)
- Warak enab — stuffed vine leaves in olive oil & lemon
- Manoushe zaatar — flatbread with wild thyme paste, fresh from the bakery
- Safiha — open-faced spiced meat pastry
- Labneh with olive oil & za'atar
- Arak tasting — Lebanese anise spirit with mezze
- Knafeh — warm cheese pastry drenched in orange blossom syrup
- Maamoul — shortbread stuffed with dates & pistachios
- Fresh-squeezed pomegranate & lemon juice
Bangkok Street Food After Dark
As the sun dips below Bangkok's skyline, the city truly comes alive through food. This evening tour plunges you into the legendary street food culture that has made Bangkok one of the world's top food destinations. We begin in the electric atmosphere of Yaowarat — Bangkok's Chinatown — where neon signs illuminate rows of sizzling woks and fragrant broths. Your local guide, born and raised in Bangkok, knows every vendor by name and will take you far beyond what any guidebook recommends. Over four exhilarating hours, you'll taste your way through 12 iconic dishes: from Pad Thai cooked over a flaming wok by a third-generation street cook, to velvety tom yum goong bursting with lemongrass and chilli. We visit hidden alleyways for the city's best boat noodles, a late-night Isaan BBQ stall beloved by taxi drivers, and end the evening with sweet coconut ice cream served inside a fresh coconut shell. This is Bangkok the way locals experience it — loud, chaotic, and utterly delicious.
Chiang Mai Morning Market Feast
Northern Thai cuisine is a world apart from what most visitors encounter in Bangkok — earthier, herbier, and deeply influenced by the Lanna Kingdom's centuries of history and its borders with Burma and Laos. Chiang Mai is its spiritual home, and this morning tour is the best possible introduction. We meet at dawn at Warorot Market — the city's oldest and most atmospheric covered market — where the stalls are piled high with jungle herbs, dried spices, and ingredients you won't find anywhere further south. Over 3.5 hours, your guide will explain the story behind each dish as you taste 11 Northern Thai specialties. The centrepiece is a bowl of khao soi: egg noodles in a rich, slightly spiced coconut curry broth, topped with crispy noodles and pickled mustard greens. It's one of Thailand's greatest dishes and Chiang Mai is the only place to truly understand it.
Phuket Old Town Street Food Walk
Phuket is famous for its beaches, but its Old Town hides one of Thailand's most fascinating food cultures — shaped by waves of Hokkien Chinese merchants, Portuguese traders, and the original sea nomad peoples of the Andaman. The result is Peranakan cuisine: a uniquely spiced, intensely flavourful fusion that exists nowhere else in Thailand. This walk takes you through Phuket Town's gorgeous Sino-Portuguese streets — past pastel-coloured shophouses dripping with bougainvillea — and into the family-run kitchens and hole-in-the-wall stalls that have served these recipes for generations. You'll try 10 dishes that tell the story of the island's multicultural soul, from braised Hokkien noodles to crispy Thai crepes with meringue topping. A perfect way to see the real Phuket, away from the beach crowds.
Phnom Penh Hidden Eateries Tour
Phnom Penh's food scene is one of Southeast Asia's best-kept secrets — a cuisine of incredible depth that somehow survived the devastation of the Khmer Rouge and re-emerged with its soul intact. This tour takes you deep into the city's back-street eateries and market stalls that rarely see foreign visitors. Your guide — a Phnom Penh local with a passion for Khmer food history — will walk you through 11 dishes that reveal the full range of Cambodian flavour. The centrepiece is fish amok: Cambodia's beloved national dish of freshwater fish steamed in coconut milk and lemongrass inside a banana leaf cup. We also visit a Khmer BBQ grill for charcoal-cooked meats with fermented dipping sauces, and for the adventurous, the chance to try a deep-fried tarantula — a genuine local delicacy that tastes considerably better than it sounds.
Siem Reap Night Market Bites
After a day of marvelling at the temples of Angkor Wat, there is no better way to end the evening than with Siem Reap's vibrant night food scene. This tour takes place after dark, when the city's markets and food stalls transform into a feast for all the senses — lanterns glowing, charcoal fires burning, and the scent of lemongrass drifting through the warm night air. Over three hours, you'll taste 11 authentic Khmer dishes with a local guide who grew up eating at these very stalls. Unlike the tourist restaurants lining Pub Street, these are the spots where Cambodian families come to eat — small, unassuming, and serving food of extraordinary flavour. We'll walk you through the story of each dish, from the subtle herbal complexity of nom banh chok to the sticky sweetness of palm sugar desserts made by the town's oldest sweet-maker.
Doha Souq Waqif Food Journey
Doha's Souq Waqif is one of the Gulf's most atmospheric places to eat — a beautifully restored mud-plastered labyrinth of alleys where the scent of frankincense mingles with slow-cooking spiced lamb and freshly brewed cardamom coffee. This tour is a rare window into the genuine food culture of Qatar, led by a Qatari guide whose family recipes date back generations. Qatari cuisine is understated and deeply satisfying — built on slow cooking, aromatic spices like baharat, loomi (dried lime), and saffron, and the generous hospitality for which Qataris are rightly famous. Over 3.5 hours and 12 tastings, you'll discover the dishes that Qatari families serve at celebrations and Friday lunches: the crown jewel machboos (slow-cooked spiced lamb on fragrant rice), the ancient porridge harees, crispy luqaimat dumplings drizzled with date syrup, and the ritual of qahwa — Arabic coffee poured from a brass dallah and accompanied by medjool dates. This is the authentic heart of Qatari culture, experienced through food.
Hoi An Lantern Market & Bites
Hoi An is arguably Vietnam's most beautiful town — a UNESCO World Heritage Site where silk lanterns cast a warm glow over ancient wooden shophouses and the Thu Bon river shimmers at dusk. But it is also home to one of the most distinctive regional cuisines in all of Southeast Asia, shaped by centuries of Japanese, Chinese, and Portuguese trade. This tour begins just as the lanterns are lit and the ancient town transforms into something truly magical. Over 3.5 hours, you'll taste 11 dishes that are unique to Hoi An — you simply cannot eat them as authentically anywhere else in Vietnam. Cao lau is the star: thick, chewy noodles with sliced pork and crispy rice crackers, made using water from a single ancient well in the centre of town. White rose dumplings are another Hoi An exclusive — delicate shrimp-filled parcels that look exactly like their name. Your local guide will weave stories of food history between each tasting, and the evening ends with a lantern-making demonstration on the riverbank.
Hanoi Pho & Beyond Breakfast Tour
Hanoi's food culture is intense, obsessive, and deeply tied to time of day — there are dishes eaten only at dawn, only at midnight, and only standing at a specific corner of the Old Quarter. This three-hour morning tour immerses you in the ritual of the Hanoian breakfast, which is arguably the finest in the world. We start before the city fully wakes, walking narrow lanes filled with the steam of simmering broth. Your first stop is a bowl of pho bo at a stall that has been serving the same recipe since 1945 — clear, deep, gently spiced beef broth with silky flat rice noodles. From there we zigzag through the 36 ancient craft streets of the Old Quarter, stopping at 11 legendary spots that have fed Hanoi through wars, reunification, and the economic boom. The tour ends with Hanoi's most famous invention: egg coffee — a rich, creamy concoction of whipped egg yolk and condensed milk served over strong Vietnamese coffee that tastes like a liquid dessert.
Saigon Street Food on Two Wheels
There is no better way to experience the organised chaos of Saigon than on the back of a motorbike, weaving between the millions of other bikes that clog this extraordinary city from sunrise to midnight. This evening tour pairs the thrill of motorbike riding with the equally thrilling proposition of Saigon's street food — one of the most diverse, dynamic, and satisfying in all of Asia. You ride pillion with your expert local guide, who was born in District 4 and spent their childhood eating at the street stalls you'll visit tonight. Over four hours and 12 tastings, you'll cross districts and neighbourhoods that most tourists never see — from the busy expat enclave of District 1 to the authentically local lanes of Districts 3 and 4. The food reflects Saigon's history as a melting pot: French colonial influences in the banh mi, Cambodian roots in the hu tieu noodles, and the bold, chilli-laced flavours of the Vietnamese south. The ride ends at a pavement bia hoi stall with cold draught beer, just like a Saigonese local would after a long day.
Luang Prabang Monks & Morning Markets
Luang Prabang moves to a rhythm unlike anywhere else in Southeast Asia — slow, contemplative, and deeply anchored in Buddhist tradition. This four-hour tour begins before sunrise as saffron-robed monks glide silently through the misty streets collecting alms, one of the most poignant rituals in the Buddhist world. We watch respectfully before following our guide to the morning market, where hill tribe vendors lay out jungle greens, dried river fish, and wild herbs that you won't find in any other market in the region. Lao cuisine is built around sticky rice — not just eaten but revered — and this tour gives you a true understanding of its central place in Lao culture. Over four hours and 12 tastings, you'll eat alongside monks' families and market vendors, trying dishes that have barely changed for centuries: the slow-cooked or lam stew flavoured with the unique sao din herb and wood ash, smoky grilled Mekong river fish wrapped in banana leaf, and the fiery buffalo skin chilli paste jaew bong. The tour closes with Lao coffee — grown in the Bolaven Plateau and among the best in the world.
Vientiane Street Bites & Beer Lao
Vientiane is one of Southeast Asia's most underrated capitals — a sleepy, charming city on a bend of the Mekong where French colonial cafes mix with Buddhist temples and the pace of life is refreshingly gentle. Its food scene is equally understated, but those who look carefully will find some of the most authentic and deeply satisfying flavours in the region. This evening tour takes place as the sun sets over the Mekong, turning the river gold and luring the city's residents out to the riverside stalls and market corners they visit every evening. Over three hours and 10 tastings, your Lao guide will introduce you to the building blocks of Lao cuisine: the larb (a herb-laden minced meat salad considered the national dish), the fiery tam mak houng papaya salad that packs considerably more punch than its Thai counterpart, and the ritual of eating sticky rice from a communal bamboo basket. The tour ends with ice-cold Beer Lao at a plastic table by the Mekong — the perfect end to an authentic Vientiane evening.
Jakarta Old Town & Betawi Flavors
Jakarta is a vast, sprawling megacity of 30 million people, and beneath its modern towers lies the living culinary heritage of the Betawi people — the original inhabitants of Batavia, whose food culture is a magnificent fusion of Dutch colonial, Chinese, Malay, Sundanese, and Javanese influences. This tour focuses on Kota Tua, Jakarta's beautifully atmospheric Old Town, and the neighbourhoods where Betawi food culture remains most alive. Your guide, a proud Betawi local, will take you through 12 dishes that tell the story of Jakarta from the VOC trading post era to the present. Soto Betawi is the highlight — a rich, milky beef soup served with tomato, fried shallots and a squeeze of lime that is unlike any other soto in Indonesia. Kerak telor, cooked at stalls in Kota Tua, is an experience in itself: sticky rice and egg beaten together and cooked directly over a brazier of hot coals, then flipped and cooked face-down until crispy. Four hours of food, history, and the real Jakarta.
Ubud Morning Market & Cooking Class
The food of Bali is inseparable from its spiritual life — almost every dish is connected to an offering, a ceremony, or a prayer. This five-hour experience, led by a Balinese chef whose family has cooked the same recipes for four generations, begins before the tourist Ubud wakes up and reveals the true rhythm of Balinese culinary life. We start before sunrise at Ubud's main market, weaving between women in temple dress carrying towering offerings of tropical fruit, and market vendors laying out fresh galangal, turmeric root, pandan, and the extraordinary array of chillies that define Balinese cooking. From the market, we move to a working spice farm where you'll identify and smell 20 fresh spices in their natural state. Then comes the cooking class — in an open-sided jungle kitchen with rice paddies all around — where you'll learn to make base genep, the sacred Balinese master spice paste that underpins almost every dish on the island, before cooking and sitting down to eat your own five-dish Balinese feast.
Kathmandu Durbar Square Food Walk
Kathmandu is one of the great food cities of Asia — a place where ancient Newari civilisation left behind a culinary tradition of extraordinary sophistication, and where the influence of Tibet, India, and the high Himalayas creates a cuisine unlike anything else on earth. This tour explores the medieval heart of the city: Durbar Square, where old palace courtyards and pagoda temples form the backdrop for a food walk that reaches back 2,000 years. The Newari people of the Kathmandu Valley are the original inhabitants of Nepal, and their cuisine is the soul of this tour. You'll taste 11 dishes across 3.5 hours, guided by a Newari local who will explain the cultural significance of each: chatamari, the delicate rice crepe once offered to the gods; yomari, the sweet steamed dumpling eaten only during the Yomari Punhi festival; and the full ceremonial experience of kwa kha, the Newari feast served in clay pots with dozens of small side dishes. The tour ends with tongba — warm millet beer sipped through a bamboo straw — drunk alongside locals in a centuries-old courtyard restaurant.
Beirut Mezze & Old Souks Tour
Lebanese food stands alongside French, Japanese, and Italian as one of the world's truly great cuisines — and Beirut is its spiritual capital. Despite the challenges this extraordinary city has faced, its food culture remains vibrant, joyful, and extraordinarily generous. This tour takes you through the colourful, mural-covered streets of Gemmayzeh and Mar Mikhael — Beirut's most creative neighbourhoods — to the family restaurants, neighbourhood bakeries, and market stalls that represent the real Lebanese table. The Lebanese mezze spread is one of the world's most civilised ways to eat: dozens of small dishes brought to the table in a continuous wave, designed to be shared, discussed, and savoured slowly. Over four hours and 12 tastings, your Lebanese guide will introduce you to the full depth of mezze culture, from the silken hummus bil lahme to the daring kibbeh nayyeh (Lebanese steak tartare, eaten only when the meat is from a trusted butcher). The tour includes a visit to Beirut's oldest manoushe bakery, where breakfast flatbreads are baked in a wood-fired oven at dawn, and ends with the ritual of arak — Lebanon's beloved anise spirit, mixed with water and ice, drunk slowly alongside food.
Cairo Khan el-Khalili Street Food
Cairo is one of the world's oldest continuously inhabited cities, and its food culture carries the weight of millennia — from the pharaonic staples of bread and lentils to the Ottoman influences of stuffed vegetables and rich stews, and the modern street food innovations that feed 20 million Cairenes every day. Khan el-Khalili, the 14th-century bazaar at the heart of Islamic Cairo, is the perfect stage for this culinary journey: a maze of gold merchants, spice sellers, and tea houses that has barely changed in 600 years. Over 3.5 hours and 12 tastings, your Egyptian guide — a Cairo native who has spent years documenting the city's disappearing food traditions — will take you from the famous to the forgotten. Koshari is the undisputed star: a uniquely Egyptian invention of rice, lentils, pasta, and crispy fried onions drowned in tangy tomato sauce and a fiery chilli dressing that somehow adds up to something extraordinary. But equally memorable are the ful medames eaten at a stall that has served the same recipe since 1890, the warm aish baladi bread from a clay oven, and the ethereal om Ali pudding — Egypt's answer to bread and butter pudding, served warm with cream and scattered nuts.
Muscat Mutrah Souq Spice & Seafood
Oman is one of the most hospitable countries on earth, and its cuisine reflects the warmth, generosity, and ancient maritime history of its people. Muscat — the elegant, low-rise capital tumbling down to the turquoise waters of the Gulf of Oman — is a city of extraordinary contrasts: gleaming white mosques and Corniche promenades alongside the labyrinthine Mutrah Souq, where incense burners and silver khanjars have been traded for centuries. This four-hour evening tour explores both worlds, beginning as the sun sets over the harbour and dipping into 12 authentic Omani dishes that showcase a cuisine built on slow cooking, Indian Ocean spices, and the finest seafood in the Gulf. The centrepiece is shuwa — lamb buried in an underground pit for up to 48 hours until the meat simply falls from the bone, perfumed with a paste of coriander, cumin, chilli, and dried lime. We also visit the waterfront fish market to understand the central role of the sea in Omani cooking, and end with the ritual of qahwa: cardamom-spiced Omani coffee poured from a carved brass dallah into tiny cups, accompanied by Omani halwa and dates — the essence of Omani hospitality.
Abu Dhabi Heritage Village Food Trail
Abu Dhabi's gleaming skyline of towers and grand mosques can make it easy to forget that this is a city built on an ancient Bedouin culture with a food heritage that stretches back thousands of years — long before the oil era transformed the UAE into what it is today. This tour is a deliberate journey into that pre-oil culinary culture, beginning at the Heritage Village where reconstructed Bedouin camps and pearl-diving exhibits provide the context for the food that sustained these communities across the desert and the sea. Emirati food is quiet, understated, and deeply nourishing — built on slow cooking, aromatic whole spices (cardamom, saffron, dried lime, cinnamon), and the dates and camel milk that sustained generations of Bedouin travellers. Over four hours and 12 tastings, your Emirati guide will share family recipes and the stories behind each dish: harees, the slow-cooked wheat and lamb porridge that is eaten at every Emirati wedding and celebration; machboos, the fragrant saffron rice dish that is the UAE's equivalent of a Sunday roast; and lgeimat, the golden fried dumplings drizzled with date syrup that appear at every Ramadan iftar table. The tour ends with a camel milk chocolate tasting — one of Abu Dhabi's most unexpected and delicious modern food traditions.
Dubai Old Town Spice & Soul
Dubai is famous for its superlatives — tallest buildings, biggest malls, most extravagant hotels. But beneath all of that, in the winding lanes of Al Fahidi and across the creek in Deira, lies the old Dubai: a salt-weathered trading port where Emirati pearl divers and Indian spice merchants rubbed shoulders for centuries, and where the food is extraordinary. This tour takes you away from the glitter and into the soul of the city. We start in Al Fahidi — Dubai's best-preserved historic neighbourhood, a cool labyrinth of wind-tower houses and courtyard museums — before crossing Dubai Creek by traditional abra wooden boat to reach the Spice Souk and Gold Souk of Deira. Over four hours and 12 tastings, you'll eat at restaurants and stalls that have fed Dubai's working population for decades. The food is deeply Emirati: rich machboos rice cooked with dried limes and whole spices, whole grilled hammour (the Gulf's most prized fish), saffron-scented pancakes with date honey, and the classic ritual of qahwa — Arabic coffee poured in a continuous stream by your host as a symbol of welcome. This is the Dubai worth knowing.
Manama Bab Al Bahrain Food Walk
Bahrain is the Gulf's smallest kingdom, but its food culture is one of the region's richest — shaped by its ancient role as a pearl-trading centre at the crossroads of Indian, Persian, and Arabian culinary traditions. Manama, the compact and walkable capital, preserves this heritage most vividly around the Bab Al Bahrain gateway and the Old Souq: a covered maze of gold merchants, spice vendors, and family restaurants that has fed the island's population for generations. This tour is led by a Bahraini whose family has run a traditional restaurant in the souq for four decades. Over 3.5 hours and 11 tastings, you'll discover a cuisine defined by the sea — the freshest hammour fish prepared in multiple ways, including the uniquely Bahraini muhammar: a sweet rice dish cooked with dates and sugar, served alongside whole grilled fish, that perfectly captures the island's love of contrasting sweet and savoury flavours. You'll also try qoozi — slow-roasted whole lamb perfumed with cardamom and saffron — and the authentic Bahraini coffee ceremony with dates and cardamom sweets that represents the warmest form of island hospitality.