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Travel, With Bite

Culinary Backstreets covers the world’s best eating destinations, with city guides, food tours, multi-day trips and daily dispatches.

Our Food Tours

Belleville Bound: Paris, Beyond the Baguette Featured Image

In the backstreets of eastern Paris, the city feels most alive. From Bastille to Belleville, immigrant kitchens, corner bakeries, and family-run cafés capture the flavor of a capital always reinventing itself. On this full-day walk, we’ll taste how global influences shaped modern Parisian cuisine — from Chinese canteens to North African bakeries and open-air markets — discovering where tradition and creativity meet.

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Step back into the Tokyo of another era in Yanesen, the historic trio of the Yanaka, Nezu, and Sendagi neighborhoods. Among temples, shrines, and winding backstreets, we’ll discover a neighborhood where daily life still hums to an older rhythm. This full-day walk blends history and flavor: from handmade onigiri and fresh unagi to nostalgic sweets, retro kissaten coffee, and sake. Along the way, we’ll slip into century-old shops, sip drinks in a converted bathhouse, and meet the craftspeople keeping Tokyo’s culinary traditions alive.

Backstreet Bites of Buenos Aires: Cafés, Parrillas and Beyond Featured Image

In Buenos Aires, food moves like a tango – part tradition, part improvisation, part seduction – across parrillas, bodegones, bakeries, and historic cafés. On this full-day walk, we’ll trace the city’s heritage, tasting how immigrant flavors converge into a distinctly Argentine table. From flaky medialunas and empanadas to hearty stews, towering platters of grilled meat, and dulce de leche-swirled gelato, we’ll meet the people and places that keep these culinary rituals alive.

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This tour dives right into the vibrant Rio mix by taking you through the heart of the city’s two most historically and architecturally significant neighborhoods, uncovering their delicious culinary secrets along the way.

Plaka At Twilight: Another Side of Athen’s Culinary Heart Featured Image

On this afternoon-into-evening food tour in Plaka, we’ll explore how this ancient district comes alive as the sun sets, visiting the hidden culinary gems and out-of-the way historical sites of this otherwise touristy neighborhood.

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Join us for this Porto food tour, as we spend the day getting to know the city’s lesser-known food traditions, its local institutions and its culinary heroes. We’ll visit and taste dishes across a wide spectrum of places, from the decadent to the down-home.

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On this food tour in Mexico City, we’ll weave through cobblestoned streets of the city’s famous Centro Histórico district, discovering its many hidden gems: from delicious carnitas, tropical fruit cocktails, to enchiladas and home-cooked cantina classics.

The Spirit of Tokyo: Exploring Old School Monzen-Nakacho Featured Image

From hidden izakayas to generations-old food shops and historic temples with taiko drum and fire ceremonies, Monzen-Nakacho has everything you could dream of in a Tokyo neighborhood – and more. On this afternoon into evening tour, we’ll explore this magical slice of old-school Tokyo, where the city’s ancient spirit and modern-day creativity live deliciously side-by-side.

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Latest Stories

A castanyera, photo by Paula Mourenza

While Americans celebrate Halloween this week with M&Ms and Milk Duds, in Catalonia this time of the year is marked with a different, more sophisticated, kind of sweet. The small, round marzipan cookies called panellets are, along with roasted chestnuts and sweet wine, the traditional fare of All Saints’ Day, or Tots Sants in Catalan.

Dorie Greenspan’s Anytime Cakes  Featured Image

Award-winning baker and author Dorie Greenspan shares her love of simple, satisfying cakes and the Paris pastry shop that inspired her new Moko Cake recipe.

Martin Códax: Wine Making With the Tide in Rías Baixas DO Featured Image

Our guide to Albariño, a classic Galician white wine, and the producers like Martin Códax who are keeping this tradition alive in Rías Baixas DO.

Paris: State of the Stomach Featured Image

Paris dining moves between nostalgia and reinvention. From bistros reborn as PMU-style bars to chefs blending Sri Lankan spice with French technique, the city’s appetite for both comfort and change keeps it the most exciting food capital on Earth.

The Paris Essentials: 11 Restaurants That Define How Paris Eats Featured Image

Paris dining today isn’t just about white tablecloths or tasting menus. It’s about neighborhood spots, inventive bakers, and chefs cooking with personality—and this list captures 11 of the best.

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Upcoming Trips

April 2026
October 2026
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The thriving urban foodways of cosmopolitan Athens and the deeply traditional culinary life on the island of Tinos provide for a striking and delicious contrast, one that’s even better experienced during certain seasonal moments, when everything is amplified in celebration of the Eastern Mediterranean’s culinary bounty.

August 2026
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For millennia, Istanbul has been the connection point for a vast web of places with distinct cultural identities, landscapes, and, of course, cuisines. These disparate influences form the great mosaic that is modern-day Istanbul cuisine, which is so much more than simply “Turkish food.”

May 2026
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The freshest buffalo mozzarella. Tomatoes grown on steep terraces overlooking the Bay of Naples. The world’s best noodles from “the city of pasta.” These are the building blocks of the world-famous cuisine of Campania, the southern Italian region that includes Naples, Pompeii, the Amalfi Coast and Mount Vesuvius. On this exclusive-to-Milk-Street eight-day culinary tour, we get a perspective on Naples and Campania that few visitors ever do. We begin with a crash course in Neapolitan food led by Culinary Backstreets tour leader and Naples native Chiara Garofalo.

March 2026
April 2026
September 2026
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On this week-long seafood pilgrimage, we’ll delve deep into the world of barnacle hunters, oyster fisherman, lobster trap builders, razor clam-diggers, and net menders, along with the local chefs who are harnessing the incredible offerings of their coast, transforming Galician cuisine into something new and exciting. Though our focus will be seafood and the traditional artisans along this coast, we’ll be exploring all facets of Galician identity—history, folklore, architecture, music, language, and religion—and gaining a deeper understanding of its unbreakable bond with the sea.

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