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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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

On this afternoon-into-evening tour, we’ll explore the Oaxaca backstreets during a culinary changing of the guard, tasting our way through some of the city’s best nighttime food spots while also gaining an understanding of their important role in maintaining Oaxaca’s civic life.

On this full-day food tour in Osaka – Japan’s “umami town” – we’ll chase down the eats and flavors that make this city such a culinary capital. From street stalls to markets and backstreet restaurants, we’ll join the locals in their daily obsessive quest to find that perfect, flavor-rich bite.

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Latest Stories

Call ahead by a couple days and Serdil will arrange a deep dive on Diyarbakır dishes you can't experience anywhere else, not in the city, not in the region, not anywhere else in the country. On our last visit in September, he started the meal with a local caprese made from lavaş peyniri (a flat, mild sheep's milk cheese), reyhan (purple basil, which grows all over the countryside), and tırnak ekmek (handmade bread from a local baker, first popularized in nearby Gaziantep). He presents his dish, and those after, with a story of how it came to be and where the ingredients are from. More bread was served with a bright green salt Serdil had made from a rare Kurdish herb he called "zuzak," explaining just how difficult it has become to track down. It was tangy and slightly sweet, and no one from either of our dining groups (eight in total, we were at capacity), had ever heard of it before.

A Bangkok street food staple, phat phak bung fai daeng (flash-fried morning glory) delivers fiery garlic-chili heat in under two minutes. Crisp greens, wok smoke, and a splash of oyster sauce make this simple stir-fry one of Thailand’s most beloved everyday meals.

Los Galgos has been a fixture of Buenos Aires life since 1930. Revived and reimagined, it remains a gathering place where history and modern food culture meet.

Irina Widuczynski, the voice behind Buenos Paladaires, shares her favorite spot for Argentina’s iconic sweet pastry — and why it’s always her first stop back in Buenos Aires.

Every Argentine province has its own take on the empanada, and Buenos Aires offers a chance to taste them all. From Salta’s wood-fired classics to Tucumán’s championship folds, Catamarca’s “Pikachu,” and the all-night deep-fried glory of Pin Pun, here’s where to try the country’s finest without leaving the city.

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Upcoming Trips

August 2026

On this weeklong exploration of pizza's birthplace, Scott Wiener will lead us on a quest to understand all the working parts of traditional Neapolitan pizza while chasing the subject's more ethereal elements. We'll tuck into perfect pizza of all shapes and sizes – fried, baked, crowned, folded up like a wallet – and learn pizza-making techniques directly from the cadre of pizzaioli who have dedicated their lives to this tradition.

May 2026
October 2026
Sold out

Be it urban or rural, there’s something wild, exuberant and utterly delicious about Basque Country, a small but mighty region that straddles the northwest border of Spain and France. Besides the area’s unique language and culture, the Basque Country’s cooking stands apart, with recipes and dishes – both old and new – that are famous the world over (Basque cheesecake, anyone?).

October 2025
April 2026
October 2026

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

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.”

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