Plan Your Food Trip

Almost everything written about food tours is written by people who sell one, and the answer to every question is therefore yes. Yes it is worth it, yes this is the right month, yes we can work around your diet. We sell them too, and the difference we can offer is that we sell four hundred and twenty-nine of them across sixteen cities, so we can count things instead of asserting them.

These seven pages are the decisions that come before the booking. The numbers in them are counted from our own catalogue and dated, the legal points are read in the statutes, and where the honest answer is that you should not book anything, it says so.

This is the single most useful thing on this page, and it comes straight out of what each city actually sells rather than out of anyone's opinion. A city with sixty cooking classes and eleven walking tours is telling you something about itself.

Three and a half hours is the median length, and anything over six is a day trip with food in it rather than a food tour. Thirty-seven listings here cross that line and the longest runs twelve hours.

Twelve people is the median cap, and it is not a marketing number. It is roughly the group a small place will still seat and a guide can still talk to on a street without shouting. Fifty-five listings allow more than twenty, and two Naples pizza classes declare caps of 9,999 and 20,000, which is what an empty field looks like when a booking system fills it in for you.

Twenty euros an hour is what the median works out at. The food on the tour is worth perhaps a third of that, so the rest is selection, access and explanation. In some cities that is a bargain and in others it is not, which is the whole subject of one of these pages.

Fifteen out of 429 cannot be cancelled at all. Free cancellation until the day before is the norm here, but it is a commercial policy rather than a right, and a dated leisure booking has no fourteen day cooling-off period in the European Union.

4.90 is the weighted average rating across 388,065 reviews. A score that never moves carries no information. The review count still does, and so does the group cap.

They will not give you a figure that needs updating every year. Where a number moves, either it is dated on the page or it is not there: prices, exchange rates, minimum wages and this year's festival dates are all things a page cannot promise to keep true, and a page that quietly stops being true is worse than one that never said.

They will not print a translated medical phrase for an allergy, because we cannot guarantee eight scripts and a subtly wrong sentence there is worse than no sentence.

And they will not give a verdict where the evidence does not support one. Several questions on these pages end with the answer that it is genuinely contested, which reads worse and is more useful.

Budgeting for this is harder than it should be, because the published prices move with the local cost of living rather than with what you get. Three broadly comparable hours cost twenty-six euros in Hanoi and a hundred and fifty-five in San Sebastian, and the difference is not four times the tour.

Here is the median for one experience in each of the sixteen cities, counted across everything we sell. Use it to decide how many to book rather than which one: in the cheap half of this list a second tour costs less than a restaurant dinner, and in the expensive half one is plenty.

Two things that table hides and should not. The tip is not in it, and it is almost never included: budget five to ten per cent of the ticket in cash. And in the cities at the bottom of the list the tour is often a larger share of the day's spending than everything you will eat unguided that week, which is worth knowing before you book three of them.