Food Tours · Tour

Six Waves of Immigration in Two and a Half Miles

Three hours and about two and a half miles at an unhurried pace, from a corner café on Canal Street to the Lower East Side, with four tastings and a route organised around who arrived when. It begins near the courthouse on Centre Street that most people recognise from Law & Order, on ground that was a polluted freshwater pond before it was filled in and became a poor Irish district. Columbus Park comes next, on the cleared site of the Five Points, with period photographs to show what the guide is describing. In Chinatown you eat dumplings at a local favourite and get told where else to go in a neighbourhood far too large to cover in one walk. Up around Mulberry Street the subject turns to Italian immigration, with street art, organised-crime history and a tasting at an old Italian food shop. Nolita, which was Little Italy until the rents changed, is now boutiques and bars, and holds the original St. Patrick's Cathedral, built in 1815 and the seat of the archdiocese until the Fifth Avenue one opened. In Sara D. Roosevelt Park, named for Franklin Roosevelt's mother, the walk stops at the M'Finda Kalunga Garden, which the community named for the African burial ground that once lay nearby, and the conversation moves to Latin American arrivals. Then the Lower East Side itself: tenements, community gardens, murals, another tasting, and the German, Jewish and Latin American layers stacked on the same blocks. It ends beside the Tenement Museum on Orchard Street, and the guides will tell you how to get tickets if you want to go in. Up to fourteen travellers, in English. Tastings may include dumplings, pizza, a knish or an empanada. Most dietary needs can be met with twenty-four hours' notice, including vegan and gluten-free, though the kitchens are not free of cross-contamination. Runs in rain, shine or snow. Children under four go free, four to eleven at a reduced rate.