Venice food tour: gourmet local food tasting combined with architectural gems

This Venice food tour lasts 3 hours during which your guide will weave a hand-tailored path through the city using a tasting itinerary of either food and wine, or coffee and pastries (or both!); this all combined with a sprinkle of history of the places you’ll visit and the architectural gems you’ll encounter, such as the millenary Rialto food market and the Grand Canal, which you’ll cross by gondola. The costs of the tasting will be paid in person as you get to know the local, friendly faces behind the food.

Come and join us in a custom Venice food and wine tour with your foodie guide and take an opportunity to get to know more about the city’s culinary culture. While discovering the many different architectural treasures of the city, you will also have the chance to savor and learn our contemporary cooking traditions and sample an incredible variety of regional wines – more than twenty appellations – a joy of the five senses and a cultural anthropological experience. Not only this, your guide will suggest the best Venetian stores for you, with superb value and high-quality oils, chocolates, wines, cheese and much more.

The best way to experience all this is to participate in our traditional wine & cicchetto  – local finger food –  tour, where you’ll have the chance to please your palate with vibrant new tastes. The food that accompanies your fruity and full bodied red or your sparking, light white wine, can in fact complement or oppose. Here, in the traditional bacaro, listening to locals gossip in the market area, you will perhaps learn a little more about the everyday life of an ancient city reluctantly keeping pace with the present day. 

Venice has always been a city of cross roads, a vanguard center in many fields, above all in the trading of spices, essences, and other luxury goods. Spices such as cinnamon, pepper, cumin, and nutmeg were used in the culinary tradition to enhance a dish or to conceal the strong taste of the meat or the fish, while also preserving it. Spices were used also as medicines due to their healing properties, as well as in cosmetic and perfume manufacturing. This results in our culinary tradition offering a unique blend of tastes and a variety of ingredient combinations. Nutmeg was a very important spice and people almost lost their lives for it. Similarly with sugar, tea and salt, specially in England during the Victorian period.

Venice was also the first main coffee importer in Europe: for those with a sweet tooth we can craft a tour including delicious artisanal pastries accompanied by the best coffee in the city (barley coffee or hot chocolate if you are not a caffeine lover!). Delicious pastries are baked daily by families who have passed family recipes from generation to generation. There’s also a rich history in the city regarding the art of chocolate, and we know exactly where to find the most mouthwatering, homemade chocolates for you to taste. 

If you are in town for a couple of days, why not immerse yourself entirely into a true cultural experience and join us in the kitchen for a cooking class or an aperitive served in a Venetian palazzo? All held within the romantic setting of a beautiful private villa and surrounded by lush gardens. It’s an exclusive invitation not to be missed.

Highlights: two or three wine & cicchetti or pastries & chocolates/ coffee tasting of your choice, beautiful walks off the beaten paths.