Near North Food Tasting & Cultural Walking Tour

We live in the Chicago suburbs and were spending a couple of days downtown and are so happy we choose to do this tour. Our guide, Kate, was outstanding. She was enthusiastic and informative. In fact, we enjoyed it so much that I want to get some friends together and do this again in the Fall. Also, we plan to do the other tour since this one was so outstanding.

Kate was our tour guide. Besides the fact that the tour was great she was wonderful!!! She added so much historical stuff with humor and grace. I know she is leaving to go to school but this tour will stay successful if you continue to hire guides like Kate!!! Highly recommend it! Would like to come back and take my husband next time.

This tour was much better than I had expected! I'm the one that hyped the tour to the boyfriend, and then at the last minute had second thoughts. I was wrong to think that way! The tour guide (Jen?) is a natural born public speaker. The sites were interesting. Who knew places like tea and oil shops could be so interesting?! We were more than pleased. The only change I'd recommend is to drop the Catering Chocolate place. There wasn't really anything unique to it, no one from the store came and introduced themselves to us...aside from the fact the owner catered to celebrities, you could find this stuff anywhere - even in cornfield IL where we're from. Also, we mentioned to the guide we couldn't wait to take the other tour, and she said we shouldn't - that now that we've been on one tour we should know how to just immerse ourselves into a neighborhood! We still find that very odd and offputting. With our luck we'd get shot somewhere we shouldn't be going on our own! At any rate, we thought if that's how they feel then fine, we won't be back!

I went with 3 friends and we enjoyed ourselves very much. Very informative and lots of walking. Jennifer was great.

My husband and I loved the tour! It was a very educational experience. We feel like we know Chicago a lot more now! We just hoped we could have tasted more food. But the overall experience was great:) We are definitely doing a taste tour of other cities.

I've never been on a food tour and I really enjoyed this experience. It was a nice way to see different neighborhoods, architecture and of course taste food and visit unique establishments. Our tour guide was really great.

Beautiful day and great to walk everywhere but it would have been better if we could have made a complete circle so that we could have ended back up closer to where we started. The variety of places were good and interesting. Enjoyed the teas, the chocolate, and even the deep dish pizza. tour guide did a good job of moving us along. Overall, my favorite was the spice shop where I actually learned about spices and cinnamon specifically. Wish we had more time there. The health benefits of specific food would have been interesting to hear including the mood enhancing benefits ie chocolate. Tour guide did know her stuff.

Great tour, interesting , fun and tasty. Our guide was Jen. she was smart, funny and hot!

My boyfriend and I both loved the tour. He was a bit skeptical, but with in the first two stops he was having as much fun as I was. We are from a local suburb about 45 min. north, and we had never visited these shops, and are dieing to go back. After the tour was over, we walked back to 2 of the shops, (Spice House, and Tea Gschwender). Another favorite of ours was the Old Town Oil, balsamic vinegar and olive oil tasting, AMAZING! The only stop of the tour that both of us did not like, was called Catering Chocolate. Not that this store did not have its charms, but it was more of a catering business selling left overs than a shop that specialized in one item, (like the tea, spice, oil shops). It was the only store that we could not see ourselves going back to, both because of the high cost, and lack of enthusiasm from the owner. (Although the hummus and cheese where good.) I believe our tour leader was named Julie, or Jen, and she was great and very knowledgeable! Worth the money for a good day out in beautiful weather.

I believe this would be a great tour but calling it a "Food Tour" is misleading. It would best be described as a historical neighborhood tour. We did see a lot of the city we probably wouldn't have seen but 3 of the places on the list we didn't eat. I was under the impression we would get a lot of different foods. Basically we got a piece of pizza and half a sandwich for $42.