Chicago Food Planet Food Tours

I am a Chicago Native, however, I had only been to one of the restaurants featured on the tour. I really enjoyed the food and learning about the history of the neighborhood. This was a great way to spend the afternoon!

As food service providers, our group enjoyed this great activity. This was not a traditional class room seminar. It provided time to share with co-workers, walk a little, eat a little, walk more, ... As a corporate food service group we loved this out of the box experience. The customer service from each establishment was great; but the guides on our tours were extremely knowledgeble and fun. The group enjoyed the fun facts of the neighborhood and it provided folks who frequently visit downtown Chicago, new vistas to explore on their return trips!

this was my 2nd time doing the taste tour. both times it was great. the guides were very interesting and energetic ladies. very knowlegable of the stops and buildings we walked passed. the food at each place was awesome. the pizza at the end was fabulous. i normally don't like deep dish pizza because it's too greasy. this was NOT greasy at all. very tastey. i love the whole thing. infact i'm doing it again next week!!!

My sister from S. Carolina was visiting and we made a day trip into Chicago for the Food Tour. It was such fun! She'll go back to SC and have so much to share with her family and friends there. Loved it---and she will come back soon for us to take the Wicker Park Food Tour! :-) Thanks.

Really really enjoyed the shops and wished we could have stayed longer at each. we will do again .

My daughter and I enjoyed everything about our tour. Jessie, our guide, was fun, enthusiastic and knowledgeable and did a great job keeping everyone together and on time. Each establishment was different, delicious and interesting. I will definitely be ordering from some of the businesses, particularly the Spice House and Tea Gschwendner. It was great fun walking through and learning about the neighborhoods. We would recommend this to anyone who is a foodie!

I attended the Near North Food Tour with a 5 member work group. Another group in our department had previously taken the tour and were very impressed. I've lived in Chicago most of my life and thought that I knew a lot about the various neighborhoods we visited but, I was wrong. Our tour guide, Jennifer was fun, enthusiastic, and very knowledgeable about Chicago history and architecture. We enjoyed every stop on the tour....it's hard to decide which was the favorite....the chocolate shop, oil shop, spice emporium or the delicious pizza. I would recommend this to any food lover who would enjoy a leisurely stroll in a beautiful city with a lively, informative tour guide. Thank you!

I'm a Youth Minister from Georgia and we had a team of 8 youth (15 and 16 year olds) and 4 adults in Chicago doing some inner-city missions and we had a free day before our flight back to Saturday. I was looking for something that would be appealing and different for our group to do and I came across this website for the Bucktown/Wicker Food tasting tour and signed our group up. I told the kids and adults and they were SO excited!!! When we got there our tour guide Ben was awesome and the stops along the way were incredible. He did a great job talking about all the architecture and the history of the Bucktown/Wicker area. We stopped at 6 places and everyone had something that they liked! I would highly recommend this tour to anyone with teenagers or just as a couple or individual. It was a lot of fun and a great experience!

My teenage daughter and I truly enjoyed the whole experience. From the extensive history of Chicago to the varied tastes we encountered, it was a great investment of our short time in the city. Our guide was very knowledgeable and enthusiastic, sharing her love for the area. We actually returned to the same area the next day to enjoy four of the tour stops in more detail. We will definitely recommend the tour to all we encounter! Thanks! Jeanette Hornung, Kansas

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!

The food tour through Bucktown/Wicker Park was absolutely fantastic! The different foods & drinks that we sampled were great! Kent, our tour guide, had a great personality and was very knowledgeable. I would definitely recommend this tour to others!

The Near North Food Tour in Chicago was simply excellent! Jennifer, our guide, was wonderful and most entertaining. Her insight about the areas we toured was really informative and we loved hearing the history of the various locations we walked through. Had we had more time, we would have taken another Chicago food tour of a different area because our experience was so great with this first tour. Would recommend this activity for anyone interested in food, cooking, architecture and history.

My husband and I were in Chicago for a week and the Near North Food Tasting Tour was the No.1 "must-do" according to Trip Advisors . We were not let down. The tour was great! The samples were very generous and we can't wait for our olive oil/vinegar, tea and spice orders to arrive home so we can re-live the experience! Thanks to Shane and Jennifer for a fantastic tour...You two are the best!

We really enjoyed the tour. We learned things about spices & tea that we never knew before! It was great to be able to taste & sniff various spices. The smell from outside the store was amazing! It was also fun to taste different combinations of olive oil and balsamic vinegar. My only regret is that we weren't able to shop. Since the tour ends a fair distance from where it started, going back to shop is a bit of an inconvenience. We'll make a point of going back to this neighborhood on a future visit!

The food was terrific and the portions were bigger than expected. I felt rushed in the beginning because we made several quick eating stops, but during the second half we had more of an opportunity to walk and learn about the neighborhood's history.