Farmers Market & W. 3rd Street Food Tasting Tour

The tour guide was very informative and super nice. The food on the tour was excellent. My Red Hat group really enjoyed the tour and plan on taking the Melting Pot Tour in Pasadena.

Our tour guide, Diane, was a perfect hostess for this event! She was knowledgeable, friendly, & thoroughly organized. The food tasting was wonderful & the group of 12 was the perfect size to get to meet people & interact. My 2 friends & I enjoyed walking through the Grove after our tour & then dining at a Greek restaurant which served delicious food. I highly recommend this tour to anyone! Looking forward to going on the new Pasadena tour in the near future!!

The Melting Pot Tour of Farmers Market and 3rd street was informative and fun. Diane (tour guide) was knowledgeable and entertaining. Having been raised in Los Angeles and having visited Farmers Market numerous times in the last 50 years, I was very pleased to learn the inside scoop about the site. Tastings were good and varied. I have recommended to friends and would go again.

The tour was very informative. I learned a lot about the history of the Farmer's Market. The tasting stops were all really good. They mostly were places where I ordinarily wouldn't stop on my own, but the food at these places were really good. I kinda like the small samples here and there. You never get too full to try the next taste delight. By the end it all adds up though, and I felt quite well fed at the end of the tour. I think my favorite sample taste was the monkey bread. (mmm, butter).

We had out of town family and wanted to try something out of the ordinary, tracked down the tour online after hearing about something similar back East. We live an hour out from downtown and had only a vague impression of what the Farmers' Market was, so this was a treat, as was our guide, Diane, whom we're pretty sure is acquainted with everyone in every business establishment in the Fairfax district.

Loved this tour before, and will bring other friends to experience it again.

Grandparents with 17 year-old grandson, so a wide spectrum of ages and we were ALL delighted. Our tour guide was so gracious to our grandson (who can be difficlult). We walked away with the feeling of money well spent.

I am local to Los Angeles, and thought it would be interesting to learn more about the Farmer's Market, since I didn't go there very often but lived close by. I thought that the tour was an interesting concept, but could've been executed better. For example, we were eating sweets one minute and cheese the next, and then back to sweets. I understand that the eateries are in a certain place, but I would have lined up what I was going to sample better. Who wants to eat olives after having coffee and a doughnut? Also, I always felt rushed on the tour. I know we have a certain amount of time, but I think the guide should work on moving people along by saying, "hey, let's go get this great thing" instead of "we're on a schedule let's go." It was also strange for the guide, who is one of the owners, to ask for tips at the end of the tour. I mean, c'mon, you're the owner, you've already made $50/head, do you really need tips? Then at the end of the tour, it wasn't a shuttle bus that took us back to the beginning of the tour, it was a city bus! Strange. All in all, if you're a complete tourist and want something to do on a Saturday morning and don't want to cook breakfast and have an iron mixing stomach, this is the tour for you. Otherwise, go to a real Farmer's market, buy a week's worth of food for $50 and cook your own and then take a walk in the neighborhood.

Went on this tour a few weeks ago with a friend. Some of the places she took us were great and I want to go back, but the tour was 4 hours long and could have easily been 1 to 2 hours instead. I felt we wasted a great deal of time while we stood in front of the meat market or fruit stand in the Farmers Market and the host listed off prices for us (which sounded like an infomercial!) The host tells many stories, some of which are charming, but most of which just seem like filler. My friend and I found ourselves tuning her out and we missed the few good things she had to say because we were so bored early on. Also, while walking down 3rd street we stopped at some great places (Joan's and the Chado tea room were our favs) but we took a detour to talk about real estate and neighborhood prices. Waste of time. I felt the $50/person was a little steep a price to pay since Melting Pot tours gets all the food we taste as free samples from the restaurants (which is GREAT advertising for them) and so they are making 100% profit. Good for them, but $100 (plus ticketing fee) was a bit expensive for what it was. In conclusion, the places they take you are great, the food is great. The tour is a bit long-winded and boring. The price is, well, overpriced.

Great tour and great food. The tour guide was super informative and chose places for the food tasting excellently. I would definitely recemmond this tour to anyone interested in a unique look at Los Angeles' food and sights.