Trip highlights: Cook with friends of Milk Street Beto Estúa and Jorge Fritz. Make mole from scratch at a family farm in Milpa Alta. Visit quiet neighborhood markets and shop like a local. Follow corn from kernel to tortilla via cooking classes and a nighttime taco crawl. Sip a margarita al pastor at J.M. Hirsch’s favorite Mexico City bar.
Who you’ll travel with: Paco de Santiago, Beto Estúa, Jorge Fritz and Milk Street’s April Dodd
What you’ll eat: Chilaquiles pasilla; quesadillas stuffed with squash blossoms; cochinita pibil; an eye-popping variety of tacos and salsas; huitlacoche—and much more!
Per person cost: $4,000 (Single room supplement: $600)

This tour is currently sold out, but more departure dates are coming soon. To be the first to know about future departures, join the waitlist.

Trip highlights: Spend three days foraging and cooking in the wildly beautiful Mani landscape with chef Stavriani Zervakakou. Visit a small family-run olive grove and learn about world-class olive oil. Harvest sea salt straight from the pans. Taste the wines produced in a hyper-local, protected wine region.
Who you’ll travel with: Carolina Doriti, Stavriani Zervakakou and Milk Street’s Rosemary Gill
What you’ll eat: Spanakopita and loukomades; cuttlefish over local orzo pasta; a sampler of Athenian spritzes; goat milk custard pies; grilled prawns with fava beans and arugula.
Per person cost: $5,250 (Single room supplement: $775)

This tour is currently sold out, but more departure dates are coming soon. To be the first to know about future departures, join the waitlist.

Trip Highlights: Take hands-on cooking classes and market tours with Iliana de la Vega, Mexican cooking authority and Milk Street friend. Travel to Tlacolula to cook with Catalina Lucas in her home in rural Oaxaca. Visit expert ceramicist Isabel Sanchez and learn about her passion for saving heirloom corn seeds. Eat at restaurants experimenting with new approaches to traditional ingredients.
Who you’ll travel with: Maria Itaka, Iliana de la Vega, and Milk Street’s April Dodd
What you’ll eat: Oaxacan cheese tamales; enchiladas with red and black mole; barbacoa tacos; mezcal and hibiscus cocktails.
Per person cost: $4,000 (Single room supplement: $500)

This tour is currently sold out, but more departure dates are coming soon. To be the first to know about future departures, join the waitlist.

Trip highlights: Immerse yourself in the food of the Hatay region of Türkiye with native Özlem Warren, a longtime Milk Street Cooking School teacher and magazine contributor. Tour neighborhood spice, vegetable and cheese markets. Eat a big Turkish breakfast on a family farm located improbably in the moats of the City’s Byzantine-era fortified walls. Cruise the Bosporus and eat at Ciya Sofrasi, a restaurant dedicated to preserving regional Turkish dishes in danger of being forgotten.
Who you’ll travel with: Gonca Karakoc, Özlem Warren and Milk Street’s Rosemary Gill
What you’ll eat: Artichoke hearts fried in olive oil; Balkan boreks filled with Turkish goat cheese; spicy Adana kebabs; stuffed grape leaves; Black Sea-style pide.
Per person cost: $5,250 (Single room supplement: $1,250)

This tour is currently sold out, but more departure dates are coming soon. To be the first to know about future departures, join the waitlist.

Culinary Backstreets got their start in 2009, reporting from a borderless urban zone they call the “Culinary Backstreets,” a place where you can find simple family-run restaurants, masters passing their craft on to an apprentice, or the rhythm of a life committed to meatballs and nothing else. They go slow and collect these stories one-by-one, giving equal measure to the culinary side as the human element of the story.

Culinary Backstreets tells these stories through weekly restaurant reviews published on CB, culinary walking tours, multiday trips, books, web design and smartphone applications. At present, you’ll find their regular dispatches from Athens, Barcelona, Istanbul, Lisbon, Los Angeles, Marseille, Mexico City, Oaxaca, Naples, Palermo, Porto, New Orleans, Queens (NY), Shanghai, Tbilisi and Tokyo. These cities all have a culinary tradition of untold richness as well as a certain tension, be it the tug between East and West, the clash between modern and ancient identities, migration, rapid gentrification or a post-colonial hangover. The people they cover run restaurants, workshops, farms and more that are holding back the tide of globalized sameness, which is not easy work—even if it’s done unknowingly.

Culinary Backstreets’ work is guided by a belief in:

• Honest Tourism: The places where they eat and craftspeople that they feature on their culinary tours are all selected with this purpose in mind. They never accept a free lunch or consider a discount for our tour groups, and their guides don’t receive any commissions from shopkeepers.
• Honest Journalism: The same principal is applied to the publishing of stories. There are no sponsored posts or even advertising on CB. The writers and photographers are paid fairly for their work on stories that we all believe in.
• Serving Multiple Stakeholders: Culinary Backstreets seeks to provide its guests and audience with enriching culinary travel experiences while also serving the needs of the communities where they work. Sensitivity to the impact their work has on small neighborhood businesses and community spaces is key to their sustainability.