Cooking & food vacations

The tours on our cooking and food vacations not only to provide abundant, delicious tastings, but also bring you closer to the culture of the place you’re visiting. That might mean being introduced by your guide to the people behind the street food stalls in a Chiang Mai night market, or learning about the ancient art of knife-making in Japan. In the Caucasus region, tours explore a wine-making tradition going back thousands of years. But beyond the tastings, you might meet a master craftsman who makes quevri, the earthenware jars in which the wine is fermented, stored and aged underground. It all leads to a more rounded take on a destination.

Hands-on lessons, sometimes in a professional kitchen, often in a chef’s own home, are a key feature of these vacations. What you make may well depend on what you found at the market that morning, or on the herbs and vegetables that are growing in the chef’s garden. In Greece and Portugal, your hosts introduce you to the stallholders and send you out shopping for ingredients using just your senses, with no specific recipes in mind. In South Korea you might learn how to make kimchi; in Mongolia, mutton pancakes and dumplings. Once you’re done, you share the meal with your hosts and fellow participants.

Many of our most creative cooking and food vacations focus on plant-based cuisine. Plates are heaped invitingly with dark green, leafy vegetables, and pulses, flavoured with fresh herbs and spices, and in places like Portugal and Greece, generously sprinkled with good quality olive oil. Often, you’ll meet the growers themselves in the markets, while on some trips you might forage for ingredients. You needn’t be a vegetarian or vegan to enjoy these trips – committed omnivores are perfectly welcome to come and enjoy the meat-free lifestyle for a week, and return home with armfuls of inventive, delicious recipes – you’ll be amazed what can be created with some big tomatoes, a bag of fresh chickpeas and a few sun-ripened aubergines.

Our cooking and food vacations can take you to places that may surprise you. Wine making in Albania goes back as far as the Bronze Age, so they’re pretty good at it. One Albanian winery once produced wines for Roman popes. Pair your favorite tipple with dinner in Tirana, perhaps, or Llgora, where your host will regale you with his stories of cooking for submarine crews in the Cold War before he opened up his own restaurant. Then in Georgia, our groups are often invited into family homes to share meals like Mtsvadi, a traditional barbecue of shish kebabs, or to sample delicacies like jams and herbal teas. As well as fostering cultural exchange, these trips also provide useful economic opportunities for remote and sometimes disadvantaged communities.