Chefs du voyage: Why taking a trip with a renowned chef is the new ‘it’ tour

One of the most visceral ways to experience another culture is by eating its food. But without understanding the history or significance of the ingredients hitting your palate, a meal is more entertainment than education, superficial pleasure rather than deep revelation. To gain richer insight, many travelers are now turning to tours led by renowned chefs.  

Food-focused travel is already a large industry, but it’s about to get supersized. According to market research company Brainy Insights, the global culinary tourism market was worth USD$1.1 trillion in 2023, but it’s expected to reach USD$6.2 trillion by 2033. To help feed the public’s appetite, more tour companies are offering food-centric experiences. Black Tomato offers chef-helmed “Tasting Note” tours to Peru, Spain, and Australia, while Modern Adventure has partnered with a number of well-known chefs for various excursions, including a trip to Portugal with James Beard Award-winner Rob Rubba and another to Japan with Noma co-founder Mads Refslund.

Some chefs are taking hungry groups of foodies abroad through ventures of their own. James Beard Foundation Award-winning chef Iliana de la Vega of Austin, Texas, was born in Mexico City to parents from Oaxaca, Mexico. She began her career as a culinary guide leading tours to her homeland for corporate clients and other chefs. Then eight years ago, her daughter Isabel Torrealba, a journalist and cultural anthropologist, suggested she should offer her own Mexico food tours designed for the everyday traveler.

The new venture, Mexican Culinary Traditions, became a partnership, with Torrealba handling a lot of the front-end logistics and hotel bookings, while de la Vega oversees restaurant reservations and food experiences. The pair design and execute the itinerary together. “Because it’s not only about the food,” says de la Vega. “It’s also about the culture, because those two elements are entangled.”

“I always just thought of myself as a chef, who would just cook, cook, cook. I never realized people wanted to hang out with me. I had a paradigm shift: This is beyond cooking; this is building relationships.”

- Amy Brandwein, Centrolina Chef

Their week-long trips to Mexico City, Oaxaca, and Mérida cost roughly USD$4,500 per person, and include a mixture of museums, archeological sites, and cultural destinations, alongside cooking classes, market tours, and dining experiences ranging from street food vendors and holes-in-the-wall to award-winning restaurants.

“You must have balance,” says de la Vega. “You can’t eat in fancy places every night and you cannot eat tacos every night. Well, I could eat tacos every night, but not everyone can.”

Over the years, de la Vega has led more than 60 tours, booked mostly by North American travelers who find out about the tours by visiting de la Vega’s restaurant El Naranjo or word of mouth. Not only are these expeditions introducing travelers to her home country, but they are also an additional revenue stream.

The calculation is different for Amy Brandwein, the James Beard Award-nominated chef of Centrolina, her seasonally-inspired Italian osteria in Washington, D.C. “We make a small profit, but it’s paid time for my team, so it’s kind of a wash,” says Brandwein, who led trips for the James Beard Foundation and The Palatum, a food and wine-focused tour agency, before beginning to offer her own Italy trips to subscribers of Centrolina’s mailing list.

 “It’s a community-building exercise,” she continues. “I always just thought of myself as a chef, who would just cook, cook, cook,” she says. “I never realized people wanted to hang out with me. I had a paradigm shift: This is beyond cooking; this is building relationships.”

There’s another bonus: The trips serve as unofficial research and development forays. “There’s so much to learn,” she says. “Spark plugs are always going off. It inspires me.”

In summer of 2023, Brandwein took 10 travelers on an eight-day trip to Italy’s Umbria region, which set them back USD$7,500 per person or USD$13,000 per couple. The itinerary included a visit to the historic Scacciadiavoli vineyard, a hunt for black summer truffles that ended with a lavish meal championing their finds, an olive oil tasting, a gelato-making lesson, and dinner at chef Silvia Baracchi’s Michelin star Il Falconiere in the Arezzo province. Some of these experiences were exclusively arranged for Brandwein.

“As a chef, food is my business, so people open doors for us that normally wouldn’t,” she says. “People are going to experience things they would never have been able to access on their own.”

But not every chef is leading tours to their professional culinary, some are doing out of the sheer joy of sharing and experiencing food. For the last eight years, Mary Sue Milliken, owner and co-chef of modern Mexican restaurant Border Grill, has been leading trips to Italy. Milliken’s annual week-long, food-focused, small group cycling tours around Italy are with Tourissimo, and past excursions include Piedmont, Sicily, Sardinia, Freely, Puglia, and Calabria.

In Sardinia, the group dined on kebabs of lamb lungs and intestines. They also had the option to try casu martzu, a pecorino-derived sheep milk cheese containing maggots, which help ferment the cheese to soften its texture. Some have compared the flavor to gorgonzola.

The Julia Child Award winner is a longtime cycling enthusiast, so she brings two fields of expertise to the expeditions. However, it’s her unique culinary perspective that she thinks takes the travel experience to another level for guests. “I see everything through the eyes of a chef,” she says. “We went to see an old olive oil maker, and he happened to have yuca plants. I cooked them up that night. I see things that everybody else sees, but they don’t think, ‘Oh, we could eat that.’”

Milliken’s tours include the chance to sample unexpected culinary specialties. In Sardinia, the group dined on kebabs of lamb lungs and intestines. They also had the option to try casu martzu, a pecorino-derived sheep milk cheese containing maggots, which help ferment the cheese to soften its texture. Some have compared the flavor to gorgonzola. “You can afford to eat and drink with abandon, because you’re going to cycle another 30 to 50 miles the next day,” says Milliken. 

In many ways, these gastro trips are the natural extension of chef-powered, food-focused docu-series the public has gobbled up for years, including Mind of a Chef, David Chang’s Ugly Delicious, and all of Anthony Bourdain’s shows. But now, instead of simply watching chefs eat their way around the world, folks can be at the table right alongside them. No longer do they have to imagine what some enticing dish tastes like, they can find out for themselves—then compare notes with their chef-tour guide. 

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