Enjoy a flatbread pizza at Trade on your Boston foodie Tour.
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BITE Sample cacao nibs on the Taza Chocolate factory tour.
BY
kim foley mackinnon
Just like when we take our children to the farm to see where eggs come from, a food tour is a fun way to show kids how foods are made---and enjoy a great family outing at the same time. No food tour is complete without tasty samples and we’ve picked three in the Boston area that are sure to please everyone in the family, even the picky eaters!
Boston Foodie Tour This 2-year old company has a number of fantastic walking tours around the city, from the North End to the Back Bay, showcasing some of the best eats and chefs in town, but kids will likely love the Rose F. Kennedy Greenway Tour best. During school vacation weeks and in the summer, special family-friendly versions of the tour are scheduled. (A regular tour is about three hours; the family-friendly version is two). Owner Audrey Giannattasio has worked hard to gain access to some of the city’s top spots, many with national recognition. If your family is a fan of the Food Network, you’ll definitely recognize some names, though you don’t need to know anything
Watch as your milkshake is topped with liquid nitrogen at Blue, Inc.
Everyone gets a cupcake from Crumbs to take home on a Boston Foodie Tour.
A worker stir chips at the Cape Cod Chip factory.
Out of These Food Tours about them to enjoy their food. On the tour, you’ll sample specialties from food trucks parked along the Greenway, like the popular Roxy’s Grilled Cheese, as well as dishes from two celebrity chefs’ restaurants. Watch your flat bread pizza being made and cooked in the oven at Trade, Jody Adams’s restaurant. At Blue Inc., owned by Jason Santos, kids will be thrilled as they watch their root beer and toasted marshmallow or peanut butter and pretzel milkshake freeze with liquid nitrogen. They’ll also get a kick if Santos is there---he’s got blue hair, which is how the restaurant got its name. This isn’t a tour where you just get nibbles. No one leaves hungry. And no one leaves without a treat to take home. That is, if the kids don’t eat their cupcakes before you get there. The setting of the Greenway can’t be beat, especially in warmer weather. There’s a carousel, plenty of room to run around, art installations, a farmer’s market, and lots of special events. As you make your way along your guided tour, you can make note of what you might like to return to later. Boston Foodie Tours 617-461-5772 bostonfoodietours.com
Taza Chocolate The Boston area’s only chocolate factory, Taza Chocolate, in Somerville, offers a bit of an adventure in just finding the place. Located deep in an industrial park, past scrap metal yards with fences topped with razor wire, you might think you’re lost even when your GPS says you’re not. Have faith. Chocolate is near. Once you find Taza and open the door to the retail shop and factory, the rich, delicious scent of chocolate greets you. A variety of chocolate products are displayed on tables and shelves and large glass windows allow
visitors to see into the factory. Several times a week, Taza offers hour-long, guided tours for just $5 a person. Despite the low ticket fee, Taza is more than generous with its samples. The artisanal chocolate company prides itself on the care it takes in every aspect of making its Mexican-style chocolate. It enjoys a face-to-face relationship with the farmers from where it buys its cacao, currently the Dominican Republic, and the company uses handmade stones to grind the beans. On the tour, you’ll learn that founder Alex Whitmore tasted stone-ground chocolate in Oaxaca, Mexico, and loved the distinctive style so much he decided to open his own chocolate factory in the United States. Whitmore doesn’t believe in shortcuts though. Rather than hiring someone to grind the chocolate for him, he opted to learn how to hand-carve the granite millstones used to grind the cacao in the traditional way. Warn your kids that Taza Chocolate is probably not like most chocolates they have sampled before. Because of the stoneground process, the texture is gritty rather than smooth like an average chocolate bar. The company is always playing with ingredients, so you might get to try chocolates flavored with cinnamon, salt and pepper or Guajillo chili, among others. Willa Wonka would definitely approve. Taza Chocolate 561 Windsor St., Somerville 617-284-2232 tazachocolate.com
Cape Cod Potato Chip Factory Tour One of the best parts of taking a food tour is learning some little-known facts about a favorite food. The very popular Cape Cod Potato Chip Company has some very humble beginnings. When two
entrepreneurs started the company more than 30 years ago, they operated out of an 800-square-foot Hyannis store front kitchen! They were lucky to produce 200 bags of chips a day. These days, as many as 350,000 bags can be produced in one day, and there are a number of flavors and varieties. Cape Cod makes its chips by a unique hand-stirred, kettle-cooking method. You can see exactly how it’s done at the company’s large plant, where you can take a self-guided tour on weekdays. The free tour begins at one end of the building, where you’ll pick up a tour leaflet and follow signs along a hallway, which has large windows facing into the factory. Kids love to check out the conveyor belts, giant fryers and salters where the potatoes will be transformed into crunchy snacks. If you’re curious about where all those potatoes come from---and of course you are---they are the freshest potatoes the company can find. Cape Cod only purchases potatoes at their peak, buying from farmers from Maine to North Carolina at various times of the year when that particular farm’s potatoes are in season. More than 250,000 people visit the factory annually and the busiest season is summer, when vacationers flood the Cape. But don’t let that worry you. Even though the line can snake out the door to the parking lot, the tour is relatively brief and people move fairly quickly through the building. The tour ends, naturally enough, in a gift shop, where you receive two small bags of chips, and can purchase all your favorite flavors, as well as t-shirts, hats and other souvenirs. Cape Cod Potato Chip Factory 100 Breed’s Hill Rd., Hyannis, Cape Cod 888-881-2447 capecodchips.com/about-us/factory-tour. html
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