Food Lovers Tour
How we developed our Food Lovers Tour
Since opening Gringo Tours back in 2007, I have always included local foods on our tours. This has included the several fruits and vegetables I found new after my youth in California as well as the many typical dishes and food served in local eateries on the street and made by local families.
Unfortunately, and I am sure most of you will agree as we travel to new places today we commonly find international things like paninis, sandwiches, pizzas, hamburgers, tacos, pastas, salads and the likes. Even in local bakeries it is today more common to find a turnover, chocolate chip muffin, apple pie and cheese cake rather than real local pastries. Where is the world going when we lose the traditional foods of each region or country?
Local foods in El Salvador
In the case of little El Salvador when it comes to local foods, all we find are pupusas and the lower quality street snacks ( Merienda ) like nuegados small yucca balls served in a lite syrup, enchiladas, similar to a Mexican tostada, pastelitos, vegetable or meat filled fried dumplings, empanadas a small plantain dough dumpling filled with a mike pudding or sweetened refried beans, and a variety of hot thick drinks made with different corn products. One of my wife Tita’s dreams is to open a restaurant that specializes in only high quality Salvadoran foods. Today in El Salvador there is one chain restaurant that tries but most Salvadorans feel it fall short in quality, so although it offers the majority of Salvadoran dishes they are not the best example of them.
Our pupusa and cooking classes and food the desire to offer more
Tita and I have been offering pupusas making classes for close to 20 years now, from those classes clients asked for more and now we commonly offer full day cooking classes, theming each class to each different clients’ desire. These experiences have lead our clients to ask for more and reason that we started adding local foods to many of our common tours. We have found like with most of our tours that a food lovers tour as an experience is difficult to standardize and have found it best to just develop each tour around each client’s only standardizing daily costs dependent on group size.
Gringo Tours Food Lover Options
As one of the more popular options we now offer combined food lover tours to Western El Salvador’s famous Ruta de Flores, incorporation fine fine dining at some of the best restaurant with local foods going back to the Mayan culture at Nahuizalco’s night market with other street foods and snacks sold throughout the region. For the best experience and to try the most local food we highly recommend this as a two-day overnight tour. Besides the food lover’s component, we also include all common variants in the Ruta de Flores, these can include the Laguna Verde, waterfall hikes, coffee tours, hot springs, art galleries as well as visits to the 5 popular cities of Nahuizalcos, Salcoatitan, Juayua, Apaneca and Ataco. We recommend for the overnight tour lodging in Either Juayua or Ataco.
Today we also offer food lover options to our San Salvador tours, Suchitoto-Cinquera tours, Combo tours, so if interested just let us know when inquiring about tours and transfers and we will see what can be built in to you or your groups tours.
Tours and Pricing
Rates for all tours remain the same as our full day tour rates and start at $200\day for individual travelers, $250\day for couples or two travelers, $300\day for groups of 3 and from $75\person\day for groups of 4 or more. We always include bottled water, sometime other mixed non-alcoholic beverages, all entrance fees, all local guide fees, all transportation and a bilingual driver guide. For our food lovers tours your guides will normally be my wife Tita, when available and myself. We have found that for food tours we can share the cost of the foods we try which makes it cost efficient and provides the opportunity to order and share more dishes.
So for those truly interested in getting to know El Salvador through its foods, we recommend you start with one of our full day cooking classes then after getting to know Tita and I plan a day or two of tours in other parts of the country….And as always if you speak Spanish and like to do things on your own just drop me a message and I will point you to where we take our clients.
Included in this tour:
• Transportation in vehicle with A/C
• Bottled water(1-2 bottles/person)
• All Entrance fees
• Local guide fees
• Bilingual guide
Tour Duration of Tour including transportation: 7-9 hours
Difficulty level of Tour: easy to moderate
Not Include
• Snacks and Meals
• Lodging
• Optional Tips to local guides
• Cost of optional activities including: Mountain bike, Jet ski, Buggy, Zip line/Canopy, Kayak, Rafting or other activities not mentioned in tour description