KC Barbeque Tours
Kansas City, Missouri
Bethany Schemel, founder of KC Barbeque Tours, and her husband and co-founder Karl, a firefighter, were long-standing travelers and food lovers. Then a pizza tour during a visit home to Chicago turned the couple on to the concept of food tours, and they realized that no one was offering these insights on the legendary Kansas City barbeque scene.
“I had gone on maternity leave from my full-time job, and just said, ‘we’ll see how it goes,’” Schemel explained. “We bought a bus and just jumped in and contacted all the restaurants. I had weekends off and offered the tour every Saturday, and those sold out, so we added Friday, and those sold out, and then it turned into a full-time job.”
Today, KC Barbeque Tours’ public schedule remains similar, with tours running Thursday through Saturday, but the company has greatly expanded its availability for private groups, which can choose from the original tour with four restaurants, the “Cue and Brew” combining barbeque tastings with craft beer samples, or a custom combination of both.
To highlight not only the different barbeque styles that converge in Kansas City but also the importance of sauce for creating those regional variations, each stop features two different meats and a side dish. The original tour includes a tasting at a barbeque sauce bottling plant that makes guarded, long-standing recipes for many area restaurants. Schemel advises that portion sizes are very generous, with a full plate of food per stop.
The French Icarian Village
Corning, Iowa
In the middle of the 19th century, a critical mass of community-minded French arrived on American soil in search of open land upon which to create their own ideal utopian community.
They pushed through the former Colonies and the former outpost towns out into unsettled southwestern Iowa, where an acre and a prairie could be had for just over a dollar, and began their living sociology experience just as Iowa was becoming a state. Fifty years later the community became assimilated with other immigrant groups.
“Food was central for them since it was an agricultural enterprise,” said executive director Saundra Leininger. The Icarians brought never-before-seen produce, like rhubarb, with them as they grew plants like strawberries and wine grapes to support their French culinary traditions in their new land. “Their strawberry patch was a half an acre of land; they had huge gardens,” she said.
The French Icaria Colony Foundation has recently completed renovations on key buildings from the Icarian settlement, including the school and dining hall, which now features a commercial kitchen to support the colony’s food experiences. Visiting groups can enjoy an Icarian lunch breakfast in the historic dining hall before or during their tour of the site. They can also combine a visit to the Icarian colony with a day of Iowa immigrant food experiences incorporating the nearby Danish windmill, Swedish cultural center and German bierhaus.
Taste Twin Cities
Minneapolis
Like KC Barbeque Tours, Rebecca Pfeiffer, the founder and owner of Taste Twin Cities, was inspired by a visit to Chicago to begin her own food walking tours.
“I was visiting Chicago for the hundredth time, and someone recommended doing a food tour, and I’d never heard of that,” she said. “It was amazing, and I wanted to find ways like that to vacation in our own city, but there were no food tours, no tap rooms really open at the time and no winery tours.”
Even though her tours are urban walking tours in nature, Pfeiffer keeps the topics close to the seasons in unusual ways. Her first tour was a riverwalk tour, taking in Minneapolis’ attraction-packed waterfront with a different lens. But she soon created a Skyway food tour both to uncover gems in central Minneapolis and to find a creative way to continue opportunities for food walking tours throughout the winter.
In addition to a wide slate of public offerings that is expanding soon, Pfeiffer works closely with groups to create customized, private itineraries.
“You’re not going to see that on our website, but we can completely custom build,” she said. “We’ve done anything from a couple of restaurants with a brewery stop to an in-depth city tour through the lens of General Mills for a group of international chefs who toured famous local kitchens, including that of a chocolatier. We’ve seen a lot of groups come back and come back again because we’re really adaptable.”
www.tastetwincities.com
