Street food tours: eating at the stall

About this category

Lunch from the market hall

Ask a local where to eat and the answer is often a counter, a cart or a market stall. This category gathers the tours where those places are the main event, from Palermo’s oldest market to a Kansas City barbecue counter inside a gas station.

Europe first. Sicily spends two mornings in Palermo’s Ballarò and Capo markets for panelle, arancine and sfincione from a cart. The Basque Country and the three-hour San Sebastián Pintxos Walk teach you to order at a crowded counter in the Parte Vieja. Andalusia shops Triana market in Seville and eats fried fish in paper cones by the Cádiz market, and Lyon and Provence covers Les Halles de Lyon Paul Bocuse, Les Halles d’Avignon, the river market of L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue and the fish quay at Marseille’s Vieux-Port.

Further away, Japan: Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka eats breakfast in the Tsukiji outer market, walks Nishiki in Kyoto and Kuromon in Osaka, and finishes with takoyaki in Dotonbori and kushikatsu in Shinsekai. Mexico City and Oaxaca goes from tacos al pastor and La Merced’s blue corn tlacoyos to chapulines at Benito Juárez market and the smoke corridor of Mercado 20 de Noviembre, where you pick your meat and watch it grilled.

In the United States, the French Quarter Food Walk links a muffuletta from a corner grocery, raw oysters and warm pralines in three and a half hours, and the Great American Barbecue Trail eats Kansas City’s most talked-about barbecue inside a gas station and sits down to a Memphis soul food lunch.

Our hosts know the owners and the timing: which stall to hit before the line, which one sells out, and what to order when you reach the front. Where drinks come with the food, they are poured for guests 18 and over in Europe and Mexico, 20 and over in Japan and 21 and over in the USA.