Designed for high school culinary arts programs. Every itinerary is built around food — where it comes from, how it is made, and what it takes to build a career around it.
New York City feeds eight million people every day. It does so through one of the most complex, layered, and culturally diverse food systems on earth — Chinatown fish markets, Hudson Valley farms, Michelin-starred kitchens, immigrant-run bodegas, and some of the most respected culinary schools in the country, all within a few miles of each other.
e.e. Tours designs culinary tours specifically for high school programs, led by someone who has spent 30 years in the restaurant business and trained at the French Culinary Institute. Each tour combines multiple learning environments — kitchens, farms, neighborhoods, and food businesses — into a single structured experience.
Groups visit the CIA campus in Hyde Park, tour the Institute of Culinary Education in Lower Manhattan, walk through Chinatown and Little Italy tasting their way through the neighborhood, visit a working farm, and sit inside one of the most significant food history museums in the country.
This is the kind of trip a culinary arts instructor can bring to their administration and defend with a straight face. Every day has an educational purpose. Every stop connects to something students are already studying or are about to enter as a profession.
Each culinary tour includes a mix of these elements. The exact combination depends on your group's schedule, focus, and overall itinerary.
Groups take a guided walking tasting tour through Chinatown, Little Italy, and the Lower East Side. Each neighborhood is a living record of the immigrant communities that built New York's food identity.
Students eat through the stops rather than past them — the tasting tour replaces a standard meal and gives the group direct contact with the cuisines, the vendors, and the stories behind each one. A separate Nolita tasting experience, Tasty Global Bites, is available as an additional stop for groups that want broader coverage.
Groups visit Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture in the Hudson Valley for a private tour. Stone Barns is a nonprofit working farm and education center that sits on land shared with the Blue Hill restaurant group.
Students see firsthand how a farm built around ecological food systems actually operates — the relationship between soil, season, and what ends up on a plate. The private tour format means the group gets access and context that a public visitor does not.
Groups visit the Museum of Food and Drink (MOFAD), located in Brooklyn Bridge Park. MOFAD is the only museum in the United States dedicated to exploring how food shapes culture, identity, and society.
The current exhibition, Street Food City, traces generations of New York's immigrant street food entrepreneurs and the dishes they turned into icons of the city's landscape. For culinary students studying the cultural roots of what they cook, this is essential context.
Tours include visits to the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park and the Institute of Culinary Education in Lower Manhattan. At the CIA, groups tour the campus — including a look inside working instructional kitchens through viewing windows — and participate in a sensory tasting exercise in the Wine Spectator Classroom. The campus sits on 170 acres along the Hudson River and houses 41 kitchens across multiple programs.
At ICE's 74,000-square-foot facility in Lower Manhattan, groups see 12 teaching kitchens, a Chocolate Lab, a Hydroponic Garden, and a Culinary Technology Lab, and experience a cooking demonstration from a chef-instructor. Private cooking classes are also available for groups that want hands-on time rather than observation.
Groups visit Milk Bar, the bakery founded in 2008 by two-time James Beard Award-winning pastry chef Christina Tosi. Milk Bar started as a single location in the East Village — opened with seed money from David Chang of Momofuku — and grew into a nationally recognized brand with locations across the US.
The story of Milk Bar is a blueprint for what it looks like to build a food business from an idea, a borrowed space, and a specific point of view on what dessert should be. It is a conversation about creative vision, brand building, and the reality of food entrepreneurship that no classroom can replicate.
Start the conversation up to a year before travel. Most groups begin payments 6 months out.
Available to college programs on request. No prior trip experience needed.
Larger groups lower the per-person cost as shared expenses are divided across more participants.
Available throughout. All logistics and admissions coordinated in advance.
Tell us what your program covers and we build the tour around that curriculum.
e.e. Tours guides first-time organizers through every step, from the first call to the day your group returns home.
Most culinary travelers who contact us are planning their first student travel experience. We walk you through all of it.
30 years in the restaurant business. The access no booking platform can replicate.
The tour coordinator trained at the French Culinary Institute and spent 30 years in the restaurant business. This is not a generalist travel company that added a food category. The culinary knowledge is firsthand.
The CIA campus tour, the private Stone Barns visit, the ICE kitchen demonstration — these are arranged through direct relationships, not a consumer booking platform. Fundamentally different from what any individual can book on their own.
Walking tasting tours replace standard meals, so the food is the learning. Farm visits connect to sourcing. School tours connect to career pathways. Museum visits connect to culinary history. No stop is on the itinerary just to fill time.
If your program covers pastry, the itinerary leans toward Milk Bar and ICE's baking facilities. If it covers farm-to-table, Stone Barns anchors the trip. The starting point is always what your students are already studying.
School district checks, individual family payments, or online via wetravel.com. The deposit is small and fully refundable if the trip does not come together.
Request a free custom itinerary. We respond within one business day.