More than Just a Chicago Food Tour

That’s exactly it. When I attended the Chicago Food Planet Food Tours, Bucktown and Wicker Park food tour I didn’t think I would get anything besides a “food tour”. Just few samples here and there and I’ll be on my way home to eat dinner because of the small quantities of food I’ve been fed. Well, I couldn’t have been more wrong. By end of the 1.5 miles, 3 hours tour I was stuffed and more knowledgeable than ever about the rich history of these fascinating neighborhoods.

It all started when I ran into George’s Hot Dogs, the the starting point of the tour. You can immediately find out who’s in the group by the flyers displaying “Chicago Food Planet” logo. I asked for the person in charge and in comes the awesome Carrie. She informs me that it’s c-a-r-r-i-e like Carrie Bradshaw. Yes, she officially became my favorite tour guide, ever. On top of that she was extremely nice and always ready to answer any questions anyone might have.

We 1st had a hot dog Chicago style hot dog at Geroge’s. Yes a full hot dog. I’m going to go ahead and  just advise you not to have breakfast the day of. At some point I actually couldn’t finish my pizza. It was a glorious feeling. Back to George’s, Carrie told us a bit of the history of the shop before eating and we then headed out to our next stop. She did so at each of the businesses we visited which gave each location a sense of personality. Hot Chocolate was the 2nd stop and I’ll let you know right now that it has a great non-chocolate menu. There, we had hot chocolate with homemade marshmallow. YUM!

@GoddessGrocer was next. It was a pleasure to hear the story behind the name. I won’t give it to you because that would spoil the fun of hearing it from the food tour guide. Then comes @PieceChicago where we went for pizza and after that to Sultan’s Market for falafels! My favorite stop was the last one, iCream. At iCream you can custom create your own ice cream, frozen yogurt or sorbet and see it all happen in front of your eyes. The great folks at iCream use liquid Nitrogen to freeze your treat which makes it that much cooler to watch.

Don’t think that’s enough fun to go ahead and sign up for a Chicago Food Planet food tour? Listen Read this: along with the great food you eat, you actually get to learn about the history, architecture and gossip of the two neighborhoods, Wicker Park and Bucktown. I’ve lived in Chicago for ten years and have never seen some of the great architecture we visited in the back streets of these two historic neighborhoods. I highly recommend the Chicago Planet Food tour to any foodie, history and/or architecture buff. It was a truly fantastic time and great if you’re from out of town or have lived in Chicago all your life, alone or with a group.  You can view more photographs at my flickr stream here. For more info, Chicago Food Planet is on both @ChiFoodPlanet and Facebook.