We are starting a new food tour company with the goal of creating the best food tour in Paris. But this is the beginning. We are not a company that has thousands or reviews on tripadvisor. How can we prove to your our food tours are the best?
Transparency is core value here at Eat Like the French. The purpose of this blog is to outline how we are going to build a food tour company that is the best. Our goal is to invite our guests to embark on a culinary journey that goes beyond the ordinary. We are committed to share our knowledge and passion for delicious food and wonderful days out.
What Makes a Great Food Tour the Best Food Tour in Paris?
Googling will take you to plenty of lists outlining the best food tours in Paris. But they don’t mention the method or how they go about choosing the best food tours. Best is such a tough word to play around with one you take a step back and think about it.
Best Rated? Best Reviewed?
Relying on tripadvisor and google reviews is a good starting point. Yet personally I would argue it is not enough. Everyone has different expectations when it comes to a food tour.
Food is personal experience a fact often overlooked by even the worlds best chefs. As an ex chef and avid foodie reading reviews is never enough. I was disappointed many times eating at the best restaurants in the world. My expectations will clearly be different to yours. Thats why my rating will be different to yours.
But The Best Food tour in Paris will be the one that is the best rated. Reviews are feedback, and feedback is key. We want you to think you have had the best time. Looking back on the time you spent on our food tour should be one of the highlights of your holiday.
Expert Sources You Trust
I love to read restaurant reviews written by professional critics. I scour through many tour guides before I go anywhere to get the best tips. There are specific expert sources I trust more than the reviews I read on Google or TripAdvisor.
Yet when you go and look for professional reviews of the Food Tours in Paris. There are none written by French Professional Food and Travel critics. This is something that needs to be remedied. If we want to be the best food tour’s in Paris we need to get reviews from French professional food and travel writers.
France is afterall the birthplace of the restaurant and the food critic. Alexandre Balthasar Laurent Grimod de la Reynière pioneered restaurant reviews with his Almanach des gourmands in the 18th century. His eight volumes seamlessly blended restaurant guides with insightful food criticism, leaving an enduring legacy that shaped the realm of culinary writing.
Data is King
We can’t be the ones to tell you we are running the best food tours in Paris. You need other people, our clients and our reviewers to tell you.
To make the best food tour we will just need to define the important data points and collate all this Data. A key milestones on our company road map will be for us to make a tool that helps us share these data points publicly. We expect to be able to share
- Feedback from French Culinary Experts
- Reviews by Professional Traveler’s & The Travel Press
- Clients NPS Score
- Aggregated Scores from Online Reviews
To make us the best we need to use things we learned in other parts of our career that lead us here. Our team has a unique skillset that we know most of the Food Tour Companies in Paris are lacking.
What makes the best food tour?
In my humble opinion, the best food tours are not just a walk, some tastings and some stories. The best food tours are a life changing experiences. They change the way you consume a certain food and understand a certain regions culture. Food is our fuel, paramount to our health. Food tours can be an experience that will change how you eat for ever.
I know that sounds like lofty goals. Yet, we have to remember how important the food we eat is.
The best food tours are an experience that becomes a highlight of a holiday or weekend. Unforgettably delicious education.
Before starting a new food tour company we have spent months thinking about the elements that make up the best food tour. Our goal is to ensure that we can focus on making each of the below elements the best possible experience for our guests.
An experience that starts before the tour. You are probably booking your food tour as you are planning and researching your trip. This might be months before. Booking a food tour with “Eat Like…” should unlock some unobtainable insights and help before your trip starts. So by the time you arrive for your food tour, you already feel confident you have made some great choices on where and what you are going to eat.
A knowledgable and passionate guide. The guide is incredibly important when it comes to your food tour. Your fearless leader, educator and savant. There passion and knowledge make or break a tour . With a passion for great food and heaps of knowledge after a lifetimes obsession with great food. We plan to only have the best guides, well remunerated and well trained.
Great tastings. You may have read elsewhere on this site, how we want you to have more food-gasms. Thos unforgetable moments when you taste something that is superbly delicious. The food you will be tasting on our food tour’s will be unforgettable. Thats what makes the best food tours.
Educative. The Best food Tour’s will teach you something you can take home as a souvenir for the rest of your life. I have learned much of my own food knowledge through the hundreds of food tours I took since I was a child.
Happy Guests. Being surround by other, happy guests will make you enjoy your experience even more. Watching a group of guests make friends and enjoy their tour even more was one of the most rewarding bit of leading food tours last year.
Every single element will be tough to get right so we have to be clear at the beginning about how we are going to do it.
How we Plan to Run the Best Food Tours in Paris
We are just starting out running food tours, so we know we are not the best yet. What follows is an outline of our methodolgy that will ensure we become the best food tour company in Paris. This how we believe we will be able to put every other food tour in Paris to shame.
Understanding the problem a food tour solves
This article has taken several weeks to write because this is probably the most important question every food tour guide should ask themselves. Very existential. Why do people want to go on food tours?
I have been asking myself the question as well as previous food tour guests I have had from last year. The food tour’s I’ve done with my family have solved a problem when it comes to the food we want to taste or the region we are visiting.
Unique Access – Food, Wine and Beer tours often have unique access to places not open to the public. Think behind the scenes of kitchens, vinyards and breweries.
Insight and Education. We want to learn more about a particular subject from the people growing or making the food we are interested in.
Customs and Traditions Explained. We wanted to understand more about the culture we were visiting or the traditional way to eat and drink in a particular place.
Translator. Sometimes, we wanted help because we didn’t speak the language. A tour guide helps us translate and get the best wherever we were.
Delicious Food. We were always on the lookout for the most delicious food. This is often where many food tours fall down.
Someone to Ask Questions. Plenty of non guided or self guided tours exist. However, we were happy to spend more on a Guided Tour because we could ask questions.
It’s easy. We are on holiday, we want to taste and learn about the best food in a region… but we also want it to be effortlessly easy.
If you are looking to book a food tour, I would love to ask you; why do you want to go on a food tour? It’s listening to you and understanding what problem a food tour fixes for you. That we will grow the assumptions and feedback we have above and make our Food Tours the Best in Paris.
We fundimentaly believe that if we focus on the problem instead of the solution we will consitently improve and grow as a company.
Unique Skills of Our Team
Our founder is an avid foodie. He started cooking in kitchens when he was 13, working in Michelin star kitchens and for large chains. From there he spend 12 years working in tech companies and startups in London, Dublin and Paris. Finally he spent all 2023 as Food Tour Guide for one of the best rated food tour companies in Europe.
With this unique blend of management skills, tech knowledge and never ending passion for food. Our unique approach will allow us to challenge and mold the future of food tours. Today, Its a tiny team but if we start to focus on being the best now. We can build the best food tours in Paris.
The goal of the company is to hire people with diverse skills and backgrounds. Our food guides are either ex-chef’s or food historians. More about them coming over on the About Us Page soon. Our back office team will be technology, data and domain experts that can elevate the guest experience. Our partners will be the best chefs, sommeliers and farmers we can find.
At the core of all this are you fair reader our guest. Even know as you read this blog. We believe you are a guest and we are touring you through how we are about to build the company.
Human-First Design
To ensure that we are crafting experiences, not tours: we have to do everything human first.
User first design has been a popular design trend in the tech space for quite a few years. Pre-ceeded by Human First Design principals of Toyota in the 1940’s. Interested in this sort of thing then check out Toyota’s Design principals here.
Becoming a human first company will lead our clients, our team and our suppliers to say we are the best. We are talking about food here. It’s what we fuel our bodies with. The more care you take and things you learn about what you eat, the more happy and healthy you will be.
We used our understanding of human first, user first design as a base to create our own Design Principals.
The Principals that Guarantee our Food Tours are the Best.
- True hospitality consists of giving the best of yourself to your guests. Our guides give their best.
- We focus on the Problem not the Solution. There are no silver bullets.
- Food is Personal we must personalise your guests experience.
- Kaizen – Constant improvement through consistent feedback loops
- Taste is Everything – Invest in great tasting food despite the cost.
- Suppliers and Partners are key part of the team, treat them with respect.
- Be honest and Transprent in everything we do
- Document and share the journey
A human-first design approach, focusing on creating memorable experiences rather than mere tours. At every stage of building our tour company and in every element, from itinerary planning to guide interactions.
Our Guests will Make us the Best
To ensure our tours are centered around the human experience. We will need to gather heaps and heaps of feedback. Our goal is to not just collect reviews but a detailed survey for each guest. Making our guests happy and understanding what they enjoyed will help us improve.
But not everyone wants to give feedback.
My experience running surveys in the past helped me realise most people don’t like giving feedback. To enourage user feedback we will send email after our tours. To encourage people to take part, we will run a prize draw every month. The prize being a care package of delicious food to wherever our guests are in the world. This will thank them for the time they put in to helping us make the best food tours in Paris.
In 2023, I used feedback to improve my skills as a food tour guide. I took friends and foodies on my tours with me and helped me improve as a Tour guide. On one rainy day, I remember my friend reminding me of all the secrets of how to tell if a the look, the sound, the smell. A story I still use today when I am teaching people about how to find the best french bread in Paris.
Our Guides – Beyond Guides, Culinary Storytellers
Many of the food tours I have been on were disappointing because of the guide. Often the Tour Guide leading the tour was not a food professional. Students, paid badly who were following a script written for them by the company they worked for.
My own experience as a Food Tour Guide highlighted to me how little the people I was working for knew about food. Beyond Facts, a Food Tour is part of your Culinary Education. That education has to be delivered by someone who understands the food world exceptionally well. Our food tour guides need to be more than passionate foodies. An expert guide that can personalise their stories to suit their audience. Share knowledge and lead experiences that create excpetional memories for their guests.
This means we will have to recruit and build a team of expert guides with superb storytelling skills. They need to understand they are not just guides—they are storytellers, each with a unique narrative to share.
The Tastings – The Art of Ingredient Curation
Finally, the food you taste on a food tour has to be mind blowingly delicious.
Sourcing locally and selecting superb produce is one of the skills that great chef’s learn. We plan to dedicate our selves to find the best quality food for people to taste. This will need to rely on our knowledge as chef’s and lots of tasting and testing.
Watch this space to find out more about the suppliers and the tasting your will have on our food tours.
Our Goal is to Create Unforgettable Moments
In conclusion all the above is the begining of the journey to create the best food tour in Paris. We have outlined how we are going to do it but now we need your help joining us on a food tour to see if we are doing it well. We will give a money back guarantee for any one who is un-happy with our food tours for the first 6 months. I hope you will join us for an unforgettable moment in Paris soon.
Thank you so much for reading this whole article. We are so excited that you are following the begining of this Culinary Adventure with us. Help us out and tell us what you think in the comments.
If you would like to discover how our human-first approach feel on one of our tours. Join our expert guides for an unforgettable moment by checking out the food tours we offer in Paris.
If you aren’t coming to paris soon, but love food tours we would love to hear your comments on the above. By sharing this article you will be helping us in a tiny way to build the best food tour company in Paris.
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