Kyoto Night Foodie Tour

Interested in learning about local cuisine through carefully curated local restaurants? Want to explore Kyoto with a friendly and knowledgeable guide? Well then this is NOT the tour for you. Our guide clearly did not want to be there and couldn’t answer simple questions about food / culture / recommendations in Kyoto, and specifically the Gion area that we were paying to hear his expertise about. He said that he had only led tours in Gion twice and that the company puts their guides all over the city on different days. He also mentioned that personally he doesn't spend time in Gion as it's too expensive, which is fine but awfully strange.that he's then considered our "expert" guide in that area. We have done food tours all over the world, and typically love them as they’re a fantastic way to learn more about the culture while eating delicious local foods. On this tour, rather than arriving at Stop #1 and being presented with a specialty dish of that restaurant, we were handed a TOUR-branded menu and told to pick whatever we wanted off the list. No recommendations given about house specialties. No knowledge shared about traditional eats in that establishment. Nothing that we were paying for. When I finally asked our guide how the restaurants were chosen (as it was abundantly clear he hadn’t done the choosing based on his own experience), he said he thinks his manager picks based on tourist reviews online. If this is in fact the case, what were paying for? Certainly not expert local knowledge and off-the-beaten-path experiences if we were being handed a tour-branded menu and given zero recommendations on food orders. That was the last straw for us so we left only 1 stop into a 3 stop tour, not wanting to waste any more of our precious evening in Kyoto.

Good value food and drinks. the first stop in a traditional building upstairs was great. the rest lacked atmosphere. Host was pleasant but young and limited on history, good on current life in Japan.