Milwaukee Walking Food Tour With Secret Food Tours

I’ve taken a fair number of food tours, and this was objectively terrible. The worst part, was that our tour guide, Brandon, told us almost nothing. There was Almost no information about the food we were eating or the areas we were visiting. The best food tour guides act as a host, explaining about their city, any location to go to, and of course the food. Brandon seem to have been given a one-page fact sheet that he occasionally touched on. For example, he told us that fried fish was a regular thing because of the Catholic edict no meat on Fridays. Not only is this beyond basic, but it doesn’t give any explanation for why this was a particular thing in Milwaukee. He could’ve talked about the large Catholic population, which is not as big in other parts of the state. Also, the places we went to eat didn’t seem to be expecting us, there was often no place to sit often or we had to sit in a side room. While the food was fine, I think Milwaukee has a few more things to offer that would be both interesting and provide more diversity of experience. And for heaven sake’s, make sure people have something to drink, at least water, when you get something to eat!

I’ve got a mixed review for this tour - I almost always do a good tour in every city we visit. These type of walking food & history tours are always a good way to get a lay of the land/city. The tour guide & the food make or break the experience for me. Our guide was nice and pretty informative of the areas history. The negative was the food organization & preparation with the restaurant/vendors. Typically my experience on food tours is the guide preps with restaurants so we have a private experience in each restaurant- food prep set-up in a private room or area to eat, sometimes even a picnic. The meeting place did not have any tastes for the group, it was a 1 minute look around and then out to walk down the street to try cheese curds in a store - the curds we tried is what anyone walking in the store could taste on a toothpick. The Safe House was interesting but the area we were put to eat was in a separate bar area outside of the fun part of the Safe House to eat fried cheese curds, it seemed disorganized with restaurant staff. The Milwaukee Public Market stop had very tasty fried fish, but it seemed disorganized again with the vendor. The tour overall was a good experience but has room for improvement.

The starting location was changed and adequate communication was not given to all participants. Four group members (all local to Milwaukee) understood the communication. The remaining six member (none of whom were local) did not understand the communication, which included an address that had been changed in the last six months. The six were given directions to the second stop on the tour, where we waited for almost an hour instead of being given directions to the first stop. The second stop, Safe House, was by far the best stop on the tour. The third stop on the tour was a mall food court in which we were given one pirogi each. The final stop on the tour included the fish course. The the dessert on the advertisement was not chocolate cake, but salmon jerky. Definitely a disappointment considering what was advertised. I do not fault the tour guide at all. She was delightful and informative about the city. However, the communication and the actual food experience was not what was promised (even not including the one course I missed because of the lack of communication about the start point).