The resorts try “to replicate the street food experiences in the context of the hotel,” Anne says. “But they aren’t quite authentic.” The flavors are significantly toned down. The curry goat isn’t that spicy. Hotels also rarely explain to guests the historical underpinnings of dishes, like how many of them are the provenance of enslaved people who had to be resourceful in order to feed themselves.
Honolulu-based Lanai Tabura, who runs Aloha Plate Food Tours, feels he is actively fighting against decades of misrepresentation of his cuisine.
He says that 95 percent of the people who come on his tour don’t understand what Hawaiian and Hawaiian-style food really are. He points to all the fast casual poke restaurants and chains like L&L Hawaiian Barbecue that have propagated a very toned-down version of the cuisine. During his tours, he is constantly quizzing his guests about the food history of Hawaii: how ingredients like rice and spam aren’t actually Hawaiian, and how dishes like malasadas and tempura found their way to the island.
In general, he says, his guests are open-minded—they are well traveled, cultured, and up for anything.
But they have certain expectations, like poke and spam musubi. Some have asked Tabura if they’ll be attending a luau. “I say no one is having a party,” he says. “I try to keep it as real as possible.”
The majority of guides interviewed said their customers are primarily white and western, and, even if unintentionally, bring certain biases.
Jacqueline Orange runs tours of Harlem combining food, culture, and history.
GettyRubio recalls hosting a group from Australia, who was opening a quesadilla restaurant in Perth and doing research in Mexico. She took them to eat a quesadilla. “They were like, ‘What is this?’" she recalls. "And I was like, ‘This is a quesadilla,’ and they were like, ‘No.’ They had never tried a real quesadilla.”
Jacqueline Orange, who runs Taste Harlem, a tour that combines food with culture and history, said she was told by a member of one of her tour groups: “Oh, my parents are so nervous I was coming to Harlem, because they think they are going to get killed if they come up here.”
Even among those who have read up on restaurants in Harlem before taking the tour, Orange says many are only interested in those few spots that have gotten outsized attention in the media. “People are like, ‘I gotta go to Sylvia’s,’” a decades-old soul food institution. “There are places other than Sylvia’s. We could get a soul food experience somewhere else. Isn’t a food tour about exploring the uniqueness of places?”
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For Food Tour Guides, Requests to "Eat Like a Local" Are Complicated - Condé Nast Traveler
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