Kingston Downtown Food Walking Tour & Tastings

Eat your way through six kitchens on four continents in under a mile and a half, all tucked behind the grey limestone walls and 1840s shopfronts of a downtown built as a garrison town. Step through the doors on this Secret Food Tours walk and the story shifts entirely, moving from Quebec to the Himalayas to South India without ever leaving downtown Kingston.The tour opens with a Montreal-style bagel, hand-rolled and honey-boiled before it ever meets the oven, from a bakery open just a few hours a day. From there it's steamed Himalayan dumplings, half vegetable and half chicken, from a family kitchen on Princess Street. Next comes a fried lentil doughnut sunk in South Indian sambar, a dish most visitors would never think to look for here. You'll taste extra virgin olive oil and small-batch balsamic poured side by side, so the difference between them is obvious rather than theoretical, and finish with a single scoop from an ice cream counter that has been making it in-house since 1986. One stop we keep to ourselves until you're standing outside its door.Your guide lives in Kingston. They'll point out which owner will talk your ear off about a grandmother's recipe, which door looks closed when the kitchen inside is wide open, and why a city of just 130,000 people supports this much cooking. Along the way, you'll hear how Queen's University reshaped the streets around it, why Kingston holds more Feast On certified restaurants than any other city in Ontario, and what a 19th-century market square still does for the people who cook here today.Left to your own devices, you'd likely walk past three of these six doors, and two of them barely read as restaurants from the pavement. Going with someone who eats here regularly is the whole difference