The Tenement Museum’s food tours are back on the Lower East Side after a four-year hiatus
For decades, the Tenement Museum has been dedicated to telling stories of New York City’s immigrants, migrants, and refugees. And an important part of understanding that story is through food.
The museum used to host a popular series of food tours, but tours were canceled amid the pandemic. Now, after a four-year hiatus, the Tenement Museum’s popular walking tour Foods of the Lower East Side is back, exploring 150 years of immigrant cuisine.
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The food tour covers 10 stops at historic neighborhood sites with five tastings from local Lower East Side vendors, offering diverse cuisines from Eastern Europe to Italy and Puerto Rico. All-age tours are available on Saturdays for $55/person. Expect a half-mile walk over the course of 90 minutes.
Tour stops include:
- Cafe Katja, an Austrian restaurant where visitors are treated to pretzels with traditional spreads and beers
- Que Chevere, a Puerto Rican restaurant serving tostone cups with pulled pork or rice and beans
- Pickle Guys, the last remaining pickle vendor in a neighborhood that was once famous as a producer of pickled foods
- Essex Olive and Spice offers olive oils from the owner’s family olive grove in Morocco
- Chinatown Ice Cream Factory within Essex Market, a family-run business and local favorite. At Essex Market, guides will also dig into the space, which was once a hub for independent pushcart peddlers and open-air markets made up of immigrants.
“So much of our city’s immigrant history can be understood through the diverse culinary traditions that families have passed down over generations,” Kathryn Lloyd, the museum’s vice president of programs and interpretation, said in a press release. “From the 19th century to today, immigrants and migrants on the Lower East Side have created food businesses that support their communities and change the nation’s palate.”
Tours explore how tenement residents preserved and adapted traditions from their home states and countries, all while adapting to changing demographics in the neighborhood. On the walk, you’ll also learn how generations of street vendors, restaurateurs, home cooks, and grocers sustained communities while shaping wider ideas of American cuisine and identity.
While snacking on pickles, pretzels, and ice cream, tour guides will talk about the Lower East Side’s multilayered history as a hub for immigrant cuisines—from its status as the city’s first non-English speaking community, Kleindeutschland, to its position on the front lines of the early 20th century push to “Americanize” immigrant foods through school lunch menus.
While tours in April and May are mostly sold out, bookings are still available later in the summer.
