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It was a cloudy Sunday in Lyon. My husband and I emerged from the serpentine hallway of the flat we had rented with four other couples and headed, empty canvas tote bags slung over our shoulders, to La Croix Rousse, a farmer’s market that stretches for blocks. We filled our bags with Bresse chickens dribbling glorious electric yellow fat, milky white leeks, plump red tomatoes, miniature strawberries, and a veritable fortune in chanterelles. We hauled our loot back to a moderately well-equipped Airbnb kitchen and set to chopping vegetables, roasting meats, and preparing a feast that wasn’t the least bit French in description, but entirely French in sourcing.
We’re both professional chefs. It was our first trip to Lyon. Having ogled open-air markets from Tel Aviv to Kapa’a and salivated over ingredients too improbable and unwieldy to purchase while staying in hotels, we were finally able to indulge all our produce fantasies. For once, with many mouths to feed, we were not window shopping. How precious and unusual this experience was, we thought. “We never get to do this!” I exclaimed as we prepped, engaging with new ingredients instinctually, our hands digging into French abundance.
Turns out some companies are increasingly marketing this exact experience to consumers and simultaneously offering chefs hands-on discovery. In-depth travel with a chef is on the rise, from single operators running a handful of trips per year to media and travel companies organising hundreds with famous chefs. The team behind Roads and Kingdoms draws upon its experience producing TV shows with Anthony Bourdain, transforming it into group travel, and Terroir, which organises industry-focused trips, has opened these up to non-industry, food-obsessed guests, lusting for adventure.
Caroline Schiff at the souk
Thoroughly modern adventures
On her first trip to Morocco with the travel company Modern Adventure, pastry chef Caroline Schiff of NYC’s Gage and Tollner, describes an itinerary curated through her desires. “I wanted to do all the food tours and markets. I wanted to learn to make couscous and flatbread,” she says. Modern Adventure organised thoughtful excursions. “They could have taken us anywhere to make couscous, but they found a women’s co-op, and we saw how this benefits the local economy.” Her cooking tasks were light. Schiff demonstrated ras el hanout shortbread to guests after a spice workshop and then, at a food-growing hotel in the Atlas Mountains, was able to freely pick from its garden to prepare a meal. “It was about discovery for both me and the guests. Local guides that Modern Adventure facilitated were integral to these unique experiences we wouldn't have had access to if we just planned a trip independently,” says Schiff, who is also careful to note that she had no ancestral or experiential connection to Morocco, just an affinity.
“We created Modern Adventure to look through the lens of craft and go deeper into a destination,” says CEO and co-founder Luis Vargas. Modern Adventure sees itself as a platform to partner with makers and businesses and handles all the logistics of a hundred small food-focused group trips each year. Chefs lend their curiosity and propensity for community-building to the harmony of each trip. And who are these chefs? “You might have dined in their restaurant. There’s an intimacy in spending a week with them, building a relationship, learning and gaining access to things you normally wouldn’t. It’s one thing to get an impossible reservation to a restaurant, another to be met by the chef as a friend,” says Vargas.
Chefs’ travel costs are covered by trip fees, and chefs are also paid. Vargas notes: “It’s not an easy thing to be away from their restaurant for a week. We don’t want the chef to feel like they’re working. They’re not the local guide. We never want the chef to feel like they’re the chef of the trip.”
Harvesting in Morocco
Roads less travelled
“Chefs are a really compelling way to organise travel,” declares Nathan Thornburgh of the previously media-focused Roads and Kingdoms. “We had been partners in media and business with Tony [Bourdain] for years. When he killed himself, we were very deeply involved with video projects, the podcast, creative ventures with Tony, and lots of projects of his, with CNN and Parts Unknown. That all wound down in 2019 as we couldn’t replace his role in the business. And he was irreplaceable.”
At the onset of the pandemic, Thornburgh was in a Zoom call with José Andrés and Roads and Kingdom’s co-founder Matt Goulding. “In a very Jose way, he… kicked our asses into action,” says Thornburgh. Andres invested in the travel side of Roads and Kingdoms, dubbed the League of Travelers, and Thornburgh went to Asturias, Andres’ homeland for reconnaissance. That was part of the deal. “He would help us build this travel side [of R&K] but we would have to shine some light on this incredible place that he’s from.”
Now 5% of net proceeds from League of Travelers’ trips go to World Central Kitchen. “This is part of our DNA with José. These trips are a luxury. They’re expensive. They start at just under $10k USD per traveller per week. And under that umbrella, there’s an obligation. But we’re always on the lookout for more locally specific ways to get involved, making sure this project has good impact,” says Thornburgh. The League of Travelers mimics the experience of travelling with Bourdain to produce a TV show. “There’s kind of a production mentality. We’re looking for the best characters and best storylines. We’re not creating an episode for TV but for the experience of the people coming with us.”
Roads and Kingdoms runs a modest 12 to 15 trips per year. Each of these is led by a local guide and a host, typically a chef like Katie Parla or Andy Ricker. “But it’s not about Andy coming in and being like ‘Where is the nam pla in Asturias?’ He’s getting into the shoes of the traveller,” says Thornburgh. “There’s interplay [between the local guide and chef] but the trip is driven by the guide’s local pride.” There’s also the opportunity for the chef to comment on how local issues are seen globally, as Thornburgh explains, “Like listen, this is the same story we’re seeing in Southeast Asia or here is how Japan is dealing with pressures from their food supply chain… that’s an interesting conversation to have with guests who are travelling with us in Italy or Spain.”
Andy Ricker in Asturias. Photo by Michael Magers
Learning journeys
Terroir Symposium is well-known in North America for bringing restaurant industry workers and Canadian farmers and producers together annually for panels and dinners that culminate in a wild cookout. I mean ‘wild’ literally. I’ve found myself standing in the wilderness wondering how I came to be watching a fire cook a turkey another Terroir chef hunted earlier that day. Terroir’s Berlin-based founder Arlene Stein and Toronto-based Renee Lalonde replicate the symposium in smaller formats in Europe and Canada, creating pockets of gastro-diplomacy-inclined communities.
Stein and Lalonde organise “learning journeys” to destinations like Newfoundland and Castello di Potentino. Bringing chefs and producers together, they use these trips to change food policy. In 2015, local Newfoundland fishermen were barred from selling their catch to local consumers or restaurants – it was all being processed and sent to Japan and Europe. “We wanted to create a program to bring awareness and change policy, so we gathered a group of chefs and journalists, who then broke the news in the Globe and Mail of what was impacting fisher unions in Newfoundland,” says Stein.
Terroir runs some of the least expensive culinary trips I’ve encountered in this article’s research. “We want to keep trips accessible. We’re not making money off them. What we care about is people looking at food systems,” says Stein. “The commonality amongst attendees [both invited chefs and paying guests] is that there are people who care about the ethics of food systems and the culture of where food comes from.”
Chefs who travel with Terroir, like Modern Adventure, are asked to cook minimally. “When we went to Milan, we asked everyone to bring an ingredient for pizza. Chef Amanda Cohen brought seasoning from America, and in Italy, sliced little rounds of carrots, seasoned them and they cooked up and looked like pepperoni. It was so Dirt Candy and easy for her,” says Lalonde. “We don’t want to burden anyone and we want them to have a good time along with whoever bought a ticket,” adds Stein. I’ll be a travelling chef with Terroir to Adiyaman, Turkey this year and as a chef who works primarily with Hawaiian food, everyone is probably going to end up dining on Turkish-Hawaiian huli huli goat.
Mushroom pride at Terroir. Photo by Ash Naylor
Off-grid cooking
Some chefs have taken chef-driven travel into their own hands, while still running their own restaurants. I catch up with chef Jeff Michaud as he is rolling out sheets of pasta for francobolli and doppio ravioli, to be stuffed with buffalo milk mozzarella and eggplant. “People are on vacation, so I’m filling in,” he laughs.
Michaud splits his energy between Osteria in Philadelphia and La Via Gaia, the travel company he owns with his wife, Claudia. The Michauds are La Via Gaia’s only operators. “I go on every trip,” says Michaud. His wife organises the itineraries and takes care of all communication. When Michaud opened Osteria in 2007, he had just gotten back from a long stint in Italy and, “everyone kept asking – what are your secret places to go?” A few years later, he found himself driving a nine-seat passenger van around Bergamo, filled with guests and, “I fell in love with it.” In 2018, they started bringing along other chef friends of Michaud’s and now they partner with a chef on every trip. “My name is only so big. But now I can promote the trip through my network and theirs.”
Michaud laughs and shouts joyfully. “We don’t do anything touristy. We are off the grid. In Bergamo, we go up to the mountains with my cheesemaker friend, to his hydroelectric farmhouse and we’ll catch wild trout in his pond. We forage for wild herbs and if I teach a cooking class, everyone is cooking together. We go to my mother-in-law’s house at the foothill of the Alps and then cook rabbit that her brother raises. Another friend owns the Michelin-starred LoRo, and we’ll do a cooking class there. We have access to areas that are difficult for people to access.”
The Michauds run six to eight trips of 14 to 16 guests to Northern and Central Italy, soon to be expanding in the South. Michaud sees La Via Gaia as a natural extension of cheffing. “In the restaurant business, you love exposing people to stuff they never had before. Italy is not just spaghetti and meatballs. I love seeing people’s faces, it’s like when they come to Osteria, have the chicken liver rigatoni for the first time and they say, ‘I didn’t know it would be so good.’”
Scenes at Terroir Castello di Potentino. Photo by Ash Naylor
Chef Angela Cicala’s travel company started in much the same fashion. She and her husband, Joe Cicala (of Cicala in Philadelphia) wanted to share their version of Italy with their restaurant guests and simultaneously source from Italian vendors. “I started offering culinary tours in Italy in 2017. Once we began cooking together, we continued to go back to Italy every year to source local products in remote areas. We would do everything from visiting shepherd’s huts to buy cheese, truffle hunting with dogs in the woods, harvesting olives, and seeking out local artists to purchase hand-painted plates.”
Angela acknowledges that while an Italian chef can offer guests a different, more in-depth version of Italy, chefs in general speak a different vocabulary. “I believe if you have a strong emotional connection to a place, regardless of you being from that place, your passion for the culture will become contagious.”
Seeing the world through a chef’s eyes is a more dynamic way to travel. Chefs are leaders, capable of building communities within and outside of their own kitchens. Chefs now also have a broader horizon professionally, beyond operating restaurants, developing retail products, appearing on shows, or writing cookbooks. When travel is organised around a chef’s story rather than a destination’s most famous sites or even its restaurants, we have a new way to see the world that is never stagnant and cannot be replicated.
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