Taste Detours: A Moveable Feast

By Lynn Broughton from Taste Detours

#CollaborationNation. Not just one of our hashtags, it’s the frameworkwithin which we operate Taste Detours and the very essence of this city.

Guelph takes pride in its independence, and buzzes with individuality. We’ve got a frequency of our very own and a vibrancy like no other. Yet we also promote and support each other beautifully; somehow united within this fiercely independent realm.

The businesses we partner with are passionately local. This becomes evident when we get a taste of the great care with which they source their goods and the flair with which they present it. They are the heart and soul of our core. So when you join us on a tour, you get a chance to learn their stories — what got them inspired and what keeps them dedicated to being the true flavour of this town.

Food tours essentially unwrap (or uncork!) a region by offering access to its ingredients. Food — good, fresh, local — comes naturally to us. We have very deep agricultural roots; roots from a soil that holds both our old stories and a strong instinct to flourish. This forms perhaps the most significant part of our history; indeed food was the very idea behind

Taste Detours // Alex Vander Vlugt

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the founding of this town. These are the roots that we attempt to nurture, and retell. So our deliciousness is not only a matter of Guelph heritage and lore, it’s a tasty fact.

Taste Detours preserves this through storytelling. We offer lesser-known bits of history along our routes and glimpse into the past to consider how we’ve been shaped by it, how it might influence us today, and likely will tomorrow. We walk the very streets where farmers traded their crops and their cattle; where ambitious immigrants set up new shops and restaurants; where visionaries designed streets, a town, an imagined life for the growing populace. Much of this still exists today, with a modern twist. We’re able to make the experience of a food tour memorable in a unique and personal way by immersing you in these stories and revealing the very heart of Guelph.

Breaking bread and sharing a table is a distinctly human experience. Everybody eats, wherever they go. Savour the places that the locals like to frequent and you’ll end up tapping into our particular culture of food. Plus, moving from one scrumptious place to another gives you not only a chance to experience all of the above, you may just feel justified in eating all that food!

We’re quite literally a movement. A moveable feast.

Wherever we grow as a business, we want to remain authentic. To be the ones to offer that extra insight or bit of background to a place. To truly know the people in the shops, the restaurants, on the streets — their passions, their stories, what makes them tick.

We’re feasting on that connection between the past and present via the people, the locales and the tastes, and we’re telling Guelph stories through food and drink — step bite step.

Take your buds (and your tastebuds) on a Taste Detours – get all the details at tastedetours.ca