A food tour here is a tour of a restaurant district rather than of a cuisine, and the operators who say so plainly are the ones worth booking. There is no single food tradition that belongs to these twenty-three blocks the way Cuban cooking belongs to Calle Ocho across the bay. What there is instead is an unusually dense strip of kitchens from a dozen countries, squeezed into a walkable grid, with a genuine and largely forgotten food history underneath it.
That history is Jewish before it is Latin American. What is generally recorded as Miami's first delicatessen opened on Washington Avenue at 15th Street in 1925, and by the end of the 1930s South Beach held a full set of Jewish institutions, including a synagogue at 301 Washington designed in 1936 by Henry Hohauser, one of the architects who gave this district its deco frontages. After the war, Jewish veterans and retirees from New York and the northeast arrived in numbers, and the delis on Collins had queues around the block. Most of that generation has gone and most of the delis with them, but it is why the food story of this island is older and stranger than the neon suggests.
What a tour actually walks you through today is Espanola Way, the 1925 Mediterranean-revival block where the tables sit in the middle of a pedestrian street; Lincoln Road and, more usefully, the side streets off it; and a stretch of Ocean Drive for the architecture rather than the cooking. The tastings tend to run Peruvian, Italian, Cuban, Argentine, Colombian and Spanish, five or six of them over two and a half to three hours, which adds up to a full meal.
The real value is less obvious than the food. On a strip where a sidewalk café can put an automatic twenty per cent on the bill and quote a special without a price, spending three hours with a guide who tells you what things cost on which block is genuinely useful. Most people come off a South Beach food walk eating better for the rest of the week, and that is worth more than the tastings.
The other thing these tours do well is combine food with the district's architecture, which is a natural pairing on an island where the two happened at the same time. A deco-and-food walk is the single most South Beach thing on the Viator shelf here, and the good ones are led by someone who can talk about Hohauser and eyebrow windows between courses.
