The very first Downtown Santa Barbara Taco Tour
In 2021, Taste Santa Barbara Food Tours proudly launched the very first downtown Santa Barbara taco tour. Creating the very own guided taco trail tour that everyone can enjoy, 2020 changed the world forever. Restaurants were closed down immediately, of course food tours went along with that. People freaked, we all did. We didn’t know wtf was going on and where it was going to lead us.
After the 2nd shut down, when restaurants weren’t able to seat guests, we pivoted and created a to-go- food tour
During the first shut down, Taste viewed this as an opportunity to shift a lot of things with the business. Before shut down, Evan (our owner) had a very small baby and a 3 year old, she spent some time with the kids and then quickly jumped into making some business shifts. Getting to things that had been on the checklist to change for awhile, starting with a website & ticketing change. After that was done, we looked at how we could shift our tours and recreate them, creating new offerings and many more private tour options.
We started with reducing the group sizes from 16 to 6 max on all public tours. New partnerships, increasing the relationships with tasting locations. The downtown tour finally was able to start with the wine tasting.
While we were making changes, we realized there weren’t any taco tours. There was a Santa Barbara Taco Trail, but there weren’t any guided taco tours in Santa Barbara.
We started the tour with a lot of research. Research means, we were eating a lot of tacos. Out of all this taco and drink tasting, the downtown santa barbara taco tour was born. We created a guided taco tour of our very own curated taco trail. The tours focus is to highlight a bunch of different downtown & local taquerias. We are super excited and honored to be able to highlight these local tastings and serve all different types of tacos, taquitos, chips, salsa, drinks all in downtown Santa Barbara.
The tour visits both old and new taquerias, offering soft tacos, crunchy tacos, taquitos, a couple of alcohol options.
We explore downtown Santa Barbara visitng a host of different taquerias, newer restaurants created by local Santa Barbaraians like Yona Redz.
We love a good strawberry marg from our long time friends La Playa Azul.
So we thought, we don’t we go and hang out at Playa on our tours? So we did.
We love a good crunchy taco from Rudy’s and have since the 90’s, so why aren’t we visitng them? So, we are.
We have been in Santa Barbara for a very long time. Evan, our owner, since she was a kid. She has seen a lot of places come and go. We want to honor the downtown Taco scene as it is as special as the ones on Milpas. And we do encourage you to visit all the taquerias there, but we want to show you our taco trail. Our taco tour. Places we have come to love and want to share with you.
Join us for a lovely day of fun and tacos. Book your experience today.