Vancouver’s Granville Market Food Tour: A Must-Stop While Visiting
Foodies visiting Vancouver BC need to make sure that they are finding time on their itinerary to visit Granville Island. This is a foodie paradise where you can easily get lost on your own and spend a day exploring the food market and shops. Or do like we did and sign up for the Granville Market food tour Vancouver.
History of Granville Island Vancouver
Since 1979 Granville Island has been dazzling locals and tourist alike with an array of food, shopping and entertainment options. Prior to the evolution into a vibrant market, it had been an industrial section of the city.
For us it was a typical rainy day in British Columbia when we took the tour, but they did a good job of keeping us dry as we went from building to building.
Granville Market Food Tour Vancouver
The tour offered us a fantastic sampling of the foods available, over 10 different vendors and over 20 samples. Our tour started at 10:30AM, so we had planned to do the tour, and then figure out our favorite spots and grab lunch. We actually skipped lunch afterwards because we were all too full from all the samples that were included.
Lydia, our tour guide did a good job of walking you through the tour, providing us plenty of samples. We started with a chai latte from the Granville Island Tea Company, winding up with the world famous Lee’s Donut for a honey dipped glazed donut with plenty in between. You get to sample a full meal’s worth of food as you stroll the market.
There are several food highlights for us from the two hour tour. The Bread Affair provides you with a couple of different breads to sample, plus a chance to see all the other deliciousness they have available in the display case. After the tour, we had to return and check out the Thicc Choco Lava Butter Cookies.
Goat cheese is a running joke at our house after some negative experiences a few years ago. But there is nothing negative to say about the happy days unripened fresh goat cheese with preservatory blueberry bourbon preserves available from Benton Brothers.
We’re not super big fans of salmon in our household. While that opinion didn’t necessarily change, we remained brave and tried both cold and smoked salmon from Longliner Seafood.
There are several opportunities for proteins to help fill you up. But the best part of the tour were the sweets with several dessert opportunities to satisfy your sweet tooth throughout.
Savory & Sweet
Take a trip around the world with these four desserts. First stop France for some delightful salted caramel macarons from Bon Macaron. From there, skip over to Belgium to sample the amazing chocolates offered by ChocolaTas.
Next head down under for an Australian take on lemon squares. The difference between a regular lemon square and Australian one is a hint of coconut in the ingredients plus a fudgier taste. It works, so well in fact that we went back after the tour to buy more.
The finale of the tour is a cup of coffee from JJ Bean and the aforementioned Lee’s Donuts. Lee’s has been at the market since it started, and if you plan to try them, you can expect to wait in a line – especially on a weekend. Lee’s Donuts has some tasty treats, and have only seen their reputation grow since being featured on Netflix’s show Breakfast, Lunch & Dinner.
Our host for the Granville Island Market Tour was Lydia. She is a Vancouver native, and owns a bakery Creme de la Crumb in downtown Vancouver. She did a great job of engaging with everyone on the tour, had some great back stories on some of the places we visited and was a very good storyteller.
Planning Your Visit
Getting to Granville Island is pretty easy. You can get there via public transit bus, the False Creek Ferry offers service via boat, and of course you can taxi or Uber. You can also drive if you have a rental car, but it looked to us like parking might be hard to find. We chose to take an Uber from downtown.
Should you choose this experience, come hungry. That sounds silly to say, since this is a food tour. But you are just not sure how much you’ll get to sample or what those sample sizes will be on some food tours. You will get plenty of food on this tour along with discounts to shop at all of the participating vendors, making this a good value especially if you shop and pick up souvenirs while you visit.
This was a great way to sample a lot of different types of food, and probably won’t be our last food tour. Have you visited Granville Island? Let us know your favorite vendor. Or if you have another tour you think we need to try, let us know!
