Cretan Food, Local Culture & Homemade Wine: a Food Tour like no other in Chania Crete!
- Stelios
- Feb 27
- 4 min read
Back in 2023 we released a brand new Food Tour in Chania Crete Greece. The spark came from our Beer Tour guests, that were asking for a lifetime experience that goes deeper, beyond the surface.
Our philosophy is not to copy anybody's tours or ideas, so we decided to create a brand new tour, out of scratch.
We spent around 7 months of driving around in Chania's countryside, in order to find the right places & local people. We wanted to be out of the beaten path & at the same time, to create an approachable tour that does not require extra skills: Eat & Crete Food Tour [non-touristy] in Chania Villages, was born.
the basic elements
Creating a food tour that it will be only focused in food, was not an option for us. Even though food is a big part of Crete's culture, it is also connected with nature, history, local stories, country's side villages & the local population that they're still producing high quality produces or they even find & harvest goods, directly from nature.
That was the frame for our new experience.
Food:
Crete is the core of the well-known worldwide Mediterranean Diet. The most healthy & tasty diet in the world. Even though we live in this food paradise, the majority of the local population, have changed their eating habits to fast & not so healthy choices. This fact, has a big impact on the food menus & ingredients that are offered to the visitors of our island.
The downtown food tours are mostly focused to street food. Finally, all these tours, end up going at the same spots & tasting the same foods.
What we did, was to uncover small, almost hidden café-taverns, that even locals don't know their existence. In these places, they are still using extra virgin olive oil, seasonal or wild foraged ingredients & herbs, owners have their own small gardens, animals or they are still cooking the old recipes.
Nature & villages:
The island of Crete and specially Chania, has a very reach flora. Only if you have the chance to experience, you'll have a full picture of Chania. Olive groves with ancient olive trees, grapevines, wild flowers, fruit & nut trees are everywhere.
We made the decision to run our Food Tour, at the outskirts of Chania's White Mountains range. This amazing low volume traffic route in nature with free range animals around, like goats & sheep's, creates a memorable experience.
The villages of Chania, just only 40-50 years ago were full of people & vibrant elementary schools. These villages, were the places that Cretan population used to stay instead of today's coast line. People working the earth and making their living, while their network of exchanging goods, made money of no big importance in everyday life.
False governmental policies, let these villages without infrastructure & finally forced the local population to abandon them.
Our aim is, by visiting some of these villages, to keep the memories from the past alive & to encourage their population to keep doing what they are still doing.
History, local stories & people:
You cannot run a tour in Crete without historical facts & local stories.
Chania have remains from different eras & different empires, starting from around 3.500 BC. Even though our food tour is not historical, just in case you love history, we can go deeper as we love history as well.
Local stories & traditions are more valuable when we hear them from villagers, that had the chance to live these experiences. Friendly people, unspoiled from the modern way of life, are ready to welcome us & whatever they have available like fruits, homemade cookies, wine or just having a chat using their body language.
These moments are just unforgettable.
Local homes & home made wines:
In our travels, we are curious to see, how a locals house looks from inside. We thought, that our guests might feel the same. So finding a local villager that would be interested in this idea while feeling comfortable to open his private space to us and to our guests, was a must.
We felt very lucky & happy when we found this person but we cannot describe our happiness when we realized that he is also a home made wine producer.
Finally we combined the visit to his place & a wine tasting session. Wine of different years comes directly from the old wooden barrels
This experience might be the core of our Eat & Crete Food Tour [non-touristy] in Chania Villages!
our core Values
We are trying to keep alive the old traditions through the eyes of our guests, while focusing on quality than quantity: home-made wine, distilled alcohol spirits, small garden & vegetables, virgin olive oil, fruit & nut trees, honey, eggs directly from the producers.
Additionally, we are also try to keep the old memories alive.
That was our bet, when we were designing our Eat & Crete Food Tour: to connect the Cretan food with the local population, nature & the small almost abandoned villages in one piece.
This tour is a five hours deep dive full of Cretan Gastronomy, Old School Village Culture & Homemade Wine!
It is a cultural immersion, not only delicious & informative but also a lifetime experience that you'll simply never forget, totally different than a downtown Chania touristy food tour.
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