Hong Kong Foodie Tours and Pekoe and Petals Tea Tasting Experiences
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Inside Hong Kong Foodie Tours, the Owner, the Guides, and How to Book
Foreword by Jamie
Hong Kong Foodie Tours and Pekoe and Petals Tea Tasting Experiences
Food Tours in Hong Kong
Such an interesting one because I have always thought it to be a niche market, can you be a Private Tour Company and offer Food Tours and yes you can or should you be a Food Tour Company that offers private cultural Tours as well, that is the question and I will deal with that later.
Hong Kong has never been short of people who will tell you they know where to eat. What it has always been short of is a food tour company that treats the subject as a craft rather than a bolt on. Plenty of private guides, myself included over the years, will take guests for a quick lunch. That is not the same thing as building a business around six family restaurants in one neighbourhood, keeping those relationships intact for a decade and a half, training a team of eager local guides, and then adding a serious tea room on top. That is what Cecilia Leung did, and she started in 2011, not long after I ran my own first private tour on 4th April 2011.
I have met Cecilia a number of times. We have always got on. She found a gap in the market that most of us could see and then actually filled it, which is a rarer habit than people think. She still leads a great many of the tours herself. Guests say so on the reviews, year after year, and that matters. Founders who vanish into an office after year 3 and leave a different sort of company behind. This one still has her fingerprints on the wonton broth.
A founder who actually does the tours
Cecilia was born and raised in Hong Kong, then spent years working and living in the United States, Japan and Singapore. Before the tours there was a proper corporate life: management consulting, finance, media, and running online operations for a large e-commerce business in the region. That background shows. The calendars work. The ticket emails arrive. The meeting point instructions are clear. The shops are ready. You do not get that level of tightness from enthusiasm alone.
She speaks fluent Cantonese and English, with conversational French, Italian, Japanese and Mandarin in the kitbag, which is useful when a table of guests starts asking why a particular stall still does things the old way. She has travelled through more than 30 countries and has the unfashionable habit of asking locals where they actually eat rather than where the brochure says they eat. In 2011 she brought that habit home. Culinary tourism in Hong Kong was thin on the ground and still is. Food-only walking tours were thinner. She and her sister Silvana, who is Director of Operations, put the company on the street as Hong Kong Foodie Tours.
Silvana is not a footnote. Operations in this trade is the unglamorous half of the work: stallholders, wet weather, a guest who booked the wrong date, a shop that suddenly closes for a funeral, a Sunday request that is not on the public calendar. Cecilia gets the public credit, fairly, because she is the face and she still guides. Silvana is why the face can keep smiling at 9am in Sham Shui Po.
Selected routes have had Hong Kong Tourism Board support through the New Tour Product Development Scheme. Those are dull sentences. They are also the difference between a pleasant morning and a company that can still be standing in 2026.
Why foodie tours rose, and why they still feel like a niche
In Britain, the United States, Australia, Canada and a fair slice of Europe, food walking tours went from oddity to default city break activity in about 15 years. London, Melbourne, New York, Lisbon, Mexico City: the pattern is the same. Guests arrived tired of coach loops and wanted a neighbourhood, a plate, and a person who could explain both. Instagram made the plate visible. Post 2008 and then post-Covid travel made the small group feel safer than a 40-seat bus. English-speaking travellers in particular like a structured tasting because it removes the fear of pointing at the wrong thing and getting a lecture, or a bill.
Hong Kong should have been first in the queue. The city is organised around eating. Office workers argue about noodles the way other cities argue about football. And yet a company that basically just offers food tours is still uncommon here. Plenty of private tour operators will add a food morning if you ask. Very few have built the whole business around it.
There are reasons, and they are not mysterious.
A generalist itinerary can skip a closed stall. A food tour cannot. You need six relationships that survive rain, rent rises, and the owner’s cousin taking over.
I know from Cecilia just how complex co-ordinating food are not to mention an insane amount of paperwork and keeping track of restaurant invoices and such
Guests now arrive with a list of allergies that would have baffled a dai pai dong in 1995. Some routes simply cannot swap plates. That limits the market.
Food tours look easy from the outside. Anyone who has kept the same roast meat shop happy for 15 years knows they are not.
Many visitors still believe they can just wander and eat well. Sometimes they can. Often they eat the tourist set and miss the point.
So the category feels niche even as it grows. That is useful for Cecilia. The guests who book her are not looking for a snack on the way to a viewpoint. They have come to eat on purpose.
The food tours on offer, in useful detail
Prices below are the public ticket prices at the time of writing. Always confirm on the site before you pay, because shops and calendars move. I have given a rough US$ figure at about HK$7.8 to US$1 so overseas readers can think in both.
Central and Sheung Wan Foodie Tour
This is the signature Island walk and the sensible first booking for a visitor who has never eaten properly in Hong Kong.
About 3 hours 30 minutes
Starts 2:15pm, Tuesdays to Saturdays
Grown-up Foodies (15+): HK$770 (about US$99)
Young Foodies (5 to 14): HK$570 (about US$73)
Six tasting stops, all included
Maximum 12 guests, minimum 2
Route about 2km, some steps and gentle slopes
English-speaking Foodie Guide and a printed booklet
Typical plates, and these do change: wonton noodles and a serious broth, roast meat, a cold juice when the afternoon gets heavy, traditional preserved fruits, dim sum, and a tart that has not been sitting under a lamp since breakfast. You also walk a stretch of old open market that will not be there forever, which is the sort of detail that dates a city faster than any skyline. Guides talk architecture and the odd historical name without turning the afternoon into a lecture. First-time visitors do well on this one. So do people who think they already know Central and have only ever eaten in Soho.
Sham Shui Po Foodie Tour
If I am steering a guest who wants Kowloon rather than the Island business streets, this is the one I talk about first. Sham Shui Po still behaves like a working district. That is the point.
About 3 hours 30 minutes
9am starts, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays
Same ticket prices as Central: HK$770 / about US$99 adults, HK$570 / about US$73 for ages 5 to 14
Six stops, all included
Maximum 8 guests
About 2km, mostly flat
Booklet and licensed English-speaking guide
A typical morning, subject to the usual shop level changes: a cha chaan teng breakfast bun and tea, steamed rice rolls where you mix your own sauce, fresh soy milk or tofu fa from a soy specialist, cookies from a bakery that has no interest in being fashionable, handmade egg noodles at a family shop that has won more praise than it has ever advertised, and three styles of northern dumpling at the end. Between plates you get the district: working-class mornings, old streets that escaped the worst of the redevelopment wave, and the sort of shops professional cooks actually use.
That 9am start is the point of the district. Sham Shui Po does not perform breakfast for visitors. It just has breakfast, and the walk puts you in the middle of it while the steam is still coming off the bun. You finish full and still have the afternoon.
Temple Street Night Foodie Tour
Evenings are where Hong Kong stops pretending to be a tidy city. This route was rebuilt and put back on the calendar from 13th November 2025, Mondays and Thursdays at 7pm. Private evenings are available if the public dates do not fit.
About 3 hours
Grown-up Foodies: HK$850 (about US$109)
Young Foodies: HK$570 (about US$73)
Six stops, all included
About 8 guests
About 2km, mostly flat
You eat the night city rather than look at it from a taxi. Ice cream from a nut specialist, the street snack that sorts tourists from locals, curry fish balls with a proper explanation of what a good ball should feel like, a numbingly spicy egg and beef sandwich in a cha chaan teng, then a dai pai dong style stretch: Thai basil clams instead of the black bean cliché, salt and pepper squid in a light batter, sweet and sour pork made with fresh pineapple, and egg puffs off the iron at the end. The walk sits in that belt from sneaker streets and ladies’ market energy across to Temple Street itself: hawkers, fortune tellers, the old night-time economy.
This is the night city, not a viewing platform. Neon, stall oil, a queue that is not for you until your guide makes it for you, and a plate you would not have ordered on your own. That is the job. No substitute tastings for special diets on this one. Read that twice before you book if someone in the party cannot eat seafood or wheat.
Tai Po Market Foodie Tour
This is the New Territories option and the most restless of the set. Tai Po was a market town before it was a new town of some 300,000 people, and the tour treats that history as something you can still taste.
About 4 hours
3pm on weekdays, by request
Price on enquiry through the ticket desk
Six stops, all included
Maximum 12 guests
About 2km, mostly flat
Dishes lean local and a bit braver: rice rolls made to order, handmade Chinese candies, snake soup in season, seafood at an indoor dai pai dong, a proper local dessert shop, and beef brisket noodles in a clear broth from a specialist. Hong Kong Tourism Board backed this route in the New Tour Product Development Scheme years ago, which tells you it was never a copy of the Island walk. It is the booking for guests who have already done Central and want the train ride north to mean something.
Hong Kong Local Craft Beer Tour
This one is on the books but currently suspended. Behind-the-scenes brewery country, industrial neighbourhoods, a dozen local pours, snacks and lunch, private transport. Worth asking about if you are planning a private group and the calendar has opened again. I would not build a trip around it until the ticket desk says it is live.
Private groups, and the shape of the business
Cecilia already offers private group departures. You can buy out one of the public routes so the walk is just your lot, or you can ask for a customised foodie tour for families, friends and couples, tailored for groups of up to 8, including private kitchens and dining clubs when the brief needs it. Existing routes can be tweaked for an extra fee. Corporate days, reunions and wedding parties are all in the mix. Group sizes on the public walks stay as published. If someone wants the party larger or smaller than the page says, they ask, and she answers case by case. That is the grown-up way to run a ticket desk.
What she has not done, and I mention this only as an observation from my side of the fence, is turn the whole diary into one-party private tours of the sort some of us built our businesses around. The engine is still the scheduled small-group walk. Private is available. Private is not the centre of gravity. That is her decision, not an accident. She is a very sharp operator. She a lot of knowledge of the inside workings of an OTA, so she has seen the supermarket end of the trade from the inside, not just complained about it from the pavement. When a founder has sat on both stools, you can assume the public calendar is there because the numbers and the brand work that way, not because nobody suggested anything else.
There is a wider pattern here, and it is not only Hong Kong. Private tour companies add food tours all the time. Food tour companies almost never become all-day cultural operators. People treat that as a puzzle. It is not. They are two different purchases.
A food tour is a ticketed plate sequence. Three to 3.5 hours, 6 shops, start time on a calendar, tastings in the price. The route is the product. A private cultural day is 6 or 8 hours. The itinerary moves with the weather and the guest. The guide is the product. You can drop lunch onto a cultural day. You cannot honestly stretch a food walk to 8 hours without padding it with viewpoints and extra streets, at which point it is no longer a food tour and it is a fairly thin city tour.
The stomach is a clock. Six serious tastings is a meal with a plot. After that you are not eating, you are filling time. Culture already belongs on a food walk, in the 8 minutes between stools: why this stall still does it the old way, which market will not be there in 5 years, who used to live on that slope. That is seasoning. It is not a sightseeing stop. Add Victoria Peak in the middle of Sham Shui Po and you have watered down the thing the guest paid for.
From my side of the inbox the booking pattern has been consistent since 2011. The people who take a food tour are usually in Hong Kong for 2 days or more. They give one of those days, or a clear piece of one day, to eating on purpose, even when the walk itself is only about 3 hours. The other day they want the city. On a cultural day those same guests often do not want to stop for lunch at all. They would rather keep the hours and get their money’s worth of the place. That sounds rude until you have stood at a table watching the clock eat the afternoon. It is not rudeness. It is a different job and frnakly eating at well over 1,000+ restaurants here has not made me a foodie, a food expert or a food guru that can deconstruct a bowl of wonton noodles!
So the common model worldwide is the one that looks lopsided from the outside. Generalists bolt food onto a day they already sell. Specialists keep the short product sharp, sell a private buyout of the same walk when a family wants the route to themselves, and leave the 8 hour city day to the people whose whole offerring is that day. Cecilia’s private offer sits in that first box: your group, her food routes, or a custom food walk for up to 8. It does not read like a solo operator’s diary, and it should not. If you want the tour to be private, write to the ticket desk and say so. Do not expect the website to sell Hong Kong by the hour with a snack in the middle. She knows exactly what animal she is running
Pekoe and Petals, and the tea tasting Cecilia actually teaches
This is the second company, and it is not a souvenir trolley parked at the end of a food walk. Pekoe and Petals is Cecilia’s artisanal tea brand: loose-leaf teas from fresh greens through white peony and aged pu’er, tea cakes, and teaware that is meant to be used, gaiwans, zisha pots, ceramic pots. No artificial flavours, no perfume dumped into the leaf. Free shipping inside Hong Kong above HK$400, and above HK$780 heading overseas, with United States shipments suspended at the time of writing. (if you want to purchase some tea)
The public tasting sits on both sites.
Tea Tasting and Brewing Experience
About 1 hour 30 minutes
Grown up tea enthusiasts (15+): HK$420 (about US$54)
Young tea enthusiasts (5 to 14): HK$260 (about US$33)
Two to 6 guests
Three teas, light snacks, and a guided session on how to brew with a gaiwan
The session is held at the Pekoe and Petals studio. The studio changed premises at the end of August 2026, so ignore any old Wan Chai address still sitting on a third-party booking page. The exact meeting point is sent with the booking confirmation. If you are unsure before you travel, WhatsApp +852 9223 7466 and ask. Theme workshops and private tea gatherings are available if a family or a small office wants the room for themselves.
Cecilia is not play-acting this. She is a Hong Kong Tea Association tutor, an intermediate tea artisan, a senior tea taster and a senior tea maker, and she still sits the session herself often enough that reviews name her.
I should be honest here, because I always am on this subject. I do not drink tea. Not English tea, not Chinese tea, not the polite sip that is supposed to keep the peace at a dim sum table. One sip as a child, that was enough, and I have been an unapologetic coffee man ever since. An Englishman who will not drink tea is a social inconvenience in two cultures at once. That is precisely why I send tea-curious guests to Cecilia rather than pretending I can talk about a gaiwan. You cannot teach a craft you have spent 60-odd years avoiding. She has not avoided it. She built a second company out of it.
The guide crew, which is the real product
Charismatic founders get the interviews. Guests remember the person who walked them from the MTR exit to the first stool. Cecilia’s choice of guides is a large part of why the reviews stay high. The public team page lists, alongside Cecilia and Silvana:
Carrie, Foodie Guide
Ed, Foodie Guide
Yammy, Foodie Guide
Clifford, Foodie Guide
Lilian, Foodie Guide
Fennie, Foodie Guide
Amy, Digital Marketing Lead
Recent guest notes keep repeating the same names, which is what you want. Carrie on a Sham Shui Po morning. Ed through Central and Sheung Wan. Cecilia on a private day or in the tea room. Repeat guests say the walk does not go stale, which is a harder trick than a first-timer raving about a pineapple bun. All guides are Hong Kong locals. They talk living here, not reciting a script about living here. That distinction is obvious within 10 minutes.
They do not publish the restaurant list in advance. I like that. It protects the shops from being mobbed without a guide, and it stops the tour turning into a checklist people try to knock off alone the next morning. You are paying for the introductions and the order of dishes, not for a PDF file
What the reviews actually say, without the fluff
On Tripadvisor the company sits at 4.9 out of 5 from roughly 1,400 reviews, and ranks inside the top 10 Food and Drink experiences in Hong Kong depending on the week. The split is brutally one-sided: the great bulk are 5-star notes. Tripadvisor Hall of Fame in 2018 and 2019, Travelers’ Choice in 2019. Older press quotes do not tell you whether the wonton shop is still good in 2026. The current reviews do.
The pattern in those reviews is consistent.
Cecilia still guides, including private dates and last-minute Sunday requests that are not on the public grid
Portions are not polite nibbles. Guests finish full and say so
The history talk is enough to make the streets make sense and short enough that nobody misses the next plate
Repeat visitors book a second neighbourhood rather than repeating the same loop
The tea hour works for complete beginners, tea lovers and for people who already own a gaiwan
That last point is the Pekoe and Petals test. A tourist tea show is easy. A short class that leaves an 11-year-old and a parent both willing to brew at home is a different product.
Book directly through her site, not the OTA supermarket
Like every serious tour company in this city, Cecilia would much rather you booked through her own websites than through an OTA such as Viator or GetYourGuide. I say the same thing about every operator I respect, and I will keep saying it.
She is not naive about that world. She a lot of knowledge about the OTAs, (such as Viator) which is more than most of us can claim. She knows how those platforms sell, how they take their slice, and how a special request turns into a dropdown box. That is precisely why the direct path is worth taking. Dates stay cleaner. A Sunday Sham Shui Po favour, a tea hour timed after a food walk, a Temple Street night for your family rather than a seat on a public Monday: those conversations happen on WhatsApp with her desk, not with a call centre in another time zone.
The OTA cut would otherwise stay with the people who built the route and with the family shops that feed you. Use the platforms if you must, for points or for a refund policy you already understand. If you have a choice, go direct. She set the business up in 2011 to run it herself. The site is the front door.
How I would actually put this into a Hong Kong stay
A practical stack, not a fantasy itinerary:
Morning 1: Sham Shui Po Foodie Tour at 9am. Empty stomach. Comfortable shoes. Cash in a pocket for anything you fall in love with at the end.
Afternoon 2: Central and Sheung Wan if the group still has the legs, or keep the Island walk for guests who prefer a later start.
One evening: Temple Street Night Foodie Tour. Do not eat a hotel dinner first.
A quieter hour: Tea Tasting and Brewing with Pekoe and Petals, ideally not immediately after the night walk. Tea after a heavy dinner is traditional. Tea after a heavy dinner when you are already horizontal is wasted.
Families with children aged 5 to 14 have a youth ticket on the main walks and the tea hour. Under 5s are a conversation with the desk, not an assumption.
I do not run food tours. I never did, on purpose. Health is part of it. Expertise is the larger part. Eating in 1,000+-odd Chinese restaurants since 1972 does not make me a food guide any more than owning a kettle makes me a tea teacher. Cecilia specialises. Specialists are who you should pay when the subject is the point of the day.
Full contact details
Hong Kong Foodie Tours
Web: www.hongkongfoodietours.com
Bookings: tickets@hongkongfoodietours.com
General: info@hongkongfoodietours.com
Media: media@hongkongfoodietours.com
Phone and WhatsApp: +852 9223 7466
Instagram: hongkongfoodtours
Pekoe and Petals
Web: www.pekoeandpetalstea.com
Tea Tasting and Brewing can also be booked via the Foodie Tours tea page
Studio: new premises from the end of August 2026. Address comes with the booking confirmation, or WhatsApp +852 9223 7466 before you set out.
Gift cards exist on the Foodie Tours site if you are sending someone to Hong Kong and want to give them a morning rather than another fridge magnet.
A last thought out of left field
The great tour companies in Hong Kong are still founder businesses. That is not nostalgia. It is an observation after a long time watching who lasts. The ones that hold their reviews are the ones where the person who named the company can still be found on the pavement, adjusting a route because a guest’s mother wants roast goose recommendations and the public script did not include that paragraph. Cecilia is that sort of operator. She spotted a niche in 2011, hired a team that can carry the same standard when she is in the tea room rather than Sham Shui Po, and kept the restaurants on side long enough that the product still tastes like Hong Kong rather than like a tour of Hong Kong.
If you are coming here to eat, book her. If you are coming here to understand why Hong Kongers talk about lunch the way other people talk about the weather, book her twice, different neighbourhoods, and leave a gap for a gaiwan.
So there you go
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Go here for the Hong Kong Michelin Restaurant Guide which includes the Bib Gourmand Category
I do not do Food Tours in Hong Kong but I know people that do!
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The information above can be shown to restaurant managers in Hong Kong if you are intolerant to gluten and nuts,
I do not do food tours as mentioned above, I have very specific reasons and part of it is that I do not speak Cantonese or write Chinese, I am from Yorkshire in England and I lack the language gene and it is not through lack of trying and yes a lot of restaurants do not have English menu’s or staff who speak conversational English.
.. and yet I have eaten at close to 1,400 restaurants in Hong Kong since January 2nd 1972, my wife was born in Hong Kong and we have been together over 40 years and her first language is Cantonese and a lot of her family are Chinese or half Chinese so I have never had much of an issue!
This does not translate to doing food tours though, yes, I could do them, no problem there but they would never ever be as good as the food tours done by my friends (see the 3 links above) most of their awesome guides are locally born Hong Kong Chinese and obviously food culture is part of their DNA, it is impossible for me to compete with that!
So please feel free to contact them for food tours
I do not do Hiking Tours in Hong Kong but I know someone that does!
I do not do Hiking Tours, never have and never will even though I used to go Hiking a lot when I was a lot younger, The Hong Kong Government is promoting hiking tours so I urge you to contact my friend Sabrina at Hong Kong Trails and Tours, she is a long time Hong Kong resident and and a very experienced hiker with close to 700 Hikes in 15+ years under her belt, please click on the link below
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