Savor Saint Louis in Puerto Vallarta
Next food stop with our Savor team: Puerto Vallarta
Nothing like visiting somewhere a little more tropical when it’s winter where you’re from. And that’s just what Vinnie of our Savor Saint Louis team did over the winter break. However, visiting Puerto Vallarta any time of the year is always nice.
And of course, he took a food tour while visiting.
“The best way to learn about a culture is through its culture,” Vinnie stated.
Check out Vinnie’s recap of his food tour with Vallarta Food Tours in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.
In about 3.5 hours, this daytime food tour hosted 11 people, several from Wisconsin, a few from St. Louis (that’s us) and other states. From tacos (deep fried!) to ‘tuba juice’ to chocolate, beer and everything in between this food tour gave a great sampling of what the locals eat and drink in Puerto Vallarta.
A local taco stand, super busy because it’s very popular with the locals. They prepare something of an innovative taco that is deep fried, preventing it from falling apart as easily, allowing people to eat it on the go (our tour guide called it an example of Mexican “fast casual” food).
Another family owned taco stand that makes a similarly innovative taco. This taco stand makes a chile relleno taco (traditionally a chile relleno is a Mexican dish in which a jalapeño pepper is stuffed with rice and meat). The chile is stuffed with squid, shrimp, and fish and then put into a taco shell. Delicious.
Ceviche tostada. Ceviche is a mixture of diced raw fish, onion, garlic, and other ingredients which are soaked in lime juice to “cook” the fish through acid.
Mr. Concepcion roams around the town square of Puerto Vallarta selling “tuba juice” which is made from coconut milk/sap from a palm tree, anise, cloves, cinnamon, apples, and nuts. It’s a refreshing tropical drink. So impressed with the tuba juice, Vinnie and some of the people he’d met on the food tour the day before went back to fill up a large jug of it which they then mixed with rum to drink on the beach.
Tequila served “a la bandera,” or flag style. First you drink the lime juice which makes the tequila more palatable. Then you do the shot of tequila and follow it with a strawberry juice based drink. It’s called flag style because the vertical shots of green, white, and red liquid looks like the vertical bars of the Mexican flag.
Finally this beautiful panorama of the Puerto Vallarta city and bay as seen from the top of an old lighthouse, a final stop on the tour and a great photo opportunity for tourists and locals.
Besides the food and drink (of which a few of the stops on this tour were not mentioned), one of Vinnie’s favorite stops included visiting Our Lady of Guadalupe church and learning about its history and what the crown in the steeple represented.
Vinnie’s advice for others: take a food tour early on during your trip, because chances are you’ll meet some great people who you might just want to connect with during the rest of your trip. Also a food tour is perfect for someone who wants to explore a new city in a guided way (vs. roaming around on your own, afraid you’ll miss something really cool), but doesn’t necessarily want to take the “typical” tourist tour.