These Museum-Led Food Tours and Dinners Give Guests a Taste of the City’s History
When I first started working at the Tenement Museum just over seven years ago, so many things were different. I was a baby New Yorker, not even a full first winter in. I was newly dating my now husband. Barack Obama was a first-term president.
Despite all that’s changed since then (including my employment there, which ended in 2017) so many things are the same: The Lower East Side remains one of the most iconically American neighborhoods in the country, and the Tenement Museum continues to be one of the neighborhood’s most earnest purveyors of its history.
A taste of place
The museum particularly excels in facilitating immersive storytelling experiences that aim to compel greater empathy for both the historic figures we tend to romanticize as well as the living, breathing people that we interact with every day.
These immersive experiences take place in the form of thematic tours based on the real history of one of the first apartment buildings (tenement is just the old-fashioned word for apartment) on Orchard Street, including the lives of its residents and the surrounding neighborhood. Two of those tours are food-focused: “Foods of the Lower East Side” is a daytime walking and tasting tour that provides a stage for the overlapping stories of neighborhood vendors old and new; “Tastings at the Tenement” is a sit-down dinner that starts with a look inside a re-created tenement kitchen.