From London pub crawls to Secret Food Tours across the globe

While September marks an end to a busy summer for the travel industry, Secret Food Tours is gearing up for its busiest period of the year. The company organises behind-the-scenes experiences of the culinary scene in 70 cities around the world — and heat isn’t necessarily what its punters are after.
“The summer can be a little hot in Europe and some European cities close up to go on vacation. So people tend to prefer September and October,” said Oliver Mernick-Levene, who started Secret Food Tours with Nico Jacquart in 2013.
Since then, they’ve run tours everywhere from Paris to Tokyo, Charleston in the US to Rio de Janeiro, helping the firm to cook up sales of £13.5 million last year. Its success secured it the 22nd spot on this year’s Sunday Times 100 ranking of Britain’s fastest-growing private companies.
Friends Mernick-Levene and Jacquart decided to go into business together after mulling ideas over a pint in a Shoreditch pub. They first ran pub crawls, but as they got older and became more interested in the foodie scene, they pivoted into food. The concept began with two routes, one in London and one in Paris, where Jacquart grew up and still lives for several months of the year.
“Back then, London did have a good food scene but people didn’t know about it,” said Mernick-Levene, 37. “Places like Borough Market were a big deal for Londoners but people didn’t know it on an international level. And obviously, everyone knew about French food, which is fantastic, but even then people felt nervous to go and get the best food because there are a lot of tourist traps. I made a joke about doing a food crawl instead of a bar crawl and, Nico being Nico, he was like, ‘I’ll build a website’, even though we didn’t have a tour.”
Jacquart built the website and put the tours on sale. “Within an hour we’d made £400 worth of sales,” recalled Mernick-Levene. “We had to refund the people because we didn’t even have a tour yet, there was no product, but we realised we were onto something. On our party tours it would have taken us a couple of days to sell £400 of tickets.”
The founders each designed a tour around their favourite hidden spots, taking in restaurants, shops and markets. “We decided to make it all about what locals would know about but tourists wouldn’t,” said Mernick-Levene. “We’ve got some suppliers who we’ve been working with from day one so they must really value what we do.”
And what about the locals? Do they mind that their favourite “secret” spots are being revealed to tourists? “Well the local shops don’t want the locals to be bothered, so one way [to avoid that] is to order in advance, so when we get there we don’t have to queue or hold up the queue,” said Jacquart, 40.
“We designed the tours on purpose so that we will be the first or last ones in a restaurant. For example, our tours often start at 11am. We will get into a really popular restaurant at 11.30, before it opens its doors, which will be nice for the guests as it’s a unique experience, it gives the restaurant an extra boost of money that they wouldn’t have got, and we don’t bother any of their guests.”
They will also usually order in advance, said Mernick-Levene, adding that the company spends around 40 per cent of its revenues with local suppliers. “We spend a lot of money in local restaurants and that’s really good for local communities because we’re not going to chains, we’re going to local little places, sometimes market stalls, sometimes restaurants, with reliable customers buying their stuff and promoting their location [on social media].”
Have they noticed any ripple effects from the demonstrations that have taken place across Europe over the summer months calling for curbs on mass tourism? “We’re very much helping local businesses. If they’re going to protest about tourists, they’re not going to protest about us,” said Mernick-Levene, pointing out that Secret Food Tours doesn’t operate in tourist hotspots like the Vatican or near the Eiffel Tower.
A large part of the business’s success so far comes down to the quality of the tour guides, who are hired as freelancers, say the pair. Secret Food Tours has about 300 on its books, with a core head office staff of 50, who all work remotely.
“When we started the business, we were doing the tour guiding and we realised that, while you do need to be a ‘professional’ tour guide if you’re going to be in the British Museum talking about the different artefacts, if you’re talking about local food and culture, you can train people to do that,” said Mernick-Levene. “So it allows us to have a big pool of guides, and often we can find the guys that are most interesting and fun, rather than just being history buffs.”
On top of the hourly fees paid by the company, the tour guides get to keep all their tips. Everything they spend at local businesses is logged on a proprietary software tool created by Jacquart during lockdown, when the business was closed except for “virtual tours”. The jobs are allocated by local city managers who have access to all the stats and reviews on the dashboard and teams can see how their team is performing compared to counterparts in other cities around the world.
The technology also enables staff, including the founders, to work remotely. On the day of the interview with The Times, Jacquart is in Paris, while his business partner is in Panama. The pair, neither of whom are married or have children, say it’s a privilege to lead a nomadic lifestyle. Mernick-Levene recalls an early business trip to Rome where the brief was “to eat and see the city”. “Nico turned to me and said, ‘I’ve been on worse vacations than this business trip,’ ” laughed Mernick-Levene.
He says it’s also fulfilling for core staff, who often get to travel as a perk of the job. “We will say to someone, ‘We want to open a food tour in Japan, who wants to do it?’ And everyone’s going to fight us to get that opportunity because Japan is amazing. So now we’ve got a situation where we give it to our best people. We say, ‘You deserve it. You’re going to Japan for two weeks and you’re going to eat your way through Japan and learn all about Japanese culture and food.’ ”
Being able to offer incentives like this helps aid recruitment and reduce staff churn, say the pair. Today, Tokyo is a “real big seller”, and new tours in Osaka and Kyoto, launched earlier this year, are starting to gather steam, too. The pair, who previously raised £2 million from the venture investor Pembroke VCT, are raising another round of capital, and plan to use the cash to grow organically and potentially through acquisitions of complementary companies offering services like cookery classes.
It’s an area Secret Food Tours has dabbled in but found to be complicated. “We would need chefs, we would need venues, we would need recipes and we would need structure. If we set it up ourselves it might take us six months to do it or we can find someone who has it already pre-loaded then we can do that and put it into our business,” said Mernick-Levene.