There are people who talk about food, and there are people who live it — who have spent decades walking the streets of a city, building relationships with the people behind the stoves and the counters, and turning those relationships into something the rest of us get to experience.
Lisa Rogovin is the second kind.
She’s the founder of Edible Excursions, the Bay Area’s original walking food tour company, and she’s been doing this since 2004 — before food tours were a category, before anyone was googling “culinary experiences near me,” before the Ferry Building was on every travel list. She saw what this city had to offer and built a business around sharing it.
I was introduced to Lisa by our mutual friend Amy Sherman, and I’ve now been on two of her tours. Last fall, I did the North Berkeley tour — a walk through the birthplace of California cuisine that I wrote about here on The Gomes Guide. More recently, my son Quinn and I joined Lisa herself for the Japantown tour. Three hours, eight-plus stops, and as SF locals who thought we knew our own backyard, we were humbled. There is so much happening in this city that most of us walk right past.
Getting to sit down with Lisa after all of that did not disappoint. She’s funny, warm, endlessly curious, and deeply invested in the small business owners and food producers she’s been championing for over two decades. Talking to her feels like talking to someone who has the best Rolodex in San Francisco — and would actually use it to help you.
🎧 Click the audio link above to listen to our full conversation, or find The Gomes Guide Travel Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.
The Origin Story Nobody Could Have Planned
Lisa’s path to founding Edible Excursions winds through Gourmet magazine, a fateful conversation with a Four Seasons hotel GM, and a seven-month solo food and wine journey across five continents.
She spent seven years in advertising sales at Gourmet — which, if you remember that magazine, was basically a graduate degree in food culture. When she left, she did what a lot of people dream about but very few actually do: she went traveling. Not a trip. A journey. Seven months, five continents, eating and drinking her way across the world, paying attention to how food tells the story of every place she landed.
When she came home to San Francisco, she had an idea about the Ferry Building — a community space where chefs and winemakers could connect with the public over food and wine. The GM of the Four Seasons, Stan Bromley, shut that dream down immediately. “That’s never going to happen,” he told her. And then, in the same breath, handed her something better: the chance to take hotel guests off-property and into the city’s real food scene, building experiences that guests would associate with the Four Seasons long after checkout.
In 2004, almost nobody in San Francisco was doing this. She had maybe two competitors in the entire city. Food tours weren’t something people Googled or gifted or planned vacations around. She was building something without a blueprint — inspired, as it happens, by a cooking experience she’d had in a small fishing village in Zihuatanejo, Mexico, where a local woman took her to the farmers market, handed her masa and squash blossoms, and showed her what a quesadilla actually is.
That kind of revelation — learning something new about something you thought you already knew — is still what she’s chasing on every tour.
What It Actually Takes to Lead a Great Food Tour
One of the things I was most curious about going into this conversation was the guides. Edible Excursions has kept many of its guides since the very beginning — which, in any service business, is almost unheard of. And they’re not your average tour guides. We’re talking food TV alumni, chefs, award-winning food writers, longtime restaurant workers.
Lisa told me she’s always valued enthusiasm over expertise. “It’s one thing to know your stuff,” she said. “It’s another thing to be excited to share it with the general public.”
That combination — deep knowledge plus genuine excitement — is what makes the difference between a tour that feels like a lecture and one that feels like you’re being shown around by a friend who happens to know everyone. No scripts. No two tours alike. Every guide brings their own personality, their own connections, their own favorite bite at each stop. One of her guides retired young, graduated from culinary school, and joined Edible Excursions because he wanted another way to share what he loved. Another is a food and culture writer who wanted a different medium. These are people for whom this is a calling.
She also makes a point of encouraging her guides to share their own backstories with guests — because meeting a local who knows the food scene cold is part of what people are actually paying for.
SF, Berkeley, Oakland — Three Very Different Food Cities
Edible Excursions runs tours across the Bay Area, and what struck me in talking to Lisa is how differently she describes each place.
San Francisco has the Ferry Building, Japantown, the Mission, North Beach — dense, layered, deeply multicultural neighborhoods where the food tells the story of who’s lived there and how those communities have shifted over time. North Berkeley has the the legacy of Chez Panisse and the California Cuisine movement, a particular kind of food consciousness that’s been there for decades. Oakland’s Temescal neighborhood is where a lot of the energy has moved — a Sunday farmers market, a younger generation of chefs and makers, and food that reflects the East Bay’s incredible diversity.
More than 75% of Edible Excursions’ business comes from locals — either individuals joining public tours or companies bringing their teams for a bonding experience. Lisa mentioned she’d just gotten an inquiry from a venture capital firm wanting to help new hires build community. Her answer: food tour. “We all eat,” she said. “It’s always the equalizer.”
The Hard Years, and Why She Kept Going
I’d be doing this conversation a disservice if I didn’t acknowledge what the pandemic did to a business like Edible Excursions.
Lisa shut down for 17 months. Seventeen months of no tours, no guests, no food stops, no human connection — which, for a business built entirely on all of those things, is a particular kind of devastating. She pivoted quickly to virtual cocktail classes (her daughter, in fourth grade at the time, wrote a school paper about them), but it wasn’t the same.
When she finally led her first in-person tour again, she cried.
That detail stopped me. Because it says everything about why she does this. Not just because it’s a business, but because those tours mean something to her. The producers and chefs and shop owners she’s been introducing people to for two decades mean something. Losing access to all of it, even temporarily, was genuinely painful.
She came back. The business came back. And the stories on the tours shifted too — a lot of the vendors she works with now are people who started businesses during Covid, who turned a hobby or a passion project into something real. The pandemic broke a lot of things in the food world. It also created some of the most interesting new voices in it.
The Moments That Stay With Her
When I asked Lisa about a memory that still reminds her why she does this, she didn’t have to think long.
Recently, on a Ferry Building tour, she took a group that included a couple visiting from Nebraska. The woman had been diagnosed with diabetes five years earlier, after a long stretch of feeling sick without knowing why. On the tour, they stopped at the farmers market stand of a berry grower named Poli, who grows nine or ten varietals of berries: Olallieberry, Tayberry, Boisenberry, varieties most people have never heard of.
She knew she could eat berries, but had no idea how freely — berries have a low glycemic index, which makes them a near-unlimited food for diabetics. Standing at that stand, tasting variety after variety, she started crying from joy. Poli packed up a bag and sent her home with them.
“It’s stuff like that that happens all the time,” Lisa said. And you could tell she meant it.
She also mentioned leading a tour many years ago where one of her guides met a guest who later became her husband. And then there was the guy who proposed to his girlfriend mid-tour, on a public food tour, with zero advance warning to Lisa or anyone else. “Talk about confidence,” she laughed.
Rapid Fire: Lisa’s SF Picks 🔥
Ferry Building on a Saturday morning — still magic or too touristy?
Still magic, full stop. But go early. Around 10am you’ll still catch locals doing their actual shopping. Look out at the waterfront, feel the history of the place, then eat as much as you possibly can.
Most underrated SF neighborhood for food right now?
The Tenderloin — without hesitation. Lisa goes anywhere there’s good food, full stop. Her current picks there: Bodega (Vietnamese, newly relocated), Outta Sight Pizza, Brenda’s for Cajun soul food and the best po’ boys and hush puppies in the city, and Onsen, a Japanese restaurant and bathhouse she’s been meaning to get to.
Best $5 bite in the Bay Area?
Panchitas in the Mission, on 16th and Valencia. Two pupusas for under $10. Lisa says they showed her the right way to eat one — with your hands, torn open, the curtido tucked inside the melted cheese. She hadn’t known there was a right way. Once again, learning something new about something she thought she knew.
Favorite coffee shop in SF?
Two answers. Best Boy Electric Coffee in Japantown, inside the New People Building — get the Okinawa brown sugar latte or the black sesame latte, and don’t skip the pastries. And Abanico Coffee Roasters in the Mission, a woman-owned shop that sources all its beans from women-owned farms across Latin America, roasts in Oakland, and has the kind of warm, community-oriented energy that makes you want to stay.
Favorite wine bar or cocktail spot?
20 Spot in the Mission, on 20th off Valencia. Tiny, dimly lit, plays vinyl, tiny galley kitchen that punches well above its weight. She had crudo last time. It’s been there forever and it shows — in the best way.
One cuisine for a month in SF?
Japanese, no hesitation. Sushi, sashimi, onigiri, okonomiyaki, takoyaki — she’s been eating rice balls wrapped in seaweed since kindergarten, when her best friend’s bento box was the highlight of lunch.
Top 3 restaurants in SF right now?
The prepared food counter inside Super Mira Market — restaurant-quality Japanese food made by a former restaurant owner, four days a week, inside a grocery store.
Kokkari, where she got married, which tells you everything about how she feels about it — the spreads, the lamb chops, the seasonally inspired menu.
And Jilli, a Korean tapas spot in the Mission on 15th, tucked into the ground floor of an apartment building.
What Stayed With Me
After we talked, I kept thinking about what it means to build a business entirely around human connection — around the idea that the best way to know a city is through the people feeding it.
Lisa has been making that case, one tour at a time, for over 20 years. Through the lean years, through Covid, through every shift in the SF restaurant scene, through the loss of beloved spots and the arrival of new ones. She’s still out there, still excited, still making introductions and telling stories and handing out her personal phone number at the end of every tour.
One last thing she said that stuck with me: don’t save a food tour for the end of the trip. Do it first! Let it set the table for everything else. I learned this lesson myself once in Paris — did a food tour on the very last day, came away with a list of the best cheese shops and restaurants in the city, and had no time left to use any of it.
If you’re in the Bay Area, get on one of her tours. If you’re visiting SF, book it before you book your dinner reservations. You’ll eat better all week because of it.
You can find all of Lisa’s tours — and gift certificates, which she swears by as the best gift you can give anyone at Edible Excursions.
Meet Lisa Rogovin
For over 20 years, Lisa Rogovin has provided award-winning culinary experiences across the SF Bay Area through her food tour company, Edible Excursions. Her deep knowledge of the local food scene spans her beginnings at the Four Seasons Hotel, a passion for the chefs, farmers, artisans, and people behind our food, and a lifetime of exploring the world for the best places to eat. Lisa lives in the gourmet mecca of San Francisco with her husband, two children, and six-year-old Australian Labradoodle, Ozzie — adventurous eaters all.
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