What is your best idea of a blissful escape? Is it touring the vineyards of Australian wine country or the cellars of champagne? Is it a weekend in Parma sampling the cheese and ham that this city is deservedly famous for, direct from the producer? Is it a cooking class on the beaches of Phuket followed by a feast of the best of Thai food? If any of these sound like your ideal vacation, then chances are you are a gastronomic tourist.
Tasting the food on a trip is now essential in the list of best overseas experiences. Long gone are the days when tourists wanted familiar fare on their travels. Nowadays, the local cuisine can make or break a place. Food unites, food nourishes, food educates, food celebrates and, most importantly, food gives us a glimpse into environment and culture for all the senses. It is the easiest and often the most pleasurable way to embed yourself in a new culture, meeting strange and new ingredients, cooking styles and the practices and traditions that surround them.
Gastronomic tourism itself has taken this element of travel one step further, inviting visitors into the food chain to experience how it is grown, collected or prepared. It is a deep experiential dive into an unfamiliar landscape that can take a visitor from the environment itself to the best expression of a country’s creativity and culture as it is served on the plate. It is the ultimate way to bring a destination home with us, embedded in mind, body and soul.
This is a key travel trend currently, one that has been growing for several years. Moving from niche idea to mainstream travel impetus, it builds on the experiential aspects of tourism so popular over the last several decades. The ASEAN Sustainable Tourism awards have chosen gastronomy as their overarching theme for 2024-2025, selected by the lead country Cambodia. Both the PATA Destination Experience Forum 2023 and the EAT Conference in 2022, each held in Kuching, saw panels on this very topic. It confirms without question the shift from ‘eating to travel’ to ‘travelling to eat’.
Food is one of the key pillars of Sarawak’s tourism profile, firmly putting one of the ‘Fs’ into CANFF – Culture, Adventure, Nature, Festival and Food. But so far, Sarawak has delivered food as a support act to the other four, an essential stop along the path of every cultural experience, adventure holiday, foray into nature or annual festival. A longhouse stay will see guests enjoying jungle fare but foraging and farming were rarely the primary purpose. The Rainforest World Music Festival, while it serves from many stalls, is still mainly about the music.
That is about to change. With Kuching’s designation as a Creative City of Gastronomy under UNESCO, one of the key points of the city’s action plan is to develop dedicated gastronomic tours in collaboration with the city’s expert operators. In a place where people can eat up to five meals a day from a range of hawker stalls, high end restaurants and traditional kopitiam, and where thousands of rural communities engage in traditional systems of agriculture, complete with its own material and spiritual culture, it is a good fit.
In the context of the UN Sustainable Development Goals and the Creative Cities Network, gastronomic tourism can be a key driver. It can support Sarawak’s heritage farmers in their traditional lifestyles. It provides an understanding of land use and an appreciation of environment. It employs a huge range of people of many backgrounds in a highly diversified sector with flexible entry requirements. It has creativity at its core, making it a model of responsible and sustainable tourism, perfectly in line with Sarawak’s ethos as a destination.
So, soon, if you want to take part in the rice cycle, one test of native status in Sarawak, you will be able to book a trip at harvest time. You will be able to process Sago and personally uncover the grubs that Sarawak is famous for from the heart of the palm. You will be able to follow Sarawak coffee from imported bush to local Liberica bean, through the influence of the second Rajah along the way. You will be able to fish from community-maintained river systems and bake them up on a pebble beach. You will be able to sit in an indigenous durian orchard, in the original homeland of the fruit where its unique species have been nurtured over hundreds of years, and wait for the feast to fall from above.
Paradesa Borneo has been running cycling and walking tours in Kuching since 2014, taking the sustainable route through travel at every stop. Meanwhile, Telang Usan Hotel has been serving up indigenous food to its many guests over five decades. But now, the two have combined to curate and create a series of gastronomic tours for visitors, entirely focused on Kuching’s urban food chain.
One option is a Taste of Sarawak: Kuching food by foot. This tour takes visitors through the town, but focusing on food provision and a long walk to work it all off. It takes in traditional villages with cottage producers, wet markets and the spice and sundries shops of the heritage centre, all punctuated with multiple stops at hawker stalls and coffeeshops along the way to sample the best of Kuching’s street fare. The second, however, goes even more gastronomy, in a walking or cycling tour where visitors start at Petanak market, the heart of the wholesale trade in the city, to collect their produce in its purest form, before cooking up a storm under the watchful eye and expert tutelage of the Telang Usan’s chefs. (For more information, please visit: paradesaborneo.com)
These are just the beginning; pioneer tours which position food as the whole point of the exercise. But they have shown the sector’s popularity and potential for Sarawak. They demonstrate how willing visitors are to get their hands dirty, up to their elbows in pungent roots and nourishing shoots. They also show how well food works as a vehicle for communicating culture. For the participants, it is a tour which starts to make sense of everything they have been eating and all the communities that went into creating it.
In terms of food, Kuching has much to offer the gastronome or even the average eater looking for a new gastronomic experience. Beyond the amazing array of unusual ingredients and traditional dishes available every day, there is the annual round of festivals, many dedicated entirely to eating. Pesta Nukenen invites a trip to the Highlands and all the indigenous food on offer, while the intercultural Mooncake festival and the annual Ramadan bazaars make interesting options.
The Big Daddy of the food festival is coming up soon, however, as MBKS prepares for the 34th Kuching Festival, an extravaganza of food stalls which runs throughout the whole of August and welcomes over one million visitors through its gates annually. The aim is now to include other creative cities too in a culinary exchange of ideas to inspire Kuching chefs and delight the festival crowd.
So far, despite the handful of foreigners who have found their way here over the years, this festival has seen mostly local residents enjoying Kuching’s food culture. Perhaps this too is set to change as city of gastronomy status gets around. But this is the real beauty of gastronomic tourism, the holy grail of the experiential option. In the end, everyone has to eat. Gastronomic tourism provides a real glimpse into the everyday life of the local. Visitors can sit side by side with real Kuching residents, enjoying the experience just as they would.
So, whether you are interested in the agriculture, the culture or mainly just the eating, Kuching is currently crafting options for every visitor. In the meantime, sample the sights and scents of Kuching gastronomy from a cycling tour or simply from a table. There is no more authentic way to travel Sarawak.
