September 30 - Los Angeles, CA

pork belly food market

tour meeting point

Weather – rain when we got up, on and off until
about 1:00, sunny late afternoon, 20º

Steps – 16,269

Bradbury building

Food tours have always treated us well – Seattle, Barcelona, Bologna…all 10/10, we thought we’d better try what a Los Angeles food tour had to offer. Today’s wasn’t much more than a 5/10 unfortunately. It was OK, but just OK. In addition to trying some food, we were interested in the location for this tour - Downtown LA. If we didn’t check out downtown today, we didn’t think we’d be back. Downtown LA is about a 30 min

random downtown LA

drive from Beverly Hills where our hotel is. An
11AM start meant we had a bit of a lazy morning before heading out.

This walking tour met at a bakery just like our Seattle food tour. This is very practical…we can use the facilities and grab a coffee to go. Our first taste on the tour was an almond croissant from this bakery – it was very good! I’m not usually one for almond flavoured anything, but this may have turned me.

pumpkin ravioli stop

This tour was a combo of food, walking, and info. Every now and again, our guide Scarlet stopped to chat. Before we knew it, we arrived at LA’s Grand Central Market, for Filipino

Central Market

pork belly and a beer (unfortunately we were on our own for drinks, but maybe that was a good thing.) I’m not the biggest fan of pork belly…too fatty, but the sweet-Asian flavour was very tasty…needless to say, I helped Chris eat his. This market
was thronging with activity…people, sounds, and smells. Our visit here was perfectly timed…it poured for about 10 minutes when we were safely under cover.

meh donuts

tacos

Next, we wandered a bit down LA’s Broadway…many old theatres with

random interesting building

cool architecture, but kind of run down. Currently, there aren’t any shows playing at all. We stepped into The Bradbury Building – LA’s oldest commercial downtown building, very interesting ornamentation and iron work. Next was an Italian place for pumpkin ravioli, I thought I’d
have a double order, but Chris ate his. Then we had tacos (I had pork and Chris had steak) washed down with a beer. Lastly, were donuts from Donut Friend. Donut Friend was more like Donut Acquaintance…I’ve had better. If I’m going to

eat a donut, it had better be worth it…this was not unfortunately.

After the tour we checked out the area around LA’s Staples Centre and found a bench to eat the donut we schlepped here from the end of the food tour. We then grabbed an Uber back to Beverly Hills. Before heading up to our room for a bit of a siesta, we visited BevMo for some ship wine. We have all inclusive booze on the ship, but not via the mini bar in our room. Don’t get me started on how annoying that is…but we got a couple of bottles for our balcony on the ship.

blogging and Gump

The rest of the afternoon was spent blogging, watching Forest Gump (how I love this movie) and chilling with a beverage from BevMo.

fondue!

Dinner was cheese fondue and a bottle of wine at Monsieur Marcel in LA’s Original Farmer's Market. This place was about a 30 min walk from our hotel. This was the perfect pre and post dinner distance for a walk.

hotel mall and downtown