TOP 7 HOTELS WHERE GUESTS FORAGE FOR THEIR FOOD

The hotel offers wonderful foraging excursions due to the wide range of wild ingredients of Asheville and the support of the local foraging company "No Taste Like Home". The foraging package of Sourwood Inn offers a wild-food foraging outing lasting for 3 hours. It includes accommodations for 2 nights for two. The package costs about $590. A copy of "Wild Mushrooms: A Taste of Enchantment" is presented to the guests. Wild food is quite easy to find here as Asheville features about 120 edible species.

An Urban Foraging package for a maximum of 4 people is offered by the executive chef of the hotel, Dan Gilmore. The guests are taken out to forage the Seattle's Volunteer Park woodlands to collect chokecherries, thimbleberries, sugar maple blossoms, fennel blossoms, miners lettuce and Japanese knotweed. The amount of ingredients is completed at the University District Farmers Market and a lovely dinner is prepared using them at the Hunt Club Restaurant of the hotel.

The guests are taken out by Chef Jimmy McIntyre and the garden team to forage porcinis between February and April, under the oak trees of the hotel that are 115 years old. The species was discovered by Chef Jimmy McIntyre when he picked a brown paper bag which turned out to be several mushrooms clumped together which were declared to be Porcinis by the mycology department. The porcinis are also used in a cooking class of the hotel where these mushrooms found in the potager garden of this Victorian mansion property are showcased.

This hotel features a cheese cart including over 300 options from Quebec. There are also lovely foraging opportunities. A tasty menu of foraged food that includes sea plants from the St. Lawrence river's shore, puree made with beach rose hips and mils with sweet grass, is provided by two local foragers, Jardin de la Mer and Gaspésie Sauvage.
The sweet grass foie gras torchon is the signature foraged dish here. Others are plum sauce, candied pumpkin, gin macerated coronation grape and elderberry bread.

The hotel has a wonderful 3 hour long urban foraging experience on offer. The foraging of this colonial-style hotel is led by Charlie Standing, local hunter-gatherer. The guests are given an amazing round the city showcase making them cherish the lovely views along with a great variety of food prepared from ingredients bought from three places – the mountain forest, the Atlantic Coast and the slopes of Devils Peak. They can enjoy picking edible plants, nuts, mushrooms, seaweed, black mussels, giant sea snails and herbs such as Cape sorrel, fennel and nettle.

The hotel not only delivers picturesque views of the sea but also amazing Gourmet Wild Food Weekends to its guests. Caroline Davey, local forager, accompanies the guests and the weekend includes meals and foraging trips. The three meals are served as well as prepared in the granite goat barn. Amazing dishes and desserts are served, some of them being pigeon, nettle ravioli, squirrel, rock samphire fritti, Japanese seaweed and many more.

The foraging in Tuscany grows remarkably in the autumn which brings the truffle season and brightly colored yellow-orange leaves. This hotel located in the Tuscan hills offers a package "Florentine Food for Thoughts" to its guests where they are taken for a wonderful truffle hunt. The hotel features a lovely Italian garden and it has been built in a villa from the 15th century displaying frescoes dating back in time.

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