Skip the Line at Joe's, Then Nine More West Village Stops

Three hours through the West Village, running since 1999, and the tastings add up to a full meal rather than a series of bites. Three of them are sit-down and indoors, which in February is not a small detail.

It starts at the cheese shop on Bleecker that made its name selling cave-aged wheels and now makes the mac and cheese you are handed on arrival. The pizza stop is the counter on Carmine Street that appears in Spider-Man 2 and usually has a queue down the block; the tour walks past it. Tacombi on Bleecker does a crisp fish taco with watermelon agua fresca, indoors.

Cornelia Street is the Village's own restaurant row, with the building Taylor Swift rented on it. Faicco's, a pork shop trading for a hundred and twenty years, still makes sausage and mozzarella daily and gives you arancini and house sopressata. A family-run Italian restaurant almost thirty years old, inside a farmhouse built two centuries back, provides the meatballs. There is gelato and pastry from a new Italian bakery on Seventh Avenue South, and Neapolitan food cooked in front of you in a wood-fired oven at a place locals use for dinner rather than for tours.

The walking covers what the West Village hides: secluded gardens behind gates, tree-lined streets that break the grid, 1800s houses now worth eight figures, immigrant tenements on the same blocks, the narrowest house in New York, film locations, and the Friends corner with more stories attached to it than the show.

It ends with a cannoli, filled to order, at the Village's last Italian pastry shop.

Licensed guide, up to fifteen travellers, in English. Wheelchair accessible throughout. Drinks are extra. Vegetarian and non-coeliac gluten-free substitutions are possible with notice in the booking notes; vegan and specific allergies cannot be handled, though nothing on the tour contains nuts.