For the past 20 years, hundreds of people have flocked to the North Fork each September to meet farmers and food producers and hear their stories of how they built a food business on the North Fork.
The North Fork Foodie Tour, this year being held on Sunday, Sept. 13 from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., is a day full of farm and food purveyor tours, lectures and cooking demonstrations at 20 locations throughout the North Fork.
Pictured Above: Foodie Tour organizers Robert Deak, Amy Gadol, Sue Hearn, Ellen Zimmerman and Geri Armine-Klein awaited tourgoers at the 2025 Foodie Tour.
The event is a fundraiser for the North Fork Reform Synagogue in Cutchogue. The idea came about in 2006, as board members of the synagogue were looking for a more unique idea for a fundraiser than an artist studio tour that they had been running.
“It’s just that it’s really interesting. People don’t really get to go behind the scenes at farms,” said Foodie Tour Chair Ellen Zimmerman of the popularity of the event. “They may go to farmstands, but they don’t get to go behind that and find new people and new places they wouldn’t have found otherwise.”
Kay Freeman, who recently died after complications from Covid, was a powerful force behind the Foodie Tour, along with Ms. Zimmerman, said Linda Hill, a member of the congregation who has served as a docent, greeting guests at tour locations, for 18 years.
“Kay was a treasure of our synagogue — she did just everything,” she said. “When she died, I said ‘I don’t think we’re ever going to do this again, but Ellen is amazing. Kay’s been gone now almost three years but Ellen got it all together. It’s a really big event, even though we’re a very small synagogue. We have maybe 60 or 70 families. We’re small, but we do things.”
Scenes from the 2025 Foodie Tour
The Foodie Tour is headquartered at the Peconic Land Trust’s Charnews Farm on Youngs Avenue in Southold, where attendees pick up a wristband and get a map to the 20 locations.
The event also includes speakers at Charnews Farm and presentations by Slow Food East End at Green Acres Organic Farm in Jamesport.
Rona Smith of Greenport was part of the initial group that started the Foodie Tour, and she serves as a docent. She’s credited with coming up with the name for the event.
“This year, I’ll be at Matchbook Distilling,” in Greenport, she said. “It’s such a great place, and what Leslie (Merinoff Kwasnieski, the owner), has been doing there is so incredible. People take a tour of the distillery rooms and it’s fascinating.”
Sandy Klien has been a docent for 10 years, and she was also fascinated last year by the time she spent at Matchbook Distilling.
“You have to get the behind-the scenes tour. It’s very interesting, what she has created. It’s like the movie, “A Beautiful Mind,” where he has a board with all the Post-Its on it with new ideas,” she said. “She might get a call from a farmer who has an overload of carrots, and they’ll buy the carrots and make some kind of liquor out of them.”
The Foodie Tour has partnered for several years with Slow Food East End, which this year will be explaining its work promoting good food at Golden Acres Organic Farm in Jamesport.
Slow Food is also sponsoring a cooking demonstration by Chef Noah Schwartz of Noah’s in Greenport at Golden Acres at 2 p.m. and Chef Gail Watson will also be giving cooking demonstrations there.
“Slow Food does support entities that are looking for ways to show people good, clean and fair food,” said Ralph Reinertsen, a board member of the East End chapter of the international food organization. He added that numerous stops on the Foodie Tour have received or are nominated and may soon receive Slow Food “Snails of Approval,” an honor bestowed on food purveyors who uphold Slow Food practices.
Among recent Snail of Approval honorees on the tour are KK’s The Farm, Mattituck Mushrooms and Disset Chocolate in Cutchogue, whose owner, Ursula XVII, had shared the inside story on some of the less-than-ethical practices in sourcing of chocolate, and how “large producers take all of the product and push out all of the small people,”said Mr. Reinertsen.
“We have common goals,” he said of the partnership with the Foodie Tour. “They bring people to hear our ideas, and we learn more about the food purveyors. Participating in the community is one of the criteria we use to get the Snail approval.
Chef Noah “has had a Snail of Approval for a long time,” said Mr. Reinertsen. “He uses organic, local vegetables, and Slow Food volunteers will be there to help him with his presentation and have people at a welcome table explaining the international and local aspects of Slow Food.
Speakers at Foodie Tour headquarters at Charnews Farm in clude Tommy Bruno, who will discuss Long Island beekeeping; Paula Croteau, who will discuss the Boisseaux Cooking School; Long Island Farm Bureau President Laurie McBride; Chris Romano of theNorth Fork Garlic Company and Harrison Tobi of Cornell Cooperative Extension’s aquaculture program.
The event includes an online auction of deeply North Fork experiences and items, curated by Barbara Sheryll, which is open to everyone, even if they don’t take the tour. The auction, online here, is open now, and closes on the morning of Monday, Sept. 14.
Items range from tours of local farms and gardening consultations, wine tastings, a tour of the Turtle Rescue of the Hamptons, gym memberships and spa days, art and tickets to musical and theatrical performances and gift certificates to local stores selling both food and non-food items.
“The goal of the Foodie Tour is, yes, to be a fundraiser, but back then we were living in a place that is so amazing and offers so many fruits of the land,” said Ms. Sheryll. “We wanted to help them to promote themselves and educate people about what was here and what these people did — give them a behind-the-scenes look at their operations.”
Ms. Zimmerman says most attendees feel like, if they’re really organized, they can make it to five of the locations each year, and many keep coming back year after year to learn more about the North Fork’s food web.
On average, about 600 people take the tour each year, and even in the rain in 2025, about 400 people braved the elements to participate.
“The people who went in galoshes and raincoats seemed to be having a great time,” said Ms. Zimmerman.
Ms. Sheryll agreed.
“The beauty of it is it’s an outdoor event, and people really enjoy being out in the weather,” she said. “If you dress appropriately, you don’t mind if it rains on you a little bit.”
“I was brought up in Brooklyn in the 1940s, and coming out here 18 years ago was an eye-opener,” said docent Linda Hill. “You’d be surprised how much you can learn from a behind-the-scenes tour of a farm. You eat an apple and you know it comes from a tree, but you don’t know how that actually happens until you talk to a farmer. You meet so many interesting people on this tour.”
“We have people coming from Connecticut, Staten Island, all over to take this tour,” she said, adding that about 80 docents volunteer to greet people at each of the farms each year — including, this year, her three grandchildren. “From a small little synagogue, we’ve been able to expand this. It’s like a family. We all do what we have to do to make it happen.
Tickets to the Foodie Tour are $35 for adults and free for children 12 and under, and are available at northforkfoodietour.com, where you can find a full list of participating farms and other information.
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