Santa Monica's Best Food Tours

Donuts, Then Ice Cream, Then the Beach: A Santa Monica Food Tour

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No, it's not the Randy's with the giant donut on the roof. That one's in Inglewood. Ours is the Santa Monica Randy's Donuts, and your guide will happily tell you the rooftop story anyway while you work through a glazed ring, a butter crumb and an apple fritter. A very Southern California way to start a morning.

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From there the donut tour heads into downtown Santa Monica. Palm trees, wide sidewalks, and then Sidecar Doughnuts, where the whole idea is donuts fried fresh throughout the day. Huckleberry is the flavor people ask about. Butter and salt is the one they talk about on the way out.

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Toward the Promenade

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The ocean air gets a little stronger as you walk. Then you're on the Third Street Promenade, the car-free stretch of shops and street performers, guarded by topiary dinosaurs that have been photobombing visitors for decades. Warm churros come next, a cinnamon sugar break between donuts and dessert.

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And dessert is ice cream. We end at McConnell's, a California ice cream maker with roots up the coast in Santa Barbara, which means this walking tour finishes with a scoop instead of one more donut. Our guides think that's the right call at the beach. Before you go, they'll point you toward what's next: the sand, the bluffs of Palisades Park, or a long lunch downtown.

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Pumpkin in fall, gingerbread after that

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Flavors move with the calendar here, from passion fruit pavlova in summer to pumpkin when it cools down (a relative term in Santa Monica). From October through December, the Santa Monica Holiday Donut Tour takes the same seaside route and adds gingerbread and holiday apple pie flavors to the mix. The rest of the year it's the Santa Monica Donut Tour, Randy's to McConnell's.

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Plenty of our guests are Southern Californians who have driven past these shops for years and finally parked the car.