IT’S BEEN MORE than 20 years since the Danish chefs Claus Meyer, René Redzepi and Mads Refslund sailed through sea caves in the Faroe Islands and explored geysers in Iceland in search of culinary inspiration found in natural habitats. Many of their discoveries — sea buckthorn berries that taste like tart oranges, citrusy wild thyme and intensely flavorful seaweed — made their way onto the menu at Noma, which opened in 2003 in Copenhagen and spurred the New Nordic food movement, granting the figure of the chef-forager a kind of exalted status.
Humans, of course, have foraged for food and medicine since the dawn of existence, but during the pandemic many restless home cooks decided they’d try their hand at being hunter-gatherers too. Traffic to Falling Fruit, a crowdsourced online map of edible plants around the world, rose 40 percent from 2019 to 2020, while mushroom picking in state and national parks in the United States has become so popular that it’s now banned in a growing number of places over concerns that a surge of off-trail visitors could cause environmental degradation. The more beneficial approach might be to seek out less-accessible locales, where living off the land has endured as part of everyday life.
Fortunately for wild-food enthusiasts, more and more country hotels, nature retreats and remote restaurants around the world — often the types of places that have featured local ingredients on their menus for years — are offering foraging excursions. The difficulties of the outings vary widely, but some, like those at Cuyama Buckhorn, a 1950s roadside motel turned desert resort in California’s Cuyama Valley, are tailored to more physically ambitious visitors.
Sam Seidenberg, 38, a backcountry expert and the hotel’s head bartender, began leading hikes on private trails next to Los Padres National Forest in 2024 to look for acorns, yerba santa, manzanita berries and wild purple sage. The most challenging involves scrambling over fossil-covered rock walls and maneuvering around spiky vegetation for five hours. “It’s rough country, and you’re gonna bleed a little bit for it and you’re definitely going to sweat,” says Seidenberg, “but if you work for it, some of the most beautiful untouched places I’ve seen in my life are back in that forest.” At the end of each trek, he sets up an alfresco bar and teaches the guests to muddle the fruit and herbs they found to make their own mocktails.
The foraging expeditions organized by the Happy House, a 10-room property in the Nepalese mountain village of Phaplu, can be demanding too: Trails range from 5,250 to 12,000 feet through subalpine terrain of river valleys, thick pine and oak forest, farmland and monasteries. But you can opt for gentler walks, some of which are led by Happy House’s chef, Mingmar Sherpa, who keeps an eye out for, among other wild fare, bright red rhododendron flowers used to make tea; sour Himalayan lapsi, or hog plums, eaten to aid digestion; and timur, a zestier relative of Sichuan pepper said to improve circulation. A family home that’s been operating as a seasonal inn since 2018, the Happy House has been offering these walks from the beginning, says the owner, Ang Tshering Lama, 37, noting that until eight years ago, there was no road access between Phaplu and Kathmandu, Nepal’s capital, which meant that all food had to be sourced locally. Much of it still is. “Many guests would just join Mingmar on his walks. It wasn’t an ‘experience’ [until recently]. It just happened,” says Lama.
For the past three years, Nick Chindamo, 33, has been the resident forager at the Inn at Bay Fortune, a hotel on Canada’s Prince Edward Island that’s also home to a restaurant from the chef Michael Smith where all the dishes are cooked over an open flame. Chindamo also leads two-hour walks along riverbanks and salt marshes, collecting seaside arrowgrass (its flavor is similar to fresh cilantro, only saltier) and half-day hikes through dense woods in search of mushrooms like curry milk caps. Sprouting from mats of moss, they taste like curry powder and caramelized sugar and can be used as a spice. “Foraging walks should lean less toward ‘give me your money and I’ll show you this cherry tree,’” says Chindamo, “and more [toward] sharing information that I’ve learned over the years — like how to spot something in the mint family or tell whether a plant is edible — so that you can take [this knowledge] elsewhere.”
In Cuzco, Peru, Virgilio Martínez and Pía León, the husband-and-wife chefs behind two of Lima’s most celebrated restaurants, Central and Kjolle, opened their restaurant Mil Centro, situated at 11,800 feet in the Sacred Valley of the Incas, in 2018. The following year, they introduced the Botanical Path, a leisurely two-hour walk led by members of the Mullak’as-Misminay and K’acllaraccay Indigenous communities through the surrounding hills. Along the way, you stop to examine plants used for medicines and dyes like ch’iri ch’iri (Grindelia boliviana), a resinous shrub said to ease muscle and arthritis pain, and kiswar (Buddleja incana), an orange-flowered tree whose leaves are brewed for colds and used to dye alpaca and sheep fibers a pale yellow. Guests might also come across mashua, an Andean tuber; tumbo, a type of banana-shaped passion fruit; and other flora that appear on the restaurant’s tasting menu.
“IN URBAN AREAS, people will fixate on a particular thing like ramps as a high-value item, but in rural or remote areas, foraging is more a way of life,” says Hannah Kirshner, 41, the author of “Water, Wood and Wild Things: Learning Craft and Cultivation in a Japanese Mountain Town” (2021), an account of her time spent working with farmers and artisans at Yamanaka Onsen in Japan’s Ishikawa Prefecture. Kirshner, who has written for T and now lives in Japan part of the year, began hosting food tours and retreats in 2025 along with the sixth-generation owners of Hanamurasaki ryokan. In springtime, they take visitors on 90-minute walks along a mossy gorge path and into the edges of the surrounding landscape, past persimmon, yuzu and thorny-trunked tara trees, picking plants like yomogi (or mugwort) and yukinoshita, a mountain vegetable. Afterward, in Kirshner’s open-air kitchen in a 100-year-old house overlooking the woods, a chef makes tempura from what’s in their baskets.
New luxury retreats in Europe are also encouraging guests to dig for their supper. This summer, the chef (and Noma alum) Cuan Greene, 34, opened Omos, a produce-driven restaurant and 16-room guesthouse on an 18th-century estate in the Irish Midlands. Starting next year, Greene plans to introduce guided walks around the 4.2-acre property and the private 1,000-acre resort next door, in search of assorted herbs and other pantry items, including meadowsweet (when boiled with potatoes, the plant’s flowers impart a vanilla-tinged, haylike taste); wild garlic, whose seedpods get pickled into “capers,” he says; and other garnishes suitable for post-stroll sandwiches.
And at Eha, a month-old wellness resort on the heavily forested Estonian island of Hiiumaa, guests can walk through sandy woodland and out onto spongy peat bogs to pick puckery bilberries and floral, amber-colored cloudberries. Much of what they find is used for tea or in nutrition sessions or fermentation workshops. “No two walks are the same,” says Viive-Kai Rabane, 37, a guide at Eha. “The landscape changes quickly with the seasons, so rather than following a fixed route or list of ingredients, we’ll respond to what nature has to offer.”
