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For Will Hansen, running food tours around Allston-Brighton isn’t just about exposing attendees to new foods and places. Hansen, who began the Allston-Brighton Food Tours last year, says that he sees these tours as connecting people with resources in the community” and “creating affordable access to food.”

Hansen, who is soft-spoken yet outgoing, says that food has always been “incredibly central” to him, and at age 30, he has worn many hats when it comes to food and wellness. He was a fitness performance coach, started a meal prep company, and even began a business that made ice cream out of sweet potatoes. 

After serving as a vendor for the Brighton Farmers Market, he became involved in the Allston Brighton Health Collaborative food access committee. At the same time, while doing food tours in the North End of Boston for a private company, Hansen became inspired by colleagues to bring the tours to the Allston-Brighton neighborhood. 

“Allston-Brighton is the best place where people of all ages, generations, income levels, nationalities, languages come together and genuinely want to build community with each other,” he says. “That has to be the number one priority for this kind of thing here.”

Hansen runs a couple different types of food tours in Allston-Brighton. He recently began a “Cafe + Nature” walk series that takes place Thursday and Friday mornings. These begin in a local cafe followed by a walk around a community park or arboretum. From late March to early April, Hansen will guide a series of food history tours through Brighton Center, which include cafe hops and a final destination at the Brighton Allston Heritage Museum. 

Aside from building community and supporting local businesses, what Hansen finds most valuable about the tours is the opportunity to expose people to different areas of the neighborhood and different cuisines they haven’t tried before. 

“We did one tour in June last year, and then someone was like, ‘I’ve never had this in my life. I would never order this in my life on my own, but this is so cool, and it’s good,’ so that’s valuable,” he said. 

But, a significant challenge that Hansen has faced with organizing these tours is the process of picking and choosing what businesses to bring visitors on a given day.

“You can only do so much in a certain number of days. Deciding where not to go, for example, feels deeply personal,” he said. 

Hansen has been planning themed food tours like seafood and vegan-based food tours in Allston as a way to make it easier to plan food walks across the neighborhood. He has also been planning coffee walks in the morning as a more “low-key way to engage people.”

“People have dramatically different schedules. It’s easier to just have that as a consistent, regular thing, and it’s easy to pick between places because there’s only so many places near really awesome green spaces,” he said. 

On Mar. 26, Hansen arranged one of these coffee walks to begin at Park Bagelry, a newly opened bagel shop at 280 Western Ave, that specializes in hand-made bagels from local sourced ingredients with a rotating menu. 

The laid-back nature of these walks is heavily emphasized. The Partiful invite claims that there is “no rush” in showing up on time and people can come and go as they please. Participants continued to trickle in, joining the walk even 45 minutes later. 

The event always starts with coffee and chatting, where people can pay on a scale and chip in for shared food and drink. After some chatting and coffee, Hansen, the other guests and I walked over to the Riverstage at Herter Park to get into nature and continue conversing outside of the cafe. 

Johanna Gorton, a 39-year-old massage therapist, was a part of the group that went on the coffee walk Thursday. What she’s appreciated most about these walks is the connections people make and the increased support of small businesses. 

“Being a massage therapist, I’m so in favor of people moving more, so having a chance for people to be off their phones, connecting, especially in the world today, I think, is just so important,” she said. 

Gorton also said that these walks are a good way to build community and explore lesser-known parts of Boston that don’t get as much attention as places like Back Bay or Newbury Street. “I think it takes a lot of the guesswork out of it.”

“There are these great spaces that have even more history sometimes. I love how he always brings in indigenous history,” she said. “There’s a lot of history in this area, and so I think it’s important that people know that, whether they’re from here,  or from out of town, it’s a great way to build community, both locally and globally.”