On a mild, overcast Tuesday in July, Scott Goodfriend prepares to take a group of five people on his “Iconic Foods of the Lower East Side” tour of New York. They stand at the entrance to a large food market in downtown Manhattan.

This was “the immigrant center of New York,” Goodfriend tells the group. And wherever the immigrants came from, they brought their food with them. The tour includes restaurants such as The Italian dessert center Ferrara, the local bagel shop Baz Bagel and others, with a pinch of historical facts along the way.

The first stop is the Doughnut Plant, a 30-year-old, industrial-looking shop with concrete floors and doughnut trays behind a steel counter. Goodfriend explains that founder Mark Isreal discovered his grandfather’s doughnut recipe and used it to open the shop in 1994.

He brings the group three different donuts to try: Tres Leches, Brooklyn Blackout and Blueberry.

“Oh yes,” says a seventh-grader during the tour. “They’re good.”

Goodfriend, 39, officially started selling food tours in 2019 while working in communications. After losing his job at Meta in 2023, he decided to run his company, Ultimate Food Tours, full-time. Between May 2023 and May 2024, he earned more than $145,000.

This is how he built his up-and-coming company.

Ethnic food was a constant in Goodfriend’s life

Goodfriend grew up in the Calabasas neighborhood of Los Angeles, the oldest of two children. His father was a mortgage broker and his mother worked at the UCLA Medical Center. Food was everywhere. “My parents always liked to take us to different ethnic restaurants in LA,” he says. “My dad really likes Persian food. My mom really likes sushi and Japanese food.”

He says that he was constantly preoccupied with the past and often watched the History Channel with his father.

Goodfriend attended the University of Colorado Boulder and graduated with a journalism degree in 2007. He then worked in reality TV, first in LA and then in New York in 2011. “I liked reality TV because I felt like I could jump from one project to the next much faster,” he says.

In 2016, he landed a job at the major PR firm Edelman. During his six years at the company, he led projects in Web3 and virtual reality. Then, in July 2022, he was offered a job at Meta in the augmented reality department.

“I felt like I had finally made it,” he says. The job paid him about $200,000 a year.

Friends sent “small goals to challenge me” to go on tours

When Goodfriend moved to New York, “I picked different neighborhoods to explore,” he says, including various restaurants in the area. In search of Bosnian food, for example, he went to Astoria in Queens. Curious about the Russian population there led him to Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn.

Eventually, friends found out about the tours he was doing and asked him to do the same for them. “They would send me little goals to challenge me to do these food tours,” he says. He led them to Brooklyn neighborhoods like Borough Park, with its Hasidic population, and Sunset Park, with its Chinese community.

Goodfriend offered these types of tours for about eight years but refused to monetize them, both because he liked to give them to friends and because he didn’t want to go through the hassle of building a store and a website. Then a friend told him about Airbnb experiences, or ways to sell local tours through the site. In the fall of 2019, he decided to launch one of them.

“I earned my first dollar with my Chinatown Food Tour in October 2019,” he says.

“I made the decision to cut the social net”

By 2021, he had added his Iconic Food tour and named his company Ultimate Food Tours. “I thought, how can I create something that sounds big and fun?” he says. In December 2021, he created his website and started adding more and more tours to his repertoire there.

Goodfriend did all this while working full-time and giving tours on weekends. Between 2021 and 2022, “I probably put in about 10 hours a week for two tours a week,” he says. The side hustle brought in more than $30,000 in 2022 alone.

Eight months after being hired at Meta, in February 2023, Goodfriend was fired from his job.

Although he soon received a full-time job offer at a startup, he felt drawn to his job. “So I made the decision to cut the safety net in early 2023,” he says, “to run Ultimate Food Tours full-time and leave the corporate world.”

“I probably work 80 hours a week”

Ultimate Food Tours currently offers six different food tours per week for $90 per person, including food. On average, six to eight people take a tour, Goodfriend says. The company offers options like “Broadway Bites” and “Famous Sites” and “Famous Jewish Foods.” Goodfriend, who designs each tour himself, leads about two or three of them himself and has the rest run by five other freelance tour guides.

UFT has recently partnered with local restaurants and also added private cooking classes, mostly for corporate clients looking for a unique experience. These cost $150 per person. He also sells merchandise on the website.

In the future, Goodfriend is working to expand the company globally, helping guides organize similar tours in San Diego and Japan. When those go live, UFT will “keep a small percentage,” he says.

Goodfriend also posts content on the company’s various social media accounts, including a series called Origin Stories that teaches viewers the history of some famous New York City foods. The series is “currently in development for a long-running streaming show,” he says, which he’s very excited about.

As the company’s only full-time employee, “I probably work 80 hours a week,” he says. He also earns significantly less than he did at Meta. But he loves it.

“This is absolutely my dream job,” he says.

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