A daily tour business launched this summer with a focus on downtown Spokane has patrons walking to historical sites and sinking their teeth into food samples at eateries along the way.

Your City Bites Flavorable Walking Tours LLC offers a two-mile tour led by a guide who describes Spokane lore while weaving in brief visits to food outlets that serve samples of a featured menu item. The tours that depart at 1:30 p.m. from Riverfront Park are designed to run March through November.

The business sells the tour tickets exclusively online for $49 per adult, and $39 for a child under 12. The price covers a person's tour as well as food tasting, and the trek takes about two hours.

"We tell them little fun facts about Spokane," says Gabe Compton, the business's director. "There is a lot of history described about the park, the city, and beauty of Spokane."

Since starting in July, Your City Bites has averaged about six people a day and has hosted as many as 12, Compton says.

"Our group size maximum is 12; we don't want to lose the intimacy," he adds. The business has partnered with a few Spokane-based eateries to promote the region's foodie scene. Stops include Steelhead Bar & Grille, Soulful Soups & Spirits, and Bruttles Candies, among others.

"Our goal is to really show people the fun variety of local eateries we have in Spokane, to get people to eat locally, and maybe venture away, if you will, from the chains," he says. "It's great marketing for the restaurants. We're bringing customers to their door."

Now, Compton and friend Brad Moss, who together developed the tour concept, are expanding Your City Bites to other midsized cities, starting in September with a launch of a Salt Lake City tour. Compton says other growth plans call for a Spokane-based wine and chocolate tour by next spring.

"We'd also like to offer a Coeur d'Alene tour by next spring," he adds.

While Compton oversees daily operations and works out of his Post Falls home, Moss is the business's owner, providing financial backing, website help, and business advice. Separate from Your City Bites, Moss works full time as director of sales and marketing for Coeur d'Alene-based ROW Adventures Inc., an international adventure-travel company.

Moss says he and his wife have gone on city walking tours in big cities, but they didn't have the same intimacy, or history and food angle, as the one he and Compton developed here. They first discussed a tour concept for Spokane over a dinner this past fall with their wives at Tomato Street, a restaurant where people can use crayons to draw on white contact paper used for table covers.

"We wrote everything down with the crayon on the paper table cloth, and we took it with us," Moss says. "It had projection numbers, how many different stops, and a lot of things."

He adds, "With Your City Bites, the idea is to keep the tour intimate and local. We selected all local businesses, and we put a historical angle on it, not just a food angle."

For example, the Spokane group sees and hears trivia about landmarks such as the huge Radio Flyer red metal wagon structure that is also a play slide, the Clock Tower, the Looff Carousel, Canada Island, Spokane River Falls, and the Davenport Hotel, among others.

"We try to keep it entertaining," Compton adds. He has served as the tour guide and still does for larger groups, but the business has already grown fast enough, he says, that it recently hired a new tour guide, Kim Hobart. The business now employs four including Compton, Moss, Hobart, and Compton's wife, Aleana, who handles photography, the business's blog, and social media.

On a recent Monday, Hobart met two couples to start the tour at the Radio Flyer sculpture, at first handing out water bottles and small individual radio devices to amplify her microphone. She soon followed with a trivia question, "Can anyone guess how many tons the Radio Flyer slide is?"

After several wrong responses, her answer is 26 tons, along with descriptions of the artist Ken Spiering, and how he created the sculpture in 1989.

Hobart chats as the group walks, talking about, for example, how Riverfront Park, the site of a former Great Northern Railroad Depot, was developed for the Expo '74 World's Fair. During a break as tour members take pictures, she stops to call a restaurant 10 minutes ahead to announce the group's imminent arrival.

Later in the tour, she also talks about the Bennett Block, constructed in 1890, as one of the first construction projects just after the Spokane fire of 1889 destroyed 32 city blocks. It's the feature described right before the tour heads into the nearby Steelhead Bar & Grille, at 218 N. Howard.

Compton says that a majority of the restaurants the business works with provide small complimentary or at least discounted portions, treated as part of the eateries' own marketing efforts.

"We do cover some costs at a few of the restaurants, but a lot of them will essentially use it for marketing and hand out a coupon if people go back to the restaurant again," Compton says.

Lauren D'Arienzo, owner of Soulful Soups & Spirits at 117 N. Howard, says a benefit for the restaurants is that the tours tend to come at a quiet time after lunch.

"Gabe's made it so easy for us; he's done all the work," D'Arienzo says. "We just cut some bread and pour a little soup. I know we've had return guests as a result of Your City Bites."

Compton says Your City Bites will target midsized cities for expansion that have a good mix of culture, history, and foods. Along with Salt Lake City, the business is focusing on tours for Albuquerque, N.M., and Nashville, Tenn.

"They're the fastest-growing tourism cities in the nation, and none of those cities have a food tour, so we're trying to get into that market, and they all offer a lot of really good food and really good history," he says.