Animals utilize the rich variety of chemicals in their surroundings to identify and evaluate food sources, communicate with conspecifics and detect predators. These vital functions have led to the evolution of sophisticated sensory systems for the detection of volatiles and dissolved chemicals in the form of olfactory and gustatory systems, respectively. In a testament to the universality of many of these evolutionary pressures, remarkably diverse animals have adopted similar schemes to most efficiently extract relevant chemosensory information, even though key details such as receptor identity and mechanism vary widely. In this work, we provide an extensive overview of the sensory organs, chemoreceptors and sensory coding strategies underlying taste and smell in common model organisms. An especially attractive model to study gustation is the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. Not only does Drosophila detect a wide range of food compounds with a relatively small number of easily accessible sensory neurons, but there is also a vast array of sophisticated tools available to the fly neurobiology community. One such resource is a recent electron microscopy dataset of the entire adult fly brain. We used this dataset to reconstruct the majority of gustatory sensory neurons of the outer mouthparts. We further annotated all synaptic sites on these neurons to elucidate their connectivity. We utilized a combination of our anatomical and connectivity data to identify which taste modality reconstructed sensory neurons are likely to detect. We found that connectivity between sensory neurons is a common circuit motif and occurs mostly between neurons of the same type. We further explored the significance of these direct synaptic connections of neurons of the same and different modalities using a combination of calcium and voltage imaging. While we were not able to show functional connectivity between sensory neurons of different taste modalities, we did find preliminary evidence suggesting that excitatory connections exist between neurons of the same subclass. Lastly, we identified a second order gustatory neuron in the EM dataset and characterized its taste response profile, which was congruent with our assignment of its inputs’ taste modality identities. Our studies provide a valuable gateway to the further exploration of the gustatory circuitry of Drosophila at synaptic detail.