Back to Favorites
Food· 9 min read

The Best Cities We've Eaten In, Ranked (2019-2026)

Not the cities with the most Michelin stars. Not the ones that food magazines tell you to visit. The cities where the average meal was above average.

Not the cities with the most Michelin stars. Not the ones that food magazines tell you to visit. The cities where the average meal was above average, where we didn't have to try hard to eat well, and where the food culture exists at a level that you feel in every restaurant, market, and street corner. Ranked by how hard it is to eat badly there.

1. New York City

Nothing else is close. We've eaten in New York across seven years and dozens of trips and the city has never let us down when we tried even slightly. The range is what makes it untouchable. Carbone for red-sauce Italian in the Village where the veal parm is the size of a small shield. Katz's Delicatessen for pastrami at 10 PM on the Lower East Side. Dhamaka for Indian food that makes every other Indian restaurant you've been to feel like it was holding back. Nobu Downtown for black cod miso at the bar. A West Village place with no sign on the door and a handwritten menu that changes nightly where the uni pasta was so good I stopped talking and just ate.
And then there's Flushing. The New World Mall food court, where I spent $15 on two days of eating and every meal beat a Manhattan tablecloth restaurant. The $12 pernil plate in Bushwick that was one of the best meals of 2025. The Korean army stew on 32nd Street in Koreatown. A $3 scallion pancake from a takeout window in Flushing at 9 PM on a December night.
New York is the only city I know where the best meal of the trip might cost $200 or $3, and both have an equal chance of being the one you remember. It's not a competition. The city just has too much good food at too many price points for anywhere else to keep up.

2. Vienna

Five weeks in 2020 plus a return trip in 2023 gave us time to eat through this city properly, and what I learned is that Vienna's food culture has layers that most people miss on a three-day trip.
The obvious layer is the classics: the schnitzel at Figlmuller that hangs off the plate (we went three times), the apple strudel with vanilla sauce at Cafe Central under the marble columns, the sachertorte at Hotel Sacher. Those are the things everyone does and everyone should do.
The second layer is the fine dining, which in Vienna operates at a level that surprised me. Steirereck in Stadtpark has two Michelin stars and was the best meal of our lives, full stop. The char with beeswax. The bread trolley. The wine pairing. Mraz & Sohn, which we found on the 2023 trip, is a two-star restaurant in a neighborhood that looks like it has no business having one, and the tasting menu was inventive without being pretentious.
The third layer is the Heuriger, the wine taverns in the hills above the city where the house wine is made on-site and the food is cold cuts, fresh bread, and spreads. 10er Marie and Mayer am Pfarrplatz (in Beethoven's former apartment) are both excellent. You sit on a terrace overlooking Vienna's rooftops with a glass of Gruner Veltliner and a plate of food that somebody's grandmother could have made and it's the best meal of the day.
And then there's the Naschmarkt on a Saturday morning: 100+ stalls, Turkish, Middle Eastern, Austrian, Italian, Japanese. The falafel stands alone are worth the trip. Vienna takes food as seriously as it takes music, and the city has been taking music seriously for 300 years.

3. Seoul

G spent a month here in 2019 and I've been regretting not going with her ever since. Gwangjang Market is one of the great food experiences in Asia: stalls serving knife-cut noodles, mung bean pancakes, tteokbokki, and kimbap, all made in front of you by vendors who've been at the same stall for decades. Maple Tree House does Korean BBQ the way it's supposed to be done. Jungsik does modern Korean fine dining. Mingles does a tasting menu that blends Korean tradition with contemporary technique in a way that doesn't feel forced.
Seoul's food culture runs so deep that the street food alone could justify a trip. The tteokbokki carts, the Korean corn dogs, the fried chicken that somehow became a global phenomenon. G sent me photos every day for a month and each one made me more annoyed that I hadn't gone with her. She says the best meal she ate was at a stall in Gwangjang that cost about $5 and was better than anything at the Michelin-starred restaurants. I believe her.

4. McAllen, Texas

Nobody puts McAllen on a best food cities list. That's the problem with best food city lists. McAllen is in the Rio Grande Valley on the Mexican border, and the food there is not Tex-Mex the way Dallas or Houston does it. It's border food: barbacoa slow-cooked overnight, fresh flour tortillas made to order, carne guisada served in a bowl with nothing on the side but tortillas. The taco shops don't have Instagram accounts. They have screen doors and the best breakfast tacos in Texas.
We crossed the border into Reynosa one evening and ate cabrito (slow-roasted young goat) over an open fire for $35 total for four people. The Coca-Cola was in glass bottles with cane sugar. The walk back across the international bridge at night, with both cities lit up on either side, was as memorable as the food. McAllen proves that the most interesting food in any country happens at the borders, where two cultures are cooking in the same kitchen.

5. Los Angeles

LA's food scene is spread across 500 square miles, which means you need an Uber to get to all of it, but the payoff is a city where every neighborhood has its own cuisine and almost all of it is excellent. Bestia in the Arts District was the best meal of 2019 and set the standard for the entire blog. Bavel from the same team. Jon & Vinny's for the Fairfax chopped salad. Gjusta in Venice for the smoked fish plate. Roscoe's House of Chicken and Waffles at midnight because it's open and you're in LA and chicken and waffles at midnight is a correct decision.
The Tower Bar at the Sunset Tower for Old Hollywood atmosphere and the McCarthy salad. Nobu Malibu for the views and the rock shrimp tempura. Dan Tana's for red-sauce Italian in a room that hasn't changed since the 70s. Catch LA for rooftop sushi. We spent four weeks in LA in 2020 and ate somewhere different every night and never had a bad meal. The only city that rivals New York for range, and it does it with better weather.

6. Fes, Morocco

Moroccan cooking uses spice in a way that Western cooking rarely attempts. The tagine at a signless restaurant in the medina, where the lamb had been cooking for hours with preserved lemon and olives and the sauce was deep and concentrated enough that I soaked it up with bread until there was nothing left. The chicken pastilla (sweet and savory, a flaky pie with shredded chicken and almonds and cinnamon and powdered sugar on top) that sounds wrong and tastes like genius. The rooftop riad dinner with overlapping calls to prayer from multiple mosques echoing across the city.
And then the market: pyramids of spices, fresh mint in bundles, bread being pulled from clay ovens, olives cured a dozen ways. G bought ras el hanout from a vendor who ground it fresh while we watched, and that blend has been in our kitchen ever since, going into everything. Five nights in February 2026. Every meal was a revelation and every one was different from the last.
Read more: 2026: Morocco

7. Las Vegas

Not for the celebrity-chef steakhouses on the Strip. For the strip mall restaurants off the Strip where the rent is low and the chefs are taking risks that they couldn't afford in New York or LA. Lotus of Siam has been called the best Thai restaurant in America by multiple publications and they're all right. The khao soi alone is worth the trip. Raku does Japanese charcoal grill in a strip mall, and the tofu with foie gras is a dish that should not work and works so well I've been back twice. Oscar's Steakhouse at the Plaza downtown. Scotch 80 Prime at the Palms for the ribeye and the Basquiat on the wall. Golden Steer for the Vegas steakhouse that's been open since 1958 and hasn't changed.
We've eaten in Vegas across four trips and the pattern is consistent: the casino restaurants are fine, the off-Strip restaurants are excellent, and the $15 Uber to a strip mall is the best money you'll spend in a city designed to take it from you.

8. Venice

Osteria alle Testiere alone puts Venice on this list. Nine tables, whatever fish came in that morning, olive oil, the absolute minimum amount of interference between the ingredient and the plate. The fish was the best seafood I've eaten in Europe and G said "this is what Italy is supposed to taste like" and she was right.
Venice's food reputation suffers from the tourist trap restaurants near San Marco that serve mediocre pasta at triple the price. But five minutes off the main path, the food is extraordinary. The cicchetti bars (Venetian tapas, essentially) in the back alleys serve small plates of seafood, crostini, and fried things at the bar for a few euros each. The seafood risotto at a place near the Rialto Bridge was creamy and saline and tasted like the lagoon itself. Venice rewards you for getting lost, which is good because you will absolutely get lost.

9. Toronto

G's former home and a food city that doesn't get the credit it deserves. The diversity of Toronto's neighborhoods means you can eat a different cuisine every meal for a month without repeating. Pai Northern Thai Kitchen for khao soi that rivals Lotus of Siam. Bar Raval for pintxos in a space designed by a Gaudi-inspired architect, all curved wood and no straight lines. Seven Lives in Kensington Market for tacos that have no business being this good in Canada. Churrasco of St Clair for Portuguese chicken on St. Clair West.
Toronto's food strength is that every neighborhood is its own food scene. Kensington Market is different from the Danforth which is different from St. Clair which is different from Queen West. G lived here before we moved to Miami and she still brings up Toronto restaurants as the standard. She's not wrong.

10. Boston

Three years of INBOUND conferences (2022-2024) gave us time to eat through Boston properly, and what I found is a city that's smaller than New York but might have a higher quality-per-square-mile ratio. Row 34 for oysters and craft beer in the Seaport. Eventide for the brown butter lobster roll that changed my understanding of what a lobster roll could be. Giacomo's in the North End for cash-only Italian with a line around the block and portions that could feed a family. Mike's Pastry for the cannoli in the blue-and-white box. Tatte Bakery for morning pastries and shakshuka. Committee for Greek in the Seaport.
Boston's North End is the best Italian neighborhood in America. I'm not taking pushback on this. The restaurants are packed, the portion sizes are absurd, and the cannoli shops have lines for a reason. Three years of conference dinners became three years of food research. The conference was the excuse. The food was the reason I kept going back.
NextOur 10 Favorite Hotels (2019-2026)