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When you think back, where in the world were you when you had the best meal of your life (so far)? Was it in a little bistro in Paris, or a sushi bar in Kyoto?
Well, according to TasteAtlas, the likelihood is that it was in Italy. The platform has just published a list of the 100 best food cities in the world, based on almost 500,000 ratings from across 17,073 cities on its database, and Italy claims five of the top 10 spots.
At the very top it’s Naples, but given we also named the home of pizza as our top pick for the best city in the world for food, we’re not at all surprised.
In second place was Milan, whose cuisine is one of the most lauded in Italy and has similarities with hearty, meaty Austrian food (risotto and pannetone both hail from here). In third place was Bologna, the medieval city home to the world’s oldest university, famous for (guess what?) spaghetti bolognese.
Florence claims fourth place, and Rome claims sixth, but cities as far flung as Mumbai, Lima, Jakarta and Guadalajara all make the top 30, too. However, you might notice a couple of supposedly big-hitters missing from the upper echelons of this ranking.
London, Hong Kong, Barcelona, Ho Chi Minh, Bangkok, Amsterdam, and perhaps most shockingly of all, San Sebastian, don’t even scrape their way into the top 50!
It’s not just cities that TasteAtlas ranks – we also covered the platform’s roundup of the world’s best cuisines, a ranking in which Italy was pipped to the post by another Mediterranean country.
These are the world’s 30 best cities for food, according to TasteAtlas
- Naples
- Milan
- Bologna
- Florence
- Mumbai
- Rome
- Paris
- Vienna
- Turin
- Osaka
- Madrid
- New York
- Genoa
- Nice
- Lima
- Jakarta
- Kyoto
- Gaziantep
- Ferrara
- New Orleans
- Catania
- Singapore
- Venice
- Istanbul
- Tokyo
- San Francisco
- Lisbon
- Guadalajara
- Chicago
- Philadelphia
Intrigued by the full round up? You can take a look here.
Fill your plate
Every year, we publish our own list of the best cities in the world for food, ranked off the back of a global survey of city-dwellers. Fancy something meaty? We recently released a roundup of the world’s very best places to eat steak.
Did you see that Rome’s restaurants are making a ‘carbonara pact’?
Plus: These restaurants have been crowned the world’s best for 2025.
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