Eating great food is one of the main reasons people love to travel. Sampling local culture and tasting local cuisine is one of the great joys of exploring a new place. But what are the best cities for food? And how would we even be able to quantify this? One metric is numbers.
The more restaurants a city has, the more serious it is about food.
Of course larger, more populated cities will naturally have more restaurants than smaller less populated ones. But in general, the more a city is obsessed with food, the more great restaurants they’ll be able to support, and the more restaurants which a city supports, the better the quality should be. After all the greater the competition the greater the quality of food and in the cities on this list, there is serious competition.
According to the World Cities Culture Forum which provides a way for policy makers in 38 key cities to share research and intelligence, Asian cities are exceedingly obsessed with food. I may be no surprise but Tokyo and the Seoul lead the world in the sheer number of restaurants. Hong Kong and Taipei also have a significant numbers of eateries. All this goes to show how important food and the culture of eating out is to Asians.
Number of Restaurants
Tokyo: 148,582
Seoul: 83,239
Paris: 44,896
Bogota: 34,248
Los Angeles: 29,560
New York City: 26,697
London: 18,110
Hong Kong: 13,743
Rome: 13,721
Milan: 8,785
Taipei: 8,253
Toronto: 7,984
Eating around the world is a great way to learn about a city and its people. In places like Tokyo, Paris or even Bogota, you clearly have lots of choices. Are the the best cities for food? Maybe… just maybe they are?
