What city on the planet has the best food?  That’s a very difficult question to answer and of course everyone would have a different opinion. But eating around the world is a great way to experience other cultures and something we highly recommend. Still there are ways to determine how serious a city is about food. One metric is numbers.

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, Seoul or Hong Kong, you clearly have lots of choices.