Lima Named the World's Best City for Food in 2026
And What to Actually Eat There

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Time Out's Best Cities for Food ranking for 2026 places Lima, Peru, at number one. The list combines a survey of more than 24,000 residents across some 150 cities with input from over 100 Time Out editors and food experts. Four Latin American cities made the top 20. Below, what the ranking actually measures — and, more practically, what you can eat in Lima and where.

What the 2026 ranking says

The top five: Lima, Bangkok, Mexico City, London, Barcelona. Ho Chi Minh City, Melbourne, Beijing, Athens and Lisbon round out the top ten. Beyond Lima and Mexico City, Buenos Aires came in at 17 and Medellín at 20. To keep the list globally representative, only the highest-scoring city in each country was included.

The weighting matters: 70% local sentiment, 30% expert assessment, across five pillars — restaurant quality, affordability, quality of food and groceries, how locals describe their own city, and the expert panel. In Lima, 80% of residents rated the food scene high-quality and 85% called it affordable, the best affordability score on the list. The expert panel scored the city at 70%.

So this is not a count of starred restaurants. It is a measure of whether the people who live in a city can eat well, every day, without spending much. Medellín is a good illustration of the difference: 20th overall, but on food quality alone, 94% of locals rated it highly — second only to London.

The architecture of Lima's food: criollo, chifa, nikkei

What makes Lima unusual is less any single dish than the way its layers sit on top of one another. The base is Andean and Indigenous: potatoes in more than four thousand varieties, corn, and the family of chilies known collectively as ají. Spanish colonial ingredients and techniques settled over that, producing the coastal tradition called criollo.

Then immigration arrived twice, in force. From the mid-nineteenth century, large numbers of indentured Chinese labourers, mostly Cantonese, brought ginger, soy sauce and scallions — the origin of chifa, Chinese-Peruvian cooking. In 1899 the ship Sakura Maru landed contract workers from Japan, beginning Peru's Japanese community. Japanese technique and Peruvian ingredients only fused into a self-aware cuisine — nikkei — from the 1970s and 80s onward.

Layered through all of it is the food of Africans brought to Peru under slavery, surviving today as anticuchos and tacu tacu. I've written before on how nikkei cuisine came about, and on the regional food cultures beyond Lima and Cusco.

What to eat, and when

Cebiche comes first. White fish cured in lime juice with ají limo or yellow chili, red onion and cilantro. Peru declared it national cultural heritage in 2004, and a 2008 ministerial resolution set 28 June as National Cebiche Day. The practical point: it is a lunch dish. Specialist cebicherías work from fish landed that morning, so most serve at midday and close by mid-afternoon. La Mar in Miraflores (Av. La Mar 770) embodies the principle exactly: its own listed hours run 12:00–17:00 Monday to Thursday, 12:00–19:00 Friday, and 11:30–17:30 at weekends. No reservations — you queue. The leftover curing liquid, leche de tigre — tiger's milk — is ordered on its own.

Anticuchos are the opposite: an evening food. Beef heart marinated in ají panca, garlic, vinegar and cumin, grilled over charcoal. The origin is the coastal plantations, where the offal that owners discarded was turned into food by enslaved Africans using Andean chilies and Spanish spices from the hacienda kitchen. By the nineteenth century, street carts — carretillas — were working Lima's streets, tended by the women vendors known as anticucheras. Charcoal smoke on a residential corner after dark is still the signal. Anticuchos de la Tía Grimanesa in Miraflores (Ca. Ignacio Merino 466) began exactly that way as a street cart before taking a fixed address, and the lineage is still legible. Panchita, also in Miraflores (Calle 2 de Mayo 298), is the sit-down option if you want anticuchos alongside a broader criollo menu.

Lomo saltado is chifa's great invention: beef, onion and tomato hit hard in a wok, finished with soy sauce and vinegar, and served with both french fries and white rice. That double serving of starch is itself the record of a negotiation between Chinese technique and the Peruvian table. Beyond those three: causa, a chilled dish built on potato; ají de gallina, chicken in a yellow chili sauce; tacu tacu, beans and rice pressed and fried; chaufa, descended from fried rice. To drink, chicha morada from purple corn, and the pisco sour. For a single chifa, Chifa Titi (Av. Javier Prado Este 1212, San Isidro; closed Mondays) has been at it for over sixty years. For criollo home cooking in large shared portions, Isolina in Barranco (Av. San Martín 101). For a morning pan con chicharrón, El Chinito, founded in 1960 in the old city and now spread across a dozen-plus branches.

At the high end, Latin America's 50 Best 2025 placed Kjolle at No. 2 — and best in Peru — with Mérito at 4, Cosme at 9 and Mayta at 11. Kjolle shares a Barranco building with Central (Av. Pedro de Osma 301). Maido was named the World's Best Restaurant in 2025; former world number ones move into a Best of the Best group and leave the ranking, as Central did after winning in 2023. All of these need booking months ahead. The chifas of the old city's Barrio Chino, and the cebicherías and anticucho places on ordinary corners, need neither reservations nor a dress code — and given that Lima's win rests on an 85% affordability score, those are arguably the real subject of the ranking. Worth noting too: the Michelin Guide does not cover Peru, so Lima's standing rests on entirely different instruments.

4 November: the world comes to Lima

Since the ranking was published, Lima has picked up another date. The World's 50 Best Restaurants 2026 awards ceremony will be held there on 4 November — the first time in the event's 24-year history that it takes place in South America. A consumer magazine's residents' survey and an industry voting body are very different instruments, and this year both point at the same city.

Whose gastronomy is it?

There is a catch. When culinary tourism concentrates, rents rise and the places that were there first get pushed out. Every "great food city" has walked this road. In Lima, Miraflores and Barranco already carry a spread of foreigner-priced restaurants, and the distance between those and the places locals eat at daily keeps widening.

The irony is that affordability was the single strongest factor in Lima's win. If tourism erodes it, the same survey could score the city lower in future years. A ranking celebrates what a city has, and simultaneously starts to consume it.

My perspective

The most important thing about this list is the 70/30 split. Winning a ranking where expert opinion counts for only thirty percent means your strength is not food staged for visitors but food that people actually live on. Lima does not come first on a metric that counts stars. It is less that the yardstick was changed in Lima's favour than that what this yardstick tries to measure was already there.

And the layering of Lima's food is, before it is a story of chefs' creativity, a story of migration, slavery and conquest — not a happy history. Without indentured Chinese labourers there is no lomo saltado; without the people handed discarded offal on the haciendas there are no anticuchos. Knowing that changes nothing about the taste. It changes how you walk around the city.

Watch 4 November. The world's food media will land in Lima for the ceremony, and prices and clientele will move over the following year or two. Whether Lima still scores 85% on affordability in Time Out's 2027 survey is about as clean an indicator as you will get.

Glossary

cebiche = fish cured in lime juice; also spelled ceviche in Peru. Declared national cultural heritage in 2004. chifa = Chinese-Peruvian cooking, and the restaurants serving it; said to derive from Cantonese for "eat rice." nikkei = the strand of Peruvian cooking rooted in Japanese immigration. criollo = the coastal tradition blending Indigenous, Spanish and African foodways. anticucho = grilled beef-heart skewers. leche de tigre = the citrus curing liquid from cebiche. carretilla = a street food cart.

What put Lima first was not a count of stars, but the strength of what people there eat every single day.

※ This article is the author’s commentary based on public information. Please confirm the latest figures, dates and procedures with governments and primary sources. Quotations are kept minimal and sources are cited.