It’s entirely possible to find a great bite to eat just about anywhere in the United States. But if you’re looking for the best bites on every block, it’s time to head to one particularly sunny and food-filled Southern city.
WalletHub revealed its 2025 list of the “Best Foodie Cities in America,” ranked for being the “best” and the “cheapest.” To come to its conclusion, the team compared 182 cities, including the 150 most populated cities and at least two of the most populated cities in each state. It looked at two key dimensions: “Affordability” and “Diversity, Accessibility & Quality.”
And within those dimensions, it also looked at 28 separate metrics, including the accessibility and affordability of high-quality restaurants, the average price for a beer or wine, any applicable food tax, the number of restaurants per capita, and the average ranking of restaurants on Yelp’s “Top 100 Places to Eat in the U.S.” list. It then graded each on a 100-point scale and normalized the scoring to create a weighted average ranking. After doing all that math, it named Miami the number one food city in the nation.
“Miami is the best city for foodies, leading the country when it comes to the availability of affordable restaurants rated at least 4.5 stars out of 5. It also has an extremely high number of restaurants per capita,” WalletHub’s report explained. It added that the city doesn’t just have a high number of restaurants but rather a larger number of high-quality spots.
“The city has the 12th-most diversity when it comes to the types of restaurants available and the 13th-best ratio of full-service restaurants to fast-food chains,” it added. “On top of that, foodies who want to partake in fine dining can choose from 14 Michelin-starred restaurants. One of them, L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon, even has two Michelin stars.”
Joining Miami at the top of the rankings is San Francisco, which WalletHub explained earned high marks for its number of restaurants per capita, as well as being home to one of the “best selections of affordable restaurants that are rated at least 4.5 out of 5 stars.” It added, “The Golden Gate city has the sixth-best diversity of restaurant types in the country, along with the fourth-best access to healthy food options. San Francisco also has a large number of food festivals and cooking schools per capita, allowing foodies to enjoy new culinary experiences.”
Rounding out the top three is one more Floridian city, Orlando, which is a standout thanks to its “number of food trucks, ice cream shops, coffee and tea shops, and gourmet food stores per capita.”
The usual suspects — New York, Los Angeles, New Orleans, and Chicago — did not make the top ten, sitting at No. 16, No. 13, No. 36, and No. 18, respectively.
