Our Expert Guide to Seven of the World’s Most Delicious Dining Destinations

For the food lover, a visit to any city is an invitation to eat—and eat, and eat. What makes cities such incredible dining destinations is that they are, by nature, dense: with people, with culture, with history, and with food.

City life is often disconnected from agriculture, which might suggest worse food, but in reality, it often means better. Urban dwellers need quick lunches, comforting dinners, and everything in between. The demand feeds an industry of restaurants, market stalls, bakeries, and street carts that thrive on volume, competition, and creativity.

Cities are also crossroads. They rise on ports, along rivers, rail lines, and trade routes. Their foods are among the most immediate and delicious gateways to understanding their histories and the many different people who have passed through or settled down in them. As a result, each city has its own distinct gastronomic fingerprint—encoded into its unique pattern are the influences of rulers and the rich, of workers and the poor, of diasporic communities and religious groups.

All of this makes cities some of the most exciting—and overwhelming—places to eat. A lot of cities have so many places to eat that you could dedicate a lifetime to trying a new one every single day and still not visit them all before you die. So when you’re going for just a week, where do you start?

That’s where we come in.

At Serious Eats, we’ve long worked with a global network of culinary experts—writers, cooks, and researchers who live and breathe the food of their home cities. They’re the ones we email before we travel. They know where to go, what to eat, and why it matters.

In our Global Eats series, we’re sharing that insider knowledge with you, along with recipes you can cook before you go, while you’re there (if you’ve got a kitchen), and after you return home. Whether you’re prepping for a trip or just hungry for inspiration, this series is designed to get you closer to the cities you’re excited about, one plate at a time.

This is the second installment of Global Eats. In our first, we covered London, Paris, Cairo, Bangkok, Taipei, Buenos Aires, and Mumbai. This time, we’re taking you to seven more cities with distinct culinary identities: Kingston, Rome, Marrakesh, Kuala Lumpur, Santiago, San Juan, and Hong Kong. Think of it as your ultimate dining-out hook-up—a traveler’s crib sheet from the people who know these food scenes best.

Hong Kong is a shimmering metropolis often referred to as “Asia’s World City” and the “Gateway to China.” It’s where East meets West, and every twist and turn presents an opportunity for food. The city is packed with cha chaan tengs (Hong Kong–style cafés), dai pai dongs (outdoor hawker stalls), street carts, and eateries dishing out local specialties, such as congee and clay-pot rice.

Your guide to Hong Kong is Serious Eats senior editor Genevieve Yam, who grew up in the city during the 1990s, when it was rapidly changing. Now based in the U.S., Genevieve frequently travels to Hong Kong to visit family and eat, eat, eat. Hot off of her most recent trip to the city, she’s sharing some of her favorite eateries for brothy noodles, dumplings, French toast, pork chop sandwiches, seafood, and so much more. Inside the guide, you’ll also find Serious Eats recipes for many of Hong Kong’s most iconic dishes, so you can keep eating like a Hong Kong local when you return home.

Far too many Americans who visit Jamaica stray no further than the buffets and hotel restaurants they frequent between sunbathing sessions at their gated, all-inclusive resorts. But for any food lover, that’s a big mistake. Step away from the resorts, and you’ll find a vibrant, ever-evolving food culture that’s a mélange of the island’s African, British, Spanish, and Taino cultures, spiced up with contributions from Portuguese Jews, French Huguenots, Syrians, Lebanese, Germans, Scots, and Irish immigrants—all built upon Jamaica’s agricultural bounty and access to both reef- and deep-sea fishing. 

Visitors from the U.S.—where dining out is the norm—are often surprised by how few sit-down restaurants exist outside Jamaica’s resorts. But incredible food is everywhere, if you know where to look. That’s where our guides come in: sisters Michelle and Suzanne Rousseau, acclaimed Jamaican cookbook authors, caterers, and food TV personalities. They’re sharing their favorite spots for jerk pork (yes, it’s more popular than chicken), pan chicken, beef patties hot from the oven, cornmeal porridge, ackee, and more local specialties. Inside the guide, you’ll also find recipes for iconic Jamaican dishes you can make at home—the ones below are just a taste. Oh, and if you don’t already know what it means to lime, you will soon.

Serious Eats contributor Alia Ali compares Malaysia’s capital city of Kuala Lumpur to a middle child: “There’s something kind of like wanting to prove herself, but she also doesn’t realize she’s already cool,” she says. “We’re surrounded by places that are more popular and touristy, like Thailand and Singapore, Indonesia and Vietnam. People are like, ‘Where is Malaysia?’”

But Kuala Lumpur has so much to offer food lovers, namely a culinary scene that reflects the city’s diversity, and is not so much a melting pot as it is an all-you-can-eat buffet, with mouth-puckering fish soups, fragrant rice dishes, rich curries, and an abundance of the sweet-and-savory finger snacks known as kuih. Ali is a native Malaysian and chef who’s contributed more than a dozen recipes to Serious Eats, and she knows Kuala Lumpur inside and out. She is our guide to the “Muddy Confluence” (the city name’s literal meaning in Malay) and in addition to her picks for where to eat in KL, you’ll find her recipes for making many of Malaysia’s most delicious dishes at home inside the guide.

Ringed by pinkish, millennium-old walls that give it its nickname, “the Red City,” Marrakesh is a city that’s “deeply rooted in Berber history with Arab and Andalusian influences, a blend of the Atlantic coast, the Mediterranean, the desert, and the Atlas mountains,” says chef, cookbook author, Serious Eats contributor, and your guide to Marrakesh, Nargisse Benkabbou. “But it’s also a city that’s always looking forward—an overload of colors and sounds and smells where ancient history coexists with modern life, like with the ancient souks that have been widened to accommodate bigger crowds.”

The city’s food reflects this coexistence of ancient history and modern life, and you’ll find different restaurants serving traditional takes and contemporary spins on tagines, harira soups rich with the aromas of stewing tomatoes, turmeric, and cinnamon, and glistening lamb kefta. A native Moroccan and restaurant owner, Benkabbou truly knows the food scene of Marrakesh. She’s also the author of an internationally acclaimed cookbook on Moroccan cuisine, and inside this guide you’ll find many of her recipes for bringing a taste of Marrakesh home.

Rome is one of the few cities in the world that have a distinct cuisine that stands on its own. “How many cities could support dozens of cookbooks dedicated to their local dishes alone? Rome is one of them,” says Serious Eats editorial director Daniel Gritzer. Suffice it to say, the number of wonderful things to eat in Rome is just about limitless—classics such as Roman-style artichokes, pasta alla gricia, amatriciana, carbonara, pizza al taglio, and gelati, for starters. But while many in Rome are staunch cuisine traditionalists, there are also innovative chefs, turning out spins on classics and adding whole new foods to the canon. 

To help you ever-so-slightly narrow down the list of must-eat foods at must-go spots in Rome, we tapped experts Peter Barrett, the author of the Things on Bread Substack and a Roman resident for two years, and Sara Levi, a native Roman and chef at the Rome Sustainable Food Project at the American Academy at Rome, to share their insight into what—and where—to eat in the Capital of the World. Our guide also includes recipes for those aforementioned classics, and many more Roman dishes, so you can do as a Roman does even when you’re not in Rome.

San Juan has long served as the capital of Puerto Rico, not only in political terms but also as the island’s culinary and cultural heart. Its food reflects a blend of Taino, Spanish Criollo, and African traditions. Almost any Puerto Rican will tell you that a trip to San Juan wouldn’t be complete without mofongo—tender plantains, crunchy pork cracklings, punchy garlic, and a savory broth, all mashed together to make this beloved Puerto Rican dish—but there are plenty of other can’t-miss dishes, including lechon, pernil, a wealth of seafood, and crispy twice-fried tostones.

Your guides to dining in San Juan are Serious Eats contributor and cookbook author Reina Gascón-López and chef and food entrepreneur Manolo López, who was born and raised in Puerto Rico and now lives in New York City. In this guide, they talk about what makes Puerto Rican food so special, what to eat if you’re not already familiar with the cuisine, and where to get the best representations of those dishes in and near San Juan. The guide also includes recipes from Gascón-López to make several Puerto Rican classics so you can better understand how the flavor is built from the ground up (hint: the sofrito is key).

Apologies to Serious Eats’ home-base of New York City, but if you want to eat the best hot dog of your life, you need to fly to Santiago and get your hands on completos—oversize hot dogs generously heaped with sauerkraut, diced tomatoes, mashed avocado, mayonnaise, and more. Of course there’s much more to eat in Chile’s capital city than loaded franks, including hearty charquicán, empanadas, and platters overflowing with enough briny oysters to make your eyes pop out of your head.

Santiago, which sits midway from north to south, is where everything in the country flows to, at least food-wise, making for a “very rich and very vibrant food culture,” in the words of Isidora Díaz. Díaz is a Serious Eats contributor and recipe developer, cookbook author, the director of the Chilean food and wine magazine Revista Fondo, and your guide to how to eat like a local in Santiago. Our guide also includes recipes for some of the iconic dishes you’ll find in Santiago, including—yes—Díaz’s recipe for making completos at home, complete with the sog-resistant homemade buns you’ll need to contain a whole avocado and all those other toppings.