The world's best food cities were revealed and Montreal beat London and Bangkok

Montreal's culinary arts just earned some serious bragging rights on the global food scene.

TasteAtlas, one of the internet's largest food guide platforms, just dropped its 2025/26 World Food Awards, which includes a list of the 100 Best Food Cities in the World. And our city landed at #58 overall — ahead of many major culinary destinations.

The rankings are based on 590,228 valid food ratings for 18,912 foods across 18,828 cities in TasteAtlas' database, focusing on the highest average ratings for regional and national dishes most commonly served in each location.

What put Montreal on the map

According to TasteAtlas, Montreal's must-try dishes include poutine (rated 4.2), Montreal smoked meat (4.4), Montreal-style bagels (4.2), sugar pie (4.1), and the Montreal hot dog (3.6).

The city also got recognition for its top gourmet producers, including Qantu Chocolate, État de Choc, Distillerie Cote des Saints, Nos Cabanes, and Messorem.

TasteAtlas highlighted several iconic Montreal restaurants: Fairmount Bagel, St-Viateur Bagel, Ma Poule Mouillée, Schwartz's, and La Banquise.

How Montreal stacks up

With an overall rating of 4.17, Montreal sits comfortably in the middle of the pack, but it's the company it keeps (and beats) that's impressive.

The city outranked big names like London (4.11), Boston (4.16), Bangkok (4.16), Washington, D.C. (4.17), and Prague (4.10), proving Montreal's food scene can hold its own against cities with far larger populations and international profiles.

The top 10

Italian cities dominated the top of the list, with Naples claiming the #1 spot (4.99), followed by Milan (#2, 4.99) and Bologna (#3, 4.98).

The rest of the top 10 includes Florence (#4), Mumbai (#5), Genoa (#6), Paris (#7), Vienna (#8), Rome (#9), and Lima (#10).

North American cities made a strong showing overall, with New Orleans (#15), New York City (#19), San Francisco (#27), Philadelphia (#28), and Chicago (#29) all cracking the top 30.

Montreal, meanwhile, was the only Canadian city to make the list.

Curious about where to find the best eats in the city? OpenTable recently dropped a list of Canada's top-rated restaurants, using real customer reviews. You can explore Montrealers' 18 favourite spots here.