1. Dining Trends in America
2. Overview of WalletHub’s Rankings
3. Orlando: The No. 1 Food City
4. Other Notable Food Cities
Dining out, like everything else, is getting more expensive. In fact, according to the personal finance website WalletHub, restaurant prices rose 6.5 percent between August 2022 and August 2023. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t still go out and enjoy yourself every once in a while, especially if you happen to live in one of the top foodie cities in the country.
WalletHub just released its 2023 report of the Best Foodie Cities in America, which broke down the best, and the most affordable, local food scenes in the U.S.
To determine the rankings, the team compared over 180 of the nation’s largest cities, analyzing each across 28 metrics, including the affordability and accessibility of excellent restaurants, number of food festivals per capita, craft breweries and wineries per capita, restaurant diversity, Michelin stars, and more.
After weighing the data, the researchers named Orlando, Florida the No. 1 food city in America. It won because of the diversity and quality of the restaurants—and for another very important reason: “Orlando has the most ice cream and frozen yogurt shops,” WalletHub noted in the report. Furthermore, Orlando also had some of the most coffee shops per capita and the most specialty-food grocery stores, scoring high in the affordability rankings.
Other top food cities in WalletHub’s rankings included:
- Portland, Oregon
- Sacramento, California
- Miami
- San Francisco
- Tampa, Florida
- San Diego
- Las Vegas
- Austin, Texas
- Seattle
Moreover, WalletHub’s rankings spotlighted a few standout cities that didn’t make the top 10. St. Louis, the survey noted, has the most gourmet specialty-food stores of any city, and Miami had the most restaurants of any city surveyed.
For more detailed insights, you can find the full results of WalletHub’s best foodie cities in America report here.
