From Naples pizza to Alpine herbs, Italy leads the global table in 2025-26
ROME — For a country that measures time in courses rather than minutes, the news felt almost inevitable. This month TasteAtlas, the crowdsourced global food guide, named Italy the world’s best cuisine for 2025/2026 with a score of 4.64, pushing Greece (4.60) into second place and leaving Peru, Spain and France trailing behind.
The ranking is not a PR stunt. TasteAtlas bases its table on hundreds of thousands of user ratings for dishes, ingredients and regional traditions, and Italy’s lead rests on the same pillars that have fed it for centuries: simple preparations, high-quality raw materials, and a stubborn attachment to place. Naples was crowned the world’s best food city, with Milan, Bologna and Florence also in the global top ten — six Italian cities in total, more than any other nation.
The timing is symbolic. UNESCO recently inscribed “Italian cuisine” as Intangible Cultural Heritage, joining Neapolitan pizza-making, which was already listed. The citation praises not a single recipe but a system — the Mediterranean triad of wheat, olive oil and wine, the seasonal market, the family table.
A home game in Turin
If the world needed proof that Italy is not only loved but studied, it came on 19 June 2025, when the World’s 50 Best Restaurants awards were staged in Turin — the first time the ceremony left London or New York for a non-Anglophone host.
Italy placed six restaurants inside the top 50, despite Massimo Bottura’s Osteria Francescana sitting out in the permanent “Best of the Best” hall of fame:
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No.12 Lido 84 (Gardone Riviera) — Riccardo Camanini’s cacio e pepe cooked inside a pig’s bladder has become a pilgrimage dish.
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No.18 Reale (Castel di Sangro) — Niko Romito’s pursuit of “purity” in Abruzzo mountain ingredients.
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No.20 Atelier Moessmer (Brunico) — Norbert Niederkofler’s “Cook the Mountain” philosophy, built on forgotten Alpine vegetables.
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No.31 Le Calandre (Padua) — Max Alajmo’s saffron risotto with liquorice powder.
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No.32 Piazza Duomo (Alba) — Enrico Crippa’s garden-driven tasting menus.
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No.43 Uliassi (Senigallia) — Mauro Uliassi’s Adriatic storytelling.
The message from the Lingotto stage was clear: Italian fine dining is no longer centered on a single superstar, but on a network of regional laboratories.
What’s new on the plate
Three trends are defining the current Italian moment, and they travel well:
1. Mountain minimalism. Niederkofler’s decade-long project has inspired a generation to forage fir tips, fermented turnips and heirloom rye. Menus shrink to five ingredients, waste drops to near zero.
2. Pasta as technique, not comfort. At Lido 84 the cacio e pepe is not tossed but inflated; at Reale it becomes an aerated cream. Chefs are treating durum wheat like Japanese soba — a canvas for texture.
3. Social kitchens. In Modena, Canadian-Italian chef Jessica Rosval — No.92 with Al Gatto Verde — trains migrant women through her Roots project, turning the Emilian kitchen into a classroom. It’s a model now copied in Palermo and Bari.
The products that still rule
Behind every trend is a DOP label that travels better than any chef. TasteAtlas voters consistently rank Parmigiano Reggiano, San Marzano tomatoes, extra-virgin olive oil from Liguria, Bagòss di Bagolino and Alba white truffle among the world’s top ingredients. They are not novelties; they are benchmarks against which new Nordic or Nikkei experiments are judged.
Why the world keeps coming back
Italian food wins rankings not because it is fashionable, but because it is legible. A visitor can land in Naples, order a marinara, and understand the whole cuisine in two bites: wheat, tomato, oregano, fire. That clarity — plus a supply chain that still rewards small producers — gives Italy an advantage in an era of climate anxiety and authenticity fatigue.
As one Turin voter put it after the awards: “France invented haute cuisine. Italy taught the world how to eat every day.”
With the 2026 tourist season already breaking records and Italian cooking schools reporting a 30% jump in foreign enrolments, the crown from TasteAtlas may be symbolic. The appetite behind it is very real.
