The Best Cheap-Eats Cities in the World Right Now

Think ofNaples and you automatically think of pizza. The inexpensive kind. The delicious kind. In fact, UNESCO put the craft of the Neapolitan pizzaiuolo on its heritage list in 2017, and about 3,000 of them are still working.

At L'Antica Pizzeria da Michele, open since 1870, a Margherita runs about $7.50, and lands on the paper placemat at roughly the size of a hubcap. The other options are Marinara (no cheese), and Cosacca which substitutes Pecorino for the fresh mozzarella on the Margherita. You take a numbered ticket and wait your turn; fifteen minutes at lunch, ninety at dinner.

You can also skip the queue altogether and buy “pizza a portafoglio.” This “wallet pizza” is a smaller pie folded into quarters and handed over in paper from a window for $2.50 to $3.50. You can also sit down for dinner but some pizzerias add three dollars a head for the privilege.

Lisbon has priced itself up over the last decade. Porto hasn't, and the reason we keep recommending it fits on a chalkboard: prato do dia or dish of the day. Every weekday ordinary neighborhood restaurants produce a simple, hearty comforting dish consisting of meat, fish, potatoes and rice that runs $10 to $20. Soup and a drink included. It's the same food the kitchen sells for twice that at dinner. The Mercado do Bolhão reopened in 2022 after four years of restoration, and the ten restaurants upstairs serve until midnight.

Go on a weekday, since it shuts Sundays and holidays. When bread, olives, and cheese show up without being ordered, that's the couvert, not a gift, and it can cost up to $5 a head if you touch it. "Pode tirar, por favor" sends it back and nobody minds.

In Seville, where you put your body determines what you pay. A tapa and a small beer standing at a neighborhood counter costs about $5. Order the identical thing at a terrace table with a view of the Cathedral and it's anywhere from $10 to $15. When in Seville do as the Sevillanos do and stand.

The bigger win is the menú del día: a starter, a main, dessert or coffee, bread, and a drink for less than $20. It dates to a 1960s labor rule requiring restaurants to feed workers affordably and survives, today, mostly due to habit. Weekdays only, 1:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. To find one just walk around and look for the chalkboard, with the handwritten menu. The hunt is half the fun.

We should be honest here, because the internet hasn't caught up. The three dollar souvlaki is gone. According to the Greek trade press, wraps are now closer to seven fifty in central Athens and hit $10 on Santorini, pushed up by meat, oil, and energy costs. In residential neighborhoods the prices are lower, but the days of feeding two people for a fiver are behind us.

Our best lunches in the city have been at the canteens feeding the butchers and fishmongers at Varvakios Agora, the covered market that's been on Athinas Street since 1886. Those places cook for people who eat there five days a week, which keeps them honest. This Is Athens, the city's own tourism office, keeps a guide to souvlaki and cheap eats that will do you more good than picking a place off Monastiraki Square.

And, for a cheap and filling breakfast you can still rely on a spanakopita from any bakery for a couple bucks.

You'll see Istanbul listed as the cheapest place to eat in Europe. Don't plan around that figure. Crowd-sourced prices come in slowly and Turkish inflation is running 45 to 50 percent a year, so a number posted eight months ago has nothing to do with the bill you’ll see today.

What we'd tell a friend instead: find an esnaf lokantası, a tradesman's restaurant with the day's cooking in trays at the counter and no English menu in sight. You point at what looks good. A full plate with bread comes to about $5 to $11. The same meal at a tourist restaurant in Sultanahmet is three times that. We've never seen a wider gap between the local price and the visitor price anywhere. Balık ekmek, the grilled fish sandwich sold off the boats at Eminönü, runs $3 or $4 and is worth eating once for the theater of it.

Here’s a tip that will save you more than any restaurant pick: when the card machine offers to charge you in dollars, say no and pay in lira. You’ll save 5 to 10 percent every time.

Tokyo holds more Michelin stars than any city on earth and is also, dish for dish, cheaper than eating out in Cleveland. About one third the cost, actually.

The thing to order is the teishoku, a set meal built around a main with rice, miso soup, and pickles for $6.25. Bento boxes are even cheaper, closer to $3. Kitchens that charge three times as much after dark serve the same food at noon.

Our favorite trick there takes a willingness to eat on somebody else's schedule. Supermarkets and department store food halls start discounting unsold prepared food around 2 p.m. for lunch items and 7 p.m. for everything else. Here you’ll find meals at a 10 or 20 percent discount and eventually hitting 50 to 70 percent. Premium sushi and bento at half price, because the store would rather sell it than throw it out. It’s a great hack.

Michelin sends inspectors to street stalls in Bangkok, where their street food listings include a one-star cook named Jay Fai who works a charcoal wok on the sidewalk outside her shophouse. She’s famous for wearing ski goggles to keep the heat out of her eyes. The same list also has dozens of Bib Gourmand stalls where a bowl of guay jub costs about $1.50. Meanwhile, a regular meal in the city averages barely over $3.

Yaowarat in Chinatown is the densest stretch, and it doesn't wake up until around six. Get there by 6:30, before parts of the street go single-file and you're shuffling rather than walking. Bring small notes, since most vendors take cash only. And eat a little at five or six stalls rather than filling up at the first one, which is the mistake we made.

The only Michelin-starred taco stand in the world is a counter ten feet wide in San Rafael. Taquería El Califa de León has been open more than half a century and keeps only four things on the menu. Our favorite, the gaonera, thin beef filet seared to order with nothing but salt and lime, runs $3 to $5. You queue, then eat standing up off a plastic plate, and it's better than most meals we’ve ever been served.

Elsewhere in the city a casual meal averages around $12. Michelin's first Mexico guide in 2024 also gave out 42 Bib Gourmands, so the affordable end of that book’s list runs deeper than the starred end.

Singapore is one of the priciest cities on earth for housing and one of the cheapest anywhere to eat well, by design rather than by accident. The National Environment Agency runs roughly 124 hawker centres and keeps stall rents low on purpose, which is why a complete meal still costs about $3 to $6. UNESCO added Singapore's hawker culture to its heritage list in 2020 and described the centres, accurately, as community dining rooms.

Hawker stalls charge no service fee and no tax, so the number on the board is the number you pay. A sit-down restaurant will have added about 20 percent by the time the bill arrives.

Walk a few streets from any major sight before you sit down. Prices fall roughly 30 percent within three or four blocks and then level off, so there's no need to hike across town.

Look at who's eating before you read the menu. A room full of local workers at one in the afternoon beats any review score, and a menu offering pad thai, pasta, and burgers under one roof tells you to keep walking.

Leave room in the budget for cover charges. Italian coperto, Portuguese couvert, Greek table charges, the little unordered dish at a Japanese izakaya. All legitimate, all real money, and some can’t be declined.

Trust the market halls. Bolhão, Varvakios, Yaowarat, and the hawker centres were built to feed people who work nearby, and they still do.