Best Restaurants in South America 2026

World's #1 restaurant 2025. Nikkei cuisine in Miraflores that makes two of the world's great food cultures feel inevitable together.

Chef Mitsuharu "Micha" Tsumura was born into a Japanese-Peruvian family in Lima and trained in Japan before returning to build Maido into the world's #1 restaurant. Nikkei cuisine — the Japanese-Peruvian fusion that emerged from the wave of Japanese immigration to Peru in the nineteenth century — is not a novelty at Maido; it is a serious historical culinary tradition, treated with the technical rigour of a Japanese kaiseki and the ingredient specificity of Peruvian regional cooking. The dining room in Miraflores is warm but unfussy: the attention belongs to the food.

The tasting menu moves through the Andean highlands, the Amazon basin, and the Pacific coast, using ingredients rare enough that most guests will encounter several for the first time. A squid ramen with Amazonian chorizo oil demonstrates the Japanese-Peruvian merger at its most fluent; the 48-hour slow-braised short rib with native potato purée and yellow chilli sauce uses time as a primary ingredient. Spend runs S/ 1,295–2,525 per person ($350–$680 USD), making it one of the more affordable world-ranked restaurants given what it delivers.

For any occasion where the objective is to serve the finest food in the world, the argument is simple: the formal world ranking supports it, and the cooking delivers on the claim.

Virgilio Martínez mapped Peru's altitude zones onto a tasting menu. The world's #1 restaurant in 2023. Still the most intellectually rigorous meal in the Americas.

Virgilio Martínez opened Central in Barranco after returning from stints at Mugaritz and other European kitchens, with a commitment to one of the most original conceptual frameworks in fine dining: the tasting menu as a map of Peru's altitude, from Pacific coast at sea level to high Andes at 4,000 metres. Each course is labelled by altitude and ecosystem; the ingredients come exclusively from those environments, foraged and sourced through the kitchen's research arm, Mater Iniciativa, led by chef Pía León.

The "Extreme Stems" course — served at the Andean high plateau sequence — uses stems and stalks that most kitchens discard, prepared by slow-roasting and reduction until they achieve a complexity that challenges the assumption that ingredient value correlates with prestige. The river shrimp with Amazonian herbs at the lowland sequence is one of the most beautiful plates on the continent. Spend runs $250–$400 USD per person. The restaurant is located at Casa Tupac, which also houses Kjolle and the Mater research centre.

For solo dining at the bar counter, Central offers a front-row view of one of the most disciplined kitchens in the world. Book this for yourself if you are visiting Lima.

World's #10 restaurant 2025 — a family parrilla in Palermo that proves the best Argentine beef, handled correctly, needs no competition.

Don Julio on Avenida Scalabrini Ortiz in Palermo has been serving Argentine beef since 1999, run by Pablo Rivero whose family were butchers. The restaurant does not trade on novelty — the menu is built around premium Hereford and Angus cuts from cattle raised under regenerative grazing practices, dry-aged in-house, and grilled over quebracho hardwood. The wine cellar, visible through the dining room's glass wall, contains over 12,000 bottles of Argentine wine and functions as a working reference to every major wine region in the country.

The entraña — skirt steak — is the kitchen's best argument for simplicity: a cut that demands precise temperature control and rests beautifully with chimichurri and a glass of Malbec. The mollejas (sweetbreads) are the connoisseur's order: slowly rendered until the exterior crisps and the interior remains tender. World's 50 Best #10 (2025); Latin America's 50 Best #3 (2025). The atmosphere is convivial and warm — tiled walls, leather banquettes, large tables, and the ambient sound of a restaurant that has been full every night for decades.

For team dinners in Buenos Aires, Don Julio functions as the city's most universally beloved room: everyone agrees it is excellent, the format accommodates groups, and the wine list means the sommelier conversation alone fills an hour.

Latin America's #1 restaurant in 2025 — Álvaro Clavijo's bistro in Chapinero Alto makes Colombia's biodiversity the entire point.

Álvaro Clavijo trained at Per Se in New York, L'Atelier de Joël Robuchon in Paris, and Noma in Copenhagen before returning to Bogotá to open El Chato — a restaurant that uses his European technique education as a vehicle for Colombian ingredient discovery. The space on Calle 65 in Chapinero Alto is deliberately modest: a neighbourhood bistro without the staging of a destination restaurant. That contrast between setting and ambition is the point. Latin America's 50 Best #1 (2025); World's 50 Best #54 (2024).

The menu changes frequently, driven by what Clavijo and his sourcing team find in the market — a new Amazonian variety of cacao, an heirloom potato cultivar from the Boyacá highlands, a coastal fish not previously seen in a Bogotá kitchen. A constant: the preparation of Colombian ingredients with French sauce discipline. The slow-cooked pork belly with native ají amarillo reduction demonstrates this most clearly, achieving a richness that requires neither cream nor reduction through accumulated cooking time.

At approximately $80–120 USD per person including wine, El Chato is the best-value top-ranked restaurant in South America. For a first date in Bogotá, the casual atmosphere removes any formality barrier while the food delivers genuine substance.

World's #23 in 2025 — Rodolfo Guzmán cooks from Mapuche tradition and Chilean endemic flora. No restaurant in South America is more specific.

Rodolfo Guzmán opened Boragó in Santiago in 2006 with a commitment to endemic Chilean ingredients — plants, fungi, algae, and animals that exist only in Chile — cooked with reference to Mapuche culinary heritage and contemporary technique. World's 50 Best #23 (2025); Latin America's 50 Best #6 (2025). The Endémica tasting menu, running 12 to 18 courses, takes guests through Chile's distinct climate zones — Atacama desert, temperate rainforest, southern Patagonian channels — using ingredients that most Chileans themselves have never encountered.

A course built around ulte seaweed from the southern coast — slow-roasted with a reduced broth and dried local roe — demonstrates the kitchen's approach: severe restraint, extreme ingredient specificity, and a patience with cooking time that most restaurants cannot sustain. The merkén-smoked lamb from Araucanía, cooked in the Mapuche tradition of underground stone-heated cooking, is the most historically grounded dish on the menu. At 179,000 Chilean pesos (~$194 USD), it is excellent value for a World's top-25 restaurant.

Boragó also holds the Flor de Caña Award for the World's Most Sustainable Restaurant. For clients who weight environmental considerations in their fine dining choices, this is the most important credential on this list.

Pía León won World's Best Female Chef and built a solo restaurant that stands entirely on its own — not in Central's shadow but beside it.

Pía León is chef Virgilio Martínez's partner and the chef who built Central's kitchen team while running her own restaurant, Kjolle, at the same Casa Tupac complex in Barranco. She was awarded World's Best Female Chef and Kjolle placed #9 in Latin America's 50 Best in 2025. The restaurant's nine-course tasting menu — S/ 988 (~$270 USD) per person — explores Peru's ecosystems through León's own research into native varieties: mashwa (a knobbly Andean tuber), olluco (a pink root vegetable), mochero chili, chuncho cocoa from the Amazon.

The roasted mashwa with elderflower and pisco-cured egg yolk is one of the most technically precise courses in Lima. The chuncho cocoa dessert sequence — which appears at course eight — is the only dessert on this list that a serious diner would choose over cheese. The room is warm, light-filled, and notably more social in atmosphere than Central's precision; León has designed a space that encourages conversation as much as contemplation.

For a first date in Lima, Kjolle offers the same ingredient ambition as Central in an atmosphere that is more suitable for getting to know someone. The nine courses give you something to talk about at every turn.

Rio's finest tasting menu — Latin America's 50 Best #28, and the most sophisticated argument for Brazilian fine dining in the city's most beautiful neighbourhood.

Lasai in the Botafogo neighbourhood of Rio de Janeiro represents Brazil's finest contemporary tasting menu restaurant. Chef Rafa Costa e Silva trained at Alinea in Chicago and Mugaritz in Spain before returning to Rio to open a restaurant built around Brazilian biodiversity — Amazonian fruits, Atlantic coast fish, cerrado (savanna) ingredients unavailable in any European kitchen. Latin America's 50 Best #28 (2025). The dining room, in a converted colonial house in a tree-lined street, is among the most beautiful rooms in South America.

The tasting menu moves through Brazil's distinct ecosystems — Amazon, Cerrado, Atlantic coast — with a precision that echoes Central's altitude framework applied to a country twice Peru's size. An Amazonian tucupi (fermented cassava juice) broth with local river fish is the kitchen's most distinctive course; the acerola (Barbados cherry) dessert is a study in how to use high-acidity tropical fruit in a composed plate without losing its wild character. The wine programme emphasises South American producers.

For proposals in Rio de Janeiro, the Botafogo garden terrace at Lasai — bookable with advance notice — provides the most romantic outdoor dining setting in a city not short of competition.