Six restaurants on Latin America's 50 Best list, up from one three years ago. Here are the ten rooms — from a Coco del Mar tasting counter to a Casco Viejo coastal-Italian dining room — that explain why.
Three years ago, Panama had one restaurant on Latin America's 50 Best Restaurants list. Today it has six. That's not a fluke — it's a generation of Panamanian chefs building on local ingredients and multicultural technique rather than importing a foreign fine-dining template wholesale. For anyone evaluating Panama City as a place to actually live, not just invest, the dining scene is now a real data point, not an afterthought.
Coco del Mar. Chef Mario Castrellón's flagship — No. 18 on Latin America's 50 Best Restaurants 2025, the first Central American restaurant ever to make the list, back in 2016. The 9–11 course tasting menu runs on what the restaurant calls Chombasia cuisine: Asian cooking technique filtered through Afro-Panamanian and local ingredients, much of it grown in the restaurant's own gardens.
Started as a cocktail bar in an unmarked commercial building; now an izakaya on Latin America's 50 Best Restaurants 2026 at No. 72, built by chef Kamel Abi Hassan around Japanese small plates and a serious cocktail program.
Chef Fulvio Miranda's ceviche-forward room, No. 47 on the 2025 Latin America's 50 Best list — proof that a single, tightly executed concept can outrank far larger kitchens.
San Francisco district. Elevated Afro-descendant Panamanian cuisine in the neighborhood we've called the city's most underrated dining corridor — a 50 Best-recognized kitchen a few blocks from Costa del Este.
Widely regarded as the city's top Japanese room — precise sushi and refined hot dishes for a clientele that has eaten the real thing in Tokyo and can tell the difference.
An international fusion menu built around fresh, seasonal ingredients, live music and a genuinely relaxed dining room — the pick for a long dinner rather than a tasting-menu marathon.
Multiple locations across the city serving Italian and Mediterranean cooking with real consistency — the trattoria you return to on a Tuesday, not just for an occasion.
Casco Viejo. Coastal Italian with a Panamanian twist — handmade pasta, serious seafood, a wine list built for pairing, inside the old town's colonial architecture.
Contemporary Chinese cuisine and dim sum from a chef who has built a reputation for taking the category more seriously than most Chinese restaurants attempt to in this market.
The city's reference point for a proper Argentine-style steak — cooked correctly, paired well, and exactly what it needs to be for a client who wants beef done right.
Six restaurants on a regional 50-best list isn't a coincidence — it's what happens when a city's chef community stops imitating and starts codifying its own cuisine.
For buyers weighing Panama City against other Latin American capitals — Mexico City, Bogotá, Lima — the dining scene is a genuine lifestyle input, not a footnote. It sits alongside the neighborhood fundamentals we've covered on San Francisco's rise as a food district and the country-club daily life at Santa María: a city that can feed you this well on a Tuesday night is a city that's easier to actually move to, not just visit.