Panama City has been a UNESCO Creative City of Gastronomy since 2017. In 2026, some of the sharpest plates in the country aren't coming from the colonial quarter.
Ask anyone doing a "best food in Panama" list five years ago and Casco Viejo won by default — the cobblestone, the UNESCO plaque, the postcard backdrop. It still deserves a place on that list. What's changed is that it no longer wins it alone. A few minutes away, in a residential grid most tourists drive straight past, San Francisco has quietly built one of the city's most complete dining scenes — and it's doing it without a single restored colonial façade.
Casco Viejo earned its reputation honestly: Donde José turns tasting menus into a study of Panamanian ingredients, Fonda Lo Que Hay shows up on regional best-of lists year after year, and the setting does half the selling for you. But heritage preservation rules that protect that setting also cap it — new restaurant space is, by design, scarce, rents on the handful of restorable buildings keep climbing, and a meaningful share of the covers are tied to a tourist rhythm: cruise-ship days, weekend visitors, conference crowds. It's a scene built to be visited, not necessarily to be lived in.
San Francisco doesn't have Casco's postcard, but it has something a restaurant business actually needs more of: a dense residential population eating there on a random Tuesday, not just a Saturday. That daily, non-seasonal demand is what let the neighbourhood's food scene compound instead of just circulate.
Casco Viejo is where you take a guest for the story. San Francisco is where you actually eat, three nights a week.
Maito — one of the first serious creative-cuisine kitchens to open in the neighbourhood — has been ranked among Latin America's 50 Best Restaurants. La Tapa del Coco, a few blocks over, elevates Afro-Panamanian heritage cooking and has earned the same regional recognition. Around them sits everything else a real neighbourhood needs: Segundo Muelle for Peruvian seafood, Intimo for another take on Peruvian, Casa Tua for Italian, Arro Bistro mixing French, Spanish, and Middle Eastern flavours, El Trapiche for Panamanian and Latin classics, Wall Street Bar and Kitchen for something more casual. Most major cuisines, inside a ten-minute walk, without the heritage-zone markup.
A neighbourhood where locals choose to eat every night — not only where visitors are pointed to once — tends to hold rental and resale demand more evenly across the calendar than a purely tourist-driven district. San Francisco also offers what Casco Viejo structurally can't: room to keep growing, easier parking, and a building stock that isn't capped by heritage code. For STR and residential buyers weighing where demand is durable rather than seasonal, that's worth as much as the menu.
We currently have three projects inside this exact walk: Be Living on Calle 67, a lock-off two-bedroom at The Hub on Calle 74, and lock-off residences at Euphoria Art District, steps from Multiplaza at the seam with Punta Pacífica. If you're evaluating a unit in or near San Francisco, we can walk you through what the neighbourhood's growth means for both rental performance and resale.