Food capitals and migration: 5 cities that tell the story of movement through place and time
Across the world’s food capitals, dishes often record how people moved, settled and adapted to new surroundings. Recipes changed as migrants traded ingredients, shared methods and adjusted to local tastes. These transformations shaped neighbourhoods and markets and continue to influence how communities cook today. In these food capitals, migration is not a distant history but a living presence seen in everything from hawker stalls to home kitchens. Understanding these cities through their food offers a clear view of how cultures met, shifted and rebuilt themselves through everyday meals.
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Singapore
A melting pot of Malay, Chinese, Indian and Peranakan influences, Singapore’s hawker centres showcase cuisine shaped by centuries of migration (Photo: Dashu83/Freepik)
A melting pot of Malay, Chinese, Indian and Peranakan influences, Singapore’s hawker centres showcase cuisine shaped by centuries of migration (Photo: Dashu83/Freepik)
Singapore is among the classic food capitals that reveal migration’s imprint in every hawker centre. As a port city, it attracted early settlers from China (Hokkien, Teochew, Cantonese, Hainanese), Malaysia, India and beyond. Many hawkers were itinerant, carrying cooking gear on poles and selling dishes from their homelands. Over time, their food adapted to local ingredients, such as pandan, banana leaf, torch ginger and coconut milk.
Hainanese migrants brought what became Singapore’s signature chicken rice: poached chicken and fragrant rice cooked in chicken stock, served with chilli and ginger sauce. But the technique evolved: later hawkers adopted Cantonese methods, such as shocking the chicken in iced water to firm the skin. Meanwhile, Peranakan (Straits Chinese) communities, particularly descendants of Chinese settlers who intermarried with Malay locals, developed laksa, combining Chinese noodles with Malay rempah (spice paste) and coconut milk.
The Indian Muslim population contributed roti prata—a version of the South Indian paratha stretched, folded, fried, and eaten with mutton or fish curry or even sugar. Other cross-cultural creations include rojak: Chinese-style tofu or fritters, Malay fruit or vegetable elements, tossed in a shrimp-paste sauce. Even kaya toast, grilled bread with coconut-egg jam, reflects Hainanese adaptation: immigrants who once worked on colonial ships brought a version of Western toast and reinterpreted it in kopitiams or coffee shops.
Singapore’s hawker centres, originally mobile street stalls, became institutionalised in the mid-20th century to manage crowding and hygiene. Today, they are so central to national identity that Singapore’s hawker culture is inscribed on Unesco’s Intangible Cultural Heritage list. The result is a living archive of migration: food capitals where simple dishes tell complex stories of origin, adaptation and innovation.
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New York City
From bagels to sandwiches, New York’s streets and markets reflect the city’s layered history of European, Asian and Latin American migration (Photo: Freepik)
New York City is widely known as one of the food capitals whose culinary fabric is inseparable from waves of immigration. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, millions of Europeans—Italians, Jews from Eastern Europe, Irish—settled in New York, bringing with them delis, bakeries and trattorias. Jewish immigrants, for instance, introduced bagels, matzo ball soup and hand-carved pastrami sandwiches. Katz’s Delicatessen, open since 1888, remains a living symbol of this history.
Italian migration popularised pizza-by-the-slice, Sunday gravy and tomato-sauce-based comfort food. As Asian immigration increased, Chinatown emerged, offering dim sum, hand-pulled noodles and Peking duck. Interesting social history underlies this: Jewish and Chinese immigrants once lived side by side on the Lower East Side; Chinese restaurants offered a kind of informal refuge because restaurateurs did not object to serving Jews, and Jewish diners felt safe there.
In more recent decades, Latin American and Caribbean communities have further enriched the city’s foodscape. Mexican tacos, Puerto Rican arepas, Dominican stews and West African rice dishes now sit alongside the older immigrant cuisines. And street food remains deeply tied to migration: many of New York’s 4,000 licensed food carts are immigrant-owned, serving kebabs, falafel, tacos, and other portable cuisines.
New York’s cuisine is global because it has always been a destination. It remains a food capital where migration continues to define what the city eats.
Also read: The 5 oldest New York City delis you can still visit today
Istanbul
Istanbul’s kitchens and markets preserve centuries of movement across empires, blending Balkan, Middle Eastern and Anatolian culinary traditions (Photo: KamranAydinov/Freepik)
Istanbul is a food capital shaped over centuries by the mobility of empires, refugees, tradesmen and settler communities. As the heart of the Ottoman Empire, it was a crossroads for people from the Balkans, Caucasus, Middle East and North Africa. The city’s culinary traditions reflect that layered heritage.
One example is Arnavut ciğeri, fried lamb or veal liver cubes seasoned simply with onion and parsley. The name means “Albanian liver”, and it recalls the migration of Albanian communities into Ottoman Istanbul. Dishes like Circassian chicken and Persian rice also speak to the presence of Circassians, Persians and other displaced groups in the city’s past.
Istanbul’s communal food culture, from street food to home kitchens, has absorbed influences from Central Asia, Arab traditions and Balkan cookery. According to historians, refugees, including Tatars, Armenians, and Jews, contributed sweets, olive oil–based hors d’oeuvres, offal stews and seafood preparations. The marketplace, too, is part of that story: public bazaars once offered dried fruits, preserved meats and pulse staples brought from across the empire.
Today, Istanbul remains a living food capital where migration is not just history. Newer waves, including Syrian refugees, continue to layer the city’s cuisine, adding restaurants and food traditions rooted in their own displaced communities. Through food, the city preserves its memory of a perennially mobile population.
Lima
Chinese, Japanese, African and European influences converge in Lima, creating a cuisine that tells the story of migration along Peru’s coast (Photo: Wirestock)
Lima, Peru’s coastal capital, stands among the world’s food capitals whose cuisine is deeply shaped by migration, colonialism and internal movement. As the seat of the Spanish Viceroyalty, Lima absorbed influences from Europe, Africa and Asia. The city’s migration story is written most clearly in dishes that fuse Chinese, Japanese, African and European traditions.
In the 19th century, Chinese labourers arrived in Peru to work in mines and on the railways. Over generations, they adapted their techniques, such as wok-stir-frying, to local ingredients, giving rise to chifa, a Chinese–Peruvian cuisine. Classic chifa dishes like the fried-rice dish arroz chaufa, and the beef-and-potatoes stir-fry lomo saltado illustrate how Chinese cooking styles were recast in a Peruvian register.
In 1899, Japanese immigrants landed in Peru, and their descendants contributed to what is now called Nikkei cuisine, a delicate blend of Japanese technique and Peruvian ingredients. Dishes such as tiradito show how raw-fish traditions transformed under Peruvian citrus, chilli and native produce.
Beyond Asian communities, European immigrants and African influences also left their mark. Cape-style cooking, spices, pastas and breads entered the mix, contributing to Lima’s celebrated gastronomic identity. Internal migration within Peru also played a role: people from rural Andean regions moved into Lima in large numbers, bringing regional cooking styles, market produce and culinary traditions, further enriching the city’s food capital status.
Johannesburg
Johannesburg’s dishes, from bunny chow to chakalaka, reveal the city’s migrant communities and the culinary adaptations forged in urban life (Photo: Carl D. Walsh/Portland Press Herald via Getty Images)
Johannesburg may not be the first city that comes to mind when thinking of food capitals, but its cuisine is deeply infused with migrant histories. The city was born in the gold rush of the late 19th century, drawing people from across South Africa, Africa and beyond. Indian indentured labourers, Cape Malay traders, Chinese merchants and later African migrants all helped build the city and its food.
One of the best-known dishes linked to migrant communities is bunny chow: a hollowed-out loaf of white bread filled with curry. Originally from Durban’s Indian community, it spread across South Africa, including Johannesburg, as Indian cuisine was established in urban centres.
The Cape Malay influence also contributes to Johannesburg’s cuisine via dishes such as bobotie, a spiced minced-meat bake with an egg custard topping that likely draws from Indonesian/Malay spice traditions, carried via Malay communities in South Africa. Meanwhile, chakalaka, a fiery vegetable relish often served with braai or pap, is tied to the influx of Mozambican and other African miners who cooked canned produce with chilli in the townships.
Communal braais in townships, especially in Johannesburg, often centre on shisa nyama, where people grill meat over coals. These gatherings are social as well as culinary, bringing together people with different backgrounds and reinforcing migrant legacies in everyday life. Through its dynamic, evolving food scene, Johannesburg stands as a food capital where migration is constant and embraced.
These five food capitals—Singapore, New York, Istanbul, Lima, Johannesburg—illustrate how migration does more than bring people together: it transforms what is eaten, how meals are made and how communities define themselves. In each city, cuisine is a map of movement, of home reimagined, and of belonging made tangible.
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