Riga for foodies

Best restaurants

Riga is a city of short distances and stubborn culinary loyalties, where a walk through the old town moves you from a regional Latvian dining room to a Japanese-Peruvian counter to a late-night kebab. The twelve restaurants below are picked for what arrives on the plate, not for the marketing. Some open at noon and shut by ten; one runs until 02:00 on weekends; one stays dark on Mondays because the chef would rather lose a service than fake one. They are not all the same kind of room, and they are not pretending to be: regional Latvian alongside Russian, Nikkei alongside Uzbek, a steak house alongside a Turkish kebab counter. What unifies them is honesty: each cooks something it knows how to cook, and each owns up to it on the door. Read this as a map of one walk through Riga, not a ranking of the same dish in twelve forms.