Puerto Vallarta for first-time visitors

Best restaurants

Puerto Vallarta eats on two clocks. One runs on the Malecón, where kitchens open at breakfast and close near midnight to catch the cruise-day and the sunset-cocktail crowd; the other runs inland through Versalles and 5 de Diciembre, where lunch is the main meal and the shutters come down by early evening. This list is built for a visitor who wants both. It leans on twelve addresses that OpenStreetMap has verified, from a Guadalupe Sánchez fine-dining room at 20.6117 latitude down to a 48313 marisquería in the northern colonias, and it treats hours and phone numbers as facts, not suggestions. You will find a French bistro on Hidalgo, a Korean rice-dog counter on Juárez, a taqueria that is 100% Vegan on Nicaragua, and two seafood stops that trade the beachfront markup for a plastic chair and better fish. The through-line is address discipline: everything below is where the map says it is, at the hour the operator files, at the number that rings a real kitchen.