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Food guide

How to find good Mediterranean food

Mediterranean on a sign usually means one of several distinct Levantine, Turkish or Persian cuisines, flattened into a single word for an audience assumed not to know the difference. Learning the difference is the whole improvement.

What separates a good one from a bad one

  • Bread made there — Pita or lavash from an oven on site, arriving hot and puffed. This is the most reliable single indicator in the whole category and it is immediately obvious.
  • Hummus that is smooth and warm — Properly made hummus is silky, generously dressed with olive oil, and frequently served warm. Cold, grainy, thick hummus from a tub is the default elsewhere.
  • A real mezze selection — Ten or more small dishes. Muhammara, labneh, baba ganoush, kibbeh, manakish. Depth here means a kitchen cooking a tradition.
  • Charcoal grilling — For kebabs of any kind. Gas produces a fundamentally different and lesser result, and places using charcoal say so.
  • A named country — Lebanese, Turkish, Persian, Palestinian, Syrian, Egyptian, Israeli, Greek. The specificity is the signal.

What to order

  • Lebanese — The mezze tradition at its deepest. Also the best entry point to the region.
  • Turkish — Kebabs, pide, lahmacun, and kahvaltı — the enormous Turkish breakfast spread, which is one of the great meals anywhere.
  • Persian — Rice cooked with a crisp tahdig crust, herb stews like ghormeh sabzi, saffron and dried lime. Distinct from Arab cooking in every direction.
  • Palestinian and Syrian — Musakhan, maqluba, fatteh. Increasingly present in American cities.
  • Egyptian — Koshari — rice, lentils, pasta, fried onion, tomato and vinegar. Cheap, filling and unlike anything else.
  • Greek — Its own tradition, covered separately, and frequently what a Mediterranean sign actually means.

Where to find Mediterranean food

Open listings put 7,239 Mediterranean restaurants across the US. These are the cities and campuses with the most of them.

Cities with the most

New York, NY 253 Chicago, IL 117 Los Angeles, CA 100 San Francisco, CA 80 San Diego, CA 77 Houston, TX 74 Washington, DC 71 Seattle, WA 61 Las Vegas, NV 56 Philadelphia, PA 54 Atlanta, GA 54 Austin, TX 52

Campuses with the most within a mile

The New School 82 FIT 81 CUNY Graduate Center 80 Touro University 79 NYU 77 Baruch 74 Hunter 47 City Colleges of Chicago-Harold Washington College 38 BMCC 34 Pace University 31

A few to start with

Counts are listings in Overture Maps open data (September 2026), counted by the town in each address. Independent places only in the examples above, and they are a starting point rather than a ranking.

How Savor Scout looks for it

Searches in this category try to resolve to a specific cuisine, because Mediterranean as a filter returns everything from a Greek diner to a Persian kebab house. The matcher reads for country-specific dish names and for bread and charcoal mentions, which are the two signals that most reliably separate a real kitchen from a wrap counter.

Find Mediterranean food near you →

Looking in a particular city?

Each of these opens Savor Scout with the location already set, so you can say what you want and it searches from there. It covers 1,000 US cities in total — these are simply the largest.

All 1,000 cities →

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