Like many things, Cape Town will explain this - but let's not get to the Western Cape yet. Let's talk about Lima for a second. Yes, it's a bit weird to hail a city for not being pretentious and then also say one of your main drivers to come is to experience meals at three of the Top-30 restaurants in the World - and more pointedly two in the Top-10 (and the current #1). Yes, they are there, and they're expensive, but even the experiences at Maido, Central and Mayta help prove this point. They serve exotic food, are not white table-cloth places, are not unneccessarily tweezy and very much not like sikmilar restaurants in London or Paris. And they are the absolute maximum of the pretension.
The rest of the city just doesn't have that. Their most reputed cocktail bar - Carnaval - is like its name says more a place to have a raucously good time. Their clubs are not super exclusive with lists and stuff, but just places with a lot of people having a great time. Their bohemian neighborhood actually is one - with its most popular bar - Ayahuasca - being a giant house with many rooms with couches and again no long waits or super pretentious folk. I can't truly speak to the pretension of the people but from waht I've witnessed at least they are all nice, down to earth, and proudly Peruvian. For one of the biggest tourist cities in the World - the biggest in South America - Peru has done a great job of just being.
In a bit I'll do a short list of others - but what I find more and more is cities that have this intersection of great cultural vibrancy, with the modern trappings you want from a tourist mecca, are what attracts me the most. But it is a fine line. Ho Chi Minh City is another very much like this - an incredible joy of their people proud to be building something special in the Mekong, a great vibrancy of their culture in their food, art and religion.
Leaving aside the London's for a second, I think what's an easier comparison to maybe put into words is comparing Lima and Ho Chi Minh City with two places in their orbit that I think maybe tip too far on the other side, Buenos Aires for South America, and Bangkok for Southeast Asia.
Bangkok because it is basically selling glamour, intrigue and exclusivity at this point, a Southeast Asia version of Dubai. Now there are some great places in the city for sure, but to find the Gaggan's (again, probably not fair to build this point using a restaurant that costs $300) and #FindTheLockerRoom's you have to navigate around velvet-rope clubs, glistening malls, scores of luxury auto dealers adn the like. Buenos Aires is probably a bit close to getting it right, but their top options, especially in terms of nightlife, are far more European in their pretension (including highly selective cocktail bars) than Latin. The reason I prefer Lima to Buenos Aires (only heightened after this most recent visit), or HCMC to Bangkok, basically comes down to this.
It's also not just cost of living and cost of touring, though I'm sure the correlation there is pretty strong. For instance, Seoul I found to have surprisingly low levels of pretension outside of say Gangnam (and even there, places like Alice were more whimsical), despite it all being the cost of Western Europe. The Koreans are for the most part happy you are there, and happy for you to enjoy their culture, not trying to either (a) sell you on something that isn't really how it is, like a Bangkok, or (b) annoyed you deign to try to experience the culture, like a London.
In the end, you can't just visit low pretension cities, and avoid the high. You also never know when things change - a few more years of development and Lima may swerve that way (as Cape Town may get to as well). There's also good stuff to enjoy in cities with a high level of pretension, even if that becomes annoying to deal with over time. But the world (and by the way - a ton of US cities are in the "high pretension" camp) can learn a lot from cities like Lima, Ho Chi Minh City adn others.
