CITY GUIDES | NORTH CAROLINA
The Best Restaurants Right Now in High Point
Whether you’re here for the Furniture Market or just looking for High Point’s best restaurant tonight, we’ve got you covered.
By Eric Barton
Updated July 29, 2026
Giannos
AUTHOR BIO: Eric Barton is editor of The Adventurist and a freelance journalist who has reviewed restaurants for more than two decades. Email him here.
For much of the year, High Point is a North Carolina city with a quietly solid restaurant scene. Then the furniture market arrives, thousands of visitors start hunting for dinner reservations, and every good table suddenly becomes contested territory. That twice-yearly rush has helped support a dining scene built for more than one kind of customer, with longtime neighborhood restaurants, ambitious downtown arrivals, serious international cooking, and places that understand a plate of barbecue still solves quite a few problems. These are the best restaurants in High Point, NC, for market week and every week after it.
98 Asian Bistro
$$$ | MAP | WEBSITE | INSTAGRAM
Owners Tu and Todd Sen spent years in the local restaurant business before opening 98 Asian Bistro, where a gold Buddha, carved wood, and enough visual drama to fill a much larger city surround some of High Point’s most dependable Thai cooking. The menu moves well beyond the familiar pad Thai, although that’s here too. Start with the crispy string beans, then consider the Laos vermicelli in coconut-curry broth, ground chicken with basil, or drunken noodles carrying enough heat to make the next bite seem like a questionable decision.
Best for: Thai food in a dining room built to impress
Aquí es México
$$ | MAP | WEBSITE | INSTAGRAM
Nicolas “Nico” Vazquez spent two decades cooking in Mexico, California, Cleveland, and Atlanta before taking over a struggling High Point restaurant and making it unmistakably his own. Murals inspired by Tulum and Puerto Vallarta cover the dining room, while the menu runs from traditional Mexican cooking to seafood and five sushi rolls, including a Hot Cheetos roll that has become the bestseller. On weekend nights, the tables eventually move and the restaurant turns into a dance floor, which is one way to ensure nobody asks for the check too early.
Best for: Dinner when nobody is ready to go home
Blue Rock Pizza and Tap
$$$ | MAP | WEBSITE | INSTAGRAM
Blue Rock Pizza and Tap treats pizza toppings with the democratic enthusiasm of someone who has never understood why butternut squash, crawfish, and red curry should be kept in separate conversations. The music-themed menu includes the Moon Dance, layered with chicken, prosciutto, squash, sun-dried tomatoes, and pesto, and the Ramble on Rose, built on vodka sauce with sausage, mushrooms, caramelized onions, and ricotta. The dining room is casual, the beer list is long, and nobody will look concerned when the table orders one more pie than it reasonably needs.
Best for: Craft beer and pizzas that ignore the usual rules
Blue Water Grille
$$$$ | MAP | WEBSITE | INSTAGRAM
Blue Water Grille has spent years proving that High Point can sustain a seafood restaurant where dinner feels important, though not important enough to require whispering. The low-lit Emerywood dining room works equally well for a date, a business dinner, or relatives who expect white tablecloths whenever they visit. Fresh fish can be paired with orange-chipotle, soy-ginger, or lemon–Old Bay butter, while the kitchen also turns out crab bisque, fried green tomatoes with smoked trout, and a filet finished with smoky blue cheese butter and cabernet-thyme demi-glace.
Best for: Seafood and a proper night out
Chop House at Mendenhall
$$$$ | MAP | WEBSITE | INSTAGRAM
The Chop House at Mendenhall understands its assignment: steaks, cold drinks, attentive service, and enough space for the entire furniture-market delegation. The dining room has the comfortable formality of a place that has hosted countless anniversaries, expense-account dinners, and conversations that began with “Let’s order first.” Certified Angus Beef anchors the menu, alongside sashimi tuna, crab cocktail, cabernet mushrooms, seafood, and chops. High Point has acquired newer and flashier dining rooms, but the Chop House remains useful precisely because it knows what it is.
Best for: Steaks, business dinners, and large celebrations
Earl’s Landing
$$$$ | MAP | WEBSITE | INSTAGRAM
Earl’s Landing occupies the polished end of Congdon Yards, the former mill complex that has become part of downtown High Point’s reinvention. The Mason Jar Group opened the restaurant with chef Noah Stone, pairing a sleek dining room designed by local firm Barbour Spangle with modern American cooking and tables made next door at The Generator. The current menu includes lobster nachos, house-made pappardelle with shrimp scampi, wild boar shank, halibut over snow-pea risotto, and steaks rubbed with a coffee-forward spice blend. It is built for celebrations, though the 44-ounce tomahawk may require a second occasion.
Best for: A downtown dinner with occasion-level ambition
Frady’s Taphouse & Eatery
$$$ | MAP | WEBSITE | INSTAGRAM
Eric Frady’s path to restaurant ownership began with Frady Family Farms outside Thomasville, an attempt to get closer to the source of what he was cooking and eating. He and Stacy Dunn carried that farm-minded approach into Frady’s Taphouse & Eatery in 2022, pairing local craft beer with smoked meats, burgers, and hearty Southern food. It still feels like a neighborhood taphouse—live music, patio tables, regulars at the bar—but there’s an actual kitchen here, and the smoke coming from it provides a convincing reason to stay for dinner.
Best for: Local beer and smoked meats on the patio
Giannos
$$$ | MAP | WEBSITE | INSTAGRAM
Giannos has the cheerful volume of a restaurant where at least three tables are celebrating birthdays and somebody has just discovered the dessert tray. The Italian-American menu is built for appetite: wood-fired pizzas, steaks, customizable pastas, garlic knots, arancini, and the chicken Corfu, a longstanding favorite. Lunch brings an all-you-can-eat pizza buffet, an arrangement that requires more restraint than most of us possess. Come for a quick plate of pasta, and there’s a fair chance you’ll leave carrying enough leftovers to reconsider tomorrow’s plans.
Best for: Big Italian dinners and even bigger portions
Odeh’s Mediterranean Kitchen
$$ | MAP | WEBSITE | INSTAGRAM
The Odeh family imports spices from relatives in Nazareth, cuts its meats and vegetables each day, and makes the sauces in-house at Odeh’s Mediterranean Kitchen. That attention shows up in food that doesn’t need an elaborate dining room to announce itself. Shawarma, kafta, falafel, and kabobs arrive with hummus, rice, vegetables, and the kind of seasoning that makes the food at many fast-casual Mediterranean restaurants seem timid. Desserts come from the family’s nearby Mama Bear’s Sweet Shop, which makes skipping the final course an especially poor display of discipline.
Best for: Family-made Mediterranean food and homemade desserts
Sammy G’s Tavern
$$$ | MAP | WEBSITE | INSTAGRAM
Sammy Gianopoulos started washing dishes at age 12 and learned the restaurant business from his father, Terry, before joining restaurateur Johnny Crisp to build what became Crisp Hospitality Group. Sammy G’s Tavern is the crowd-pleasing center of that operation, polished enough for a business meal but relaxed enough that a burger doesn’t feel like surrender. The menu covers royal Thai shrimp, sesame tuna, a bourbon pork chop, seafood pasta, ribeye, and the Sammy G burger, a range that helps explain why mixed groups tend to end up here.
Best for: Groups in which nobody wants the same thing
Southern Roots
$$$ | MAP | WEBSITE | INSTAGRAM
Southern Roots sits just beyond High Point in Jamestown, but removing it over a municipal boundary would require pretending people decide where to eat by consulting a zoning map. Owner Lisa Hawley built the restaurant into a local institution while also founding Feeding Lisa’s Kids, which provides food to children in the community. The cozy Main Street dining room serves scratch-made Southern cooking shaped by local farms and a menu that changes with the seasons; grilled okra has become a favorite, though the kitchen’s strength is making vegetables feel like part of dinner rather than an obligation beside it.
Best for: Seasonal Southern cooking with a strong local following
Sweet Old Bill’s
$$$ | MAP | WEBSITE | INSTAGRAM
Sweet Old Bill’s gives High Point a barbecue restaurant with a wider field of vision than chopped pork alone. The smokers turn out Lexington-style pork, Texas-style brisket, St. Louis ribs, chicken with Alabama white sauce, and house-smoked pastrami for a Reuben that may be the menu’s smartest move. The Uptowne dining room is casual and busy, with burgers, pork skins, skillet cornbread, and enough range to keep the table from ordering the same thing.
Best for: A barbecue tour without leaving the table
The Ultimate Asheville, Where the Mountains Meet the City
Looking for the best hotels, restaurants, and things to do in this capital of the Blue Ridge Mountains? We've got you covered.
D.C.’s Best Restaurants Keep Moving the Goalposts
Just when our list of Washington, D.C., restaurants feels settled, two more great spots open in the capital.
