CITY GUIDES | MISSOURI

A Field Guide to Columbia’s Best Restaurants

Here in the center of Missouri, there’s live-fire barbacoa, handmade pasta, and enough biscuits to require a second morning.

By Jamie Dutton | Aug. 8, 2026

Barred Owl

AUTHOR BIO: With family across the Midwest and a job that has her constantly in airports, Jamie Dutton travels the Heartland regularly. She’s partial to BPTs and Bell's.

Downtown Columbia spreads out from Broadway toward the red-brick campus of the University of Missouri, with restaurants filling the narrow blocks between Ninth Street and the old warehouses north of town. Mid-Missouri farms are close enough that their eggs, pork, greens, and tomatoes appear by name on menus, though the cooking travels considerably farther: Ethiopian stews served over injera, handmade Italian pasta, shawarma, wood-fired carnitas, and biscuits buried under oyster-mushroom gravy. This is a college town, a thriving Midwest midsize city, and it’s also home to a fine food scene. Here are the best restaurants in Columbia right now.

Barred Owl Butcher Columbia Missouri Best Restaurants

Barred Owl Butcher & Table

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At Barred Owl, the menu follows the farms, meaning what you find on one visit may have disappeared by the next. The kitchen practices whole-animal butchery, turning Missouri beef and pork into charcuterie, pastas, and thick cuts with deeply browned edges. The bar follows the same restless approach, pressing juices, making cordials, and finding new uses for bourbon. There is a lot going on here, but it never feels like a demonstration. Mostly, it feels like a group of cooks and bartenders paying very close attention.

Best for: Cocktails and a locally sourced dinner

Beet Box

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The menu board at Beet Box changes so often that studying it online offers limited protection. On most days, there will be chicken shawarma, lamb koobideh, falafel, hummus bowls, and za’atar fries with harissa mayo. Breakfast might mean a burrito stuffed with koobideh or a black-garlic biscuit carrying eggs and cheese. The pastry case is even less predictable, moving through babka, pop tarts, danishes, and fat cookies. Sunday brunch sells out with some regularity. Columbia has apparently decided it can make decisions quickly when biscuits and lamb gravy are involved.

Best for: Shawarma, pastries, and Sunday brunch

Cafe Berlin

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Weekend mornings bring a line to Cafe Berlin, where breakfast rarely means two eggs and a quiet piece of toast. The Starving Artist lands as a biscuit buried under potatoes, sautéed greens, eggs, and chipotle vegetarian gravy. The Carey burrito takes a stranger route, wrapping eggs, feta, apples, potatoes, and cilantro together with tzatziki on the side. Somehow, it works. Nearby farms supply much of the meat, eggs, and produce, while vegetarians get enough choices to require actual consideration. The coffee helps with that.

Best for: A substantial brunch with vegetarian options

Cherry Street Cellar

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Cherry Street Cellar sits below street level in downtown Columbia, a fitting location for a restaurant where one bottle of wine can quietly lead to another. The menu changes with the Midwest growing season, moving between oysters, vegetables, fish, and carefully cooked meats. Boutique and organic producers fill an international wine list that rewards asking questions, especially if the answer involves something unfamiliar from France or Italy. Dinner here unfolds slowly, with another plate arriving, another glass being poured, and the evening making fewer demands than it did upstairs.

Best for: Date night with a serious bottle of wine

Endwell Taverna

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At Endwell Taverna, cooks turn flour and eggs into fresh pasta served in rotating dishes. That pasta becomes cacio e pepe, shrimp pappardelle in saffron butter, or chicken riggies, an upstate New York specialty with sweet and hot peppers. The pizzas move between a restrained margherita and combinations involving broccolini, anchovy, lemon, or house-made ’nduja. Later, the kitchen cuts New York-style slices for the downtown crowd. Handmade pasta at dinner and pizza after midnight may represent two different plans, though Endwell makes room for both.

Best for: Handmade pasta followed by a late-night slice

Flyover

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A wood-fired oven glows at the center of Flyover, where cooks send Midwestern ingredients through flames and see where they land. Cauliflower gets the chicken-fried treatment and arrives over smoked sweet potato purée with goat cheese and arugula chimichurri. Pork shoulder becomes Midwestern carnitas, flanked by roasted hominy and a sharp peppadew-caper salsa. The dishes are built for sharing, which allows the table to cover nearly every section of the menu. Regional whiskey and cocktails follow, and soon enough the entire evening belongs to the Midwest.

Best for: Shareable plates and cocktails around the wood-fired oven

Irene’s

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The fire does much of the work at Irene’s, where the cooking crosses Texas, Mexico, the Caribbean, and the American South. Beef barbacoa, green-chile pulled pork, achiote chicken, and carne asada arrive on platters with house-made tortillas, salsas, and vegetable sides. The restaurant began as the Barbacoas del Norte pop-up before Joshua Smith, one of the owners of Barred Owl, gave it a permanent address in the Arcade District. Behind the bar, shelves of mezcal offer several ways to remain a while after the platters have been cleared.

Best for: Live-fire cooking and mezcal

Mahi’s Ethiopian Kitchen

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The smell of onions and spices leads down a pedestrian alley to Mahi’s Ethiopian Kitchen, a small restaurant built around the cooking chef Mahi learned beside her mother in Kenya. Doro wot, kitfo, beef tibs, lentils, greens, and stewed cabbage arrive across broad sheets of tangy injera. The sample platter is the sensible first order, gathering several dishes together and removing the need for negotiations. Everyone tears off pieces of bread, reaches toward the middle, and discovers fairly quickly which stew they had hoped nobody else would finish.

Best for: A communal meal of stews, vegetables, and injera

Murry’s

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The lights stay low at Murry’s, where jazz drifts through the dining room and a long menu holds three decades of accumulated favorites. There are fried oysters and chicken livers, an Italian salad, a tuna sandwich with pesto and feta, and chicken poblano settled over mashed potatoes. Regulars tend to arrive already knowing what they want. Desserts change nightly and fill a separate list with brownies, cheesecakes, ice cream tortes, and many forms of chocolate. Since 1985, Columbia has changed considerably. Murry’s has mostly kept playing.

Best for: Live jazz and an old-school Columbia dinner

Ozark Mountain Biscuit & Bar

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Ozark Mountain Biscuit began as a food truck, although the biscuit eventually required a permanent address. At the restaurant, it holds fried eggs and pimento cheese, carries a Wagyu burger with crispy onions, and arrives split beneath sausage gravy. There is also a vegetarian gravy made with local oyster mushrooms, an uncommon courtesy in this part of the breakfast menu. Fried green tomatoes, shrimp and grits, waffles, and strong coffee fill the table around it. Weekend crowds often form outside, everyone waiting patiently for flour, butter, and gravity to do their work.

Best for: Biscuits and a leisurely weekend brunch

Pasta La Fata

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Behind the counter at Pasta La Fata, fresh dough become linguine, rigatoni, fusilli, and ravioli. The hot menu changes through the week, perhaps pairing linguine with butter, lemon, and Parmigiano-Reggiano or folding local pork into a slow-cooked ragù. Panzerotti emerge from the fryer swollen with meatballs, spinach, or spicy chicken and artichokes. Then there is the pastry case, stocked with cannoli, bombas, cakes, and Italian cookies. Before leaving, most people inspect the freezer of lasagna, meatballs, and sauces. Tomorrow’s dinner tends to follow them home.

Best for: Fresh pasta now and lasagna for the freezer

Pizza Tree

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Pizza Tree occupies a narrow downtown storefront painted with enough color to be visible long before you reach the door. Inside, the cooks make dough, sauces, and toppings for pizzas that rarely copy every other pizza joint’s playbook. One combines roasted garlic, pesto chicken, olives, tomatoes, and two kinds of mozzarella. Another puts macaroni and cheese on the crust. The pepperoni pie is simpler, covered with Ezzo slices that curl into little cups in the oven. Order at the window, find a seat outside, and watch Columbia pass by on Cherry Street.

Best for: Creative slices after a night downtown