CITY GUIDES | NORTHEAST
These Are the Best Restaurants in Newark Right Now
Here’s proof Newark has been underrated for too long
By Maria Rodriguez | April 25, 2026
Fornos of Spain
AUTHOR BIO: With a day job that requires constant travel, Maria Rodriguez is likely a regular at your favorite restaurant. She’s reviewed restaurants since 2007 in magazines from Spain to Seattle.
I grew up in New York, which means I inherited the usual bad habit of assuming every serious dinner required a subway ride and someone at the table pretending to understand natural wine. Newark has always been close enough to disprove that theory.
My family has roots here, and work still brings me to Newark often enough that the city has become one of my favorite assignments. There’s always another street-corner taqueria, another seafood institution I should’ve tried years ago, another chef-owned bistro making the case that Newark belongs high on any list of America’s best food cities.
The Ironbound still anchors the Newark restaurant scene with its Portuguese and Spanish dining rooms, but the city’s best meals now stretch well beyond the old standbys. From handmade tortillas and Brazilian sandwiches to Georgian-Mediterranean plates and polished Italian cooking, Newark has the evidence all over town. Here are the best restaurants in Newark right now.
Adega Grill
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Adega Grill is my polished Ironbound pick, with stone fireplaces, live piano, white tablecloths, and a Portuguese-Spanish menu built for a longer dinner. The name means wine cellar in Portuguese, and the restaurant takes that seriously with more than 180 wines, plus seafood, fish, organic meats, seasonal specials, and rodizio cooked over fire. Dinner here always feels like an occasion even before the first pour of sangria hits the table.
Best for: A dressed-up Ironbound dinner
Burke’s Tavern
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Chef Lynda Molina and Diego Fonseca left the New York restaurant world in 2022 and created what may be Newark’s Best neighborhood bistro. The space has a tavern’s bones, but the menu pushes past the obvious, with Moroccan lamb meatballs, Bangkok fried shrimp, a gochu fried chicken sandwich, and some very good pizzas. Well-shaken cocktails make Burke’s useful before or after whatever’s happening across the street at Prudential Center. But it’s also simply the rare restaurant that I’ll use as a bar, a date-night stop, and a proper dinner.
Best for: Cocktails and comfort-fusion plates near Prudential Center
Casa d’Paco
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Casa d’Paco comes from chef Paco Leston, who grew up in Galicia, studied finance at Rutgers, worked at Newark Airport, and then opened the kind of Spanish restaurant that still feels tied to his biography. The menu is heavy on Galician and Spanish staples: Galician soup, pulpo a feira, chipirones, garlic shrimp, patatas bravas, and mar y tierra with sirloin medallions and lobster. It’s small, busy, and seafood-forward, with enough personal history behind it to keep the tapas from feeling like an imported restaurant trend.
Best for: Galician tapas and seafood
Five Corners Ristorante
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Five Corners Ristorante comes from the Sihana team, including Kreshnik Berisha, Dato Khabuliani, Gabe Ribeiro, and chef Kevin Kopaliani, who studied under two-star Michelin chef Charbel Aoun. The restaurant opened in 2023 with a modern Italian-and-Mediterranean menu that includes carbonara with guanciale and egg yolk, shrimp and lemon tagliatelle, seafood risotto, truffle gnocchi, lamb chops with parmigiano mashed potatoes, and pavlova with lemon curd.
Best for: Modern takes on Italian classics
Fornos of Spain
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Fornos of Spain is the Ironbound restaurant for people who believe dinner should arrive in waves. The kitchen is known for Spanish seafood, big portions, and a wine cellar with more than 450 aged and vintage wines, while the table still fills with bread, olives, salad, rice, vegetables, and fried potatoes before the main plates land. The move here is paella, seafood, duck, or churros with chocolate, though pretending to order lightly at Fornos feels like showing up to a parade and asking for silence.
Best for: Big Spanish seafood dinners
Hamburgao
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Hamburgao is a Brazilian luncheonette where the sandwiches have no interest in restraint. The signature Hamburgao beef stacks steak, mozzarella, ham, bacon, egg, corn, potato sticks, lettuce, tomato, and mayo into one deeply unreasonable and very persuasive object. The counter also serves pão de queijo, coxinha, Brazilian pastries, açaí, breakfast plates, and party-size salgados, which makes it one of the more useful cheap meals in Newark.
Best for: Brazilian sandwiches and salgados
Mompou Tapas
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Mompou gave the Ironbound a more modern tapas room without stripping away the neighborhood’s appetite. Founder Steven Yglesias built its early reputation, and current owner Tony Martinez has kept the restaurant centered on Spanish and Catalan cooking, with tapas, paella, sangria, cocktails, small-producer wines, and tomato salad. It’s stylish, but not sterile, which matters in a category where too many tapas restaurants mistake dim lighting for a personality.
Best for: Tapas and sangria in the Ironbound
Pic-Nic Restaurant
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Pic-Nic is built around Portuguese seafood and grilled meats, and it doesn’t need much more of a thesis than that. The kitchen works through grilled fish, octopus, chicken, ribs, bitoque with egg and potatoes, shrimp in garlic sauce, bacalhau à brás, cod with cream, paella, sangria, and large seafood platters for tables that don’t believe dinner should arrive politely. It’s generous, old-neighborhood cooking, with the grill and the seafood doing the work.
Best for: Portuguese seafood and small plates
Seabra’s Marisqueira
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Seabra’s Marisqueira has been serving Portuguese seafood since 1989, keeping us regulars with dishes like octopus salad, arroz de marisco, paelha à Valenciana, mariscada, frutos do mar na cataplana, acorda de marisco, bacalhau grelhado, grilled red snapper, lobster tails, prawns, and king crab legs. It’s family-run and unfussy, with the kind of menu that makes my family start debating who’s ordering what long before we get there.
Best for: Portuguese seafood feasts
Sihana Bistro
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Sihana Bistro is the downtown Newark pick with the most interesting range, from Georgian pides to Mediterranean plates like chicken parm, along with cocktails made in collaboration with Newark’s All Points West Distillery. The restaurant comes from Kreshnik Berisha and David Khabuliani, the team behind Five Corners Ristorante, and the menu includes khinkali, imeruli cheese bread, falafel with lemon-twist hummus, octopus with parmesan mashed potato, beef tartare, steak frites, Adjaruli khachapuri, and the Sihana Burger with caramelized onions and dill emulsion. It gives downtown Newark a restaurant that feels current without losing the owner-driven specificity that makes the best neighborhood restaurants work.
Best for: Georgian-Mediterranean food downtown
Taqueria Morelos
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Handmade tortillas and salsa anchor a menu that moves from tacos into ceviche de camarón, cóctel de camarón, queso fundido, pozole, pancita, caldo de res, quesabirria, fajitas, nopalitos, and plates that look more careful than the usual quick taqueria shorthand. The tacos are still what I usually order, especially al pastor, chorizo, and the other tortilla-first classics. It’s the place on the list for masa, soup, seafood, and a reminder that the phrase “let’s just get tacos” is never a compromise.
Best for: Handmade tortillas and composed Mexican plates
The Yard
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The Yard comes from Kai Campbell, a third-generation Newarker behind Burger Walla and Bragman’s Delicatessen, and it sits inside Military Park with a menu shaped by burgers, soul food, and the African diaspora. The oxtail burger is the headline, but the shrimp burger, sweet potato tots, Beyond Burger wrap, strawberry lemonade, and grilled pound cake help explain why I’m here so often. Newark has plenty of restaurants with deeper history, but The Yard feels like the city in present tense: owner-driven, casual, inventive, and attracting attention way beyond the city’s borders.
Best for: Oxtail burgers and lunch in Military Park
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