CITY GUIDES | NEW YORK

The 11 Best Restaurants in Ithaca Right Now

From Moosewood’s vegetarian legacy to tacos that began in a metal shack, these 11 restaurants explain how the city eats.

By Maria Rodriguez | Aug. 13, 2026

Moosewood’s

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 come to Ithaca regularly for work, which means plenty of time climbing Cornell’s hills, circling the Commons for parking, and finding out where the city eats. The best restaurants in Ithaca, New York, reflect the people who arrived from Vietnam, Mexico, Italy, France, and across the Middle East and began cooking. From Moosewood’s vegetarian legacy to handmade pasta, malawach, pho, and tacos born in a metal shack, these are the Ithaca restaurants worth planning a visit around.

Allechant Ithaca New York Best Restaurants

Alléchant

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Alléchant occupies a storefront in Cayuga Heights where the food moves freely between France, the Mediterranean, and whatever else the kitchen finds interesting. At brunch, that means lemon soufflé pancakes, quiche Lorraine, and French toast stuffed with mascarpone. Dinner might begin with saffron-scented mussels before moving on to boeuf bourguignon, ricotta gnocchi in Gorgonzola cream, or miso-glazed sea bass over sesame-ginger soba noodles. It’s a menu with a wandering accent, but one that always seems to know where it’s going.

Best for: A brunch worthy of reservations

CDMX Tacos

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Before CDMX Tacos moved downtown, Eduardo Acevedo cooked from a small metal shack outside Ithaca ReUse, an unlikely location for what became one of the city’s most devoted food followings. The operation has grown, but the menu remains mostly a list of good decisions: al pastor with pineapple, carne asada, pollo, chorizo, lengua, birria, and a vegan taco. The tortillas arrive loaded enough that eating one neatly requires either considerable skill or an unreasonable amount of confidence.

Best for: Tacos with a devoted local following

Gola Osteria

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Gola Osteria can be difficult to find inside the old Quarry Arms apartment building, where limited signage makes the first visit feel a bit like arriving at someone else’s dinner party. Inside, chef Sam Epps turns out handmade pasta, mozzarella, ricotta, sauces, and whatever else the farms of New York and Pennsylvania have supplied that week. There might be grilled octopus with piquillo aioli, crostone layered with prosciutto and anchovy, or pasta with local chanterelles and black summer truffles. Finding the entrance is rewarded quickly.

Best for: Handmade pasta in an unlikely location

The Heights Restaurant

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The Heights opened in 1995 in Cayuga Heights, a mile from Cornell and far enough uphill to feel removed from the bustle below. James and Heidi Larounis built the restaurant around Mediterranean-influenced American cooking, with steaks, seafood, and seasonal specials leading the menu. Then there’s the wine cellar: more than 400 bottles, with selections from the Finger Lakes alongside familiar regions abroad. The restaurant has held Wine Spectator recognition since 1999, which means choosing dinner may be easier than choosing what to drink with it.

Best for: Opening a serious bottle of wine

Le Café Cent-Dix

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Le Café Cent-Dix looks and cooks like a French bistro that somehow landed on Ithaca’s Restaurant Row. The menu is short and written largely in French, with escargots, steak tartare, roast chicken, and steak frites joined by nightly specials of duck confit, scallops, moules frites, or côte de boeuf for two. Tables fill quickly, and the restaurant accepts no reservations. Arrive early, put your name down, and consider the wait a useful first course.

Best for: An evening of butter and Bordeaux

Lev Kitchen

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Malawach, the flaky Yemenite Jewish flatbread at the center of Lev Kitchen’s menu, crackles a little when bitten and then sends whatever is inside toward the other end. Those fillings might include lamb merguez, falafel, za’atar chicken, halloumi, or fried oyster mushrooms, layered with hummus, schug, tahini slaw, and pickled vegetables. The fries come covered in Urfa aioli, date syrup, chèvre, peppers, and cilantro. Even breakfast runs through malawach, proving a good flatbread can apparently handle an entire day’s work.

Best for: Discovering what malawach can do

Mercato Bar & Kitchen

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Mercato opened on Aurora Street in 2010 with a small dining area, no reservations, and a menu that changes with the farms around Ithaca. House-made pasta usually provides the center of the meal, perhaps filled with spinach, cut into wide ribbons, or shaped into gnocchi. Market fish, chicken liver, seasonal vegetables, Finger Lakes wines, and cocktails fill in the rest. There can be a wait on busy evenings, when the line outside serves as fairly reliable evidence that half the city had the same dinner plan.

Best for: Seasonal pasta on Restaurant Row

Moosewood Restaurant

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Moosewood began in 1973 with a collection of idealistic cooks, a chalkboard menu, and the fairly radical notion that vegetables could carry dinner. The restaurant went on to win a James Beard America’s Classics Award, while its cookbooks found their way into millions of homes, including plenty where tofu had previously been viewed with suspicion. New ownership has updated the menu, but soups, curries, grains, local produce, and the black bean burger still connect the restaurant to its past. Few places in Ithaca come with this much history before the appetizers arrive.

Best for: A meal inside American vegetarian history

Saigon Kitchen

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The Lam family opened Saigon Kitchen to share the food they knew from Vietnam, though the size of the menu suggests they had trouble deciding where to stop. Pho comes with aromatic broth and piles of noodles, while summer rolls, crispy squid, curries, chow fun, wok-fried dishes, and the spicy Saigon soup offer several other directions. Portions are generous, especially once everyone begins ordering for the table. What starts as a bowl of pho can quickly become enough food to cover most of the available surface.

Best for: Pho followed by too many shared plates

Simeon's Ithaca New York Best Restaurants

Simeon’s American Bistro

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Simeon’s sits behind tall windows at one of the busiest corners of the Ithaca Commons, where dinner comes with a steady parade of students, professors, visitors, and people trying to remember where they parked. The menu leans toward fresh oysters, seafood, steaks, and house-made pasta, backed by a long wine list and cocktails that encourage lingering. The historic building draws the eye first, but the corner view gives the restaurant its rhythm. Ithaca passes by while the oysters disappear.

Best for: Oysters with a view of the Commons

Thompson and Bleecker

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The pizzas at Thompson and Bleecker arrive with blistered crusts, soft centers, and the slightly irregular circles that indicate a person made them. The margherita keeps things simple with tomato, mozzarella, basil, and olive oil, while spicier and more elaborate combinations fill out the menu. Fresh pasta, chicken Parmesan, honey-whipped ricotta, tiramisu, organic wines, and craft beer make it possible to wander well beyond pizza. Still, it’s hard to sit near the oven and pretend that wasn’t why you came.

Best for: Blistered pizza and organic wine