CITY GUIDES | RHODE ISLAND

The Newport Restaurants Making Dinner the Main Event

James Beard-recognized chefs, tasting menus, and serious seafood: Newport has plenty of reasons to not just get another lobster roll.

By Maria Rodriguez | June 19, 2026

Bar ’Cino

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’ve learned to make Newport part of my Rhode Island work trips, whether or not the work technically happens there. That’s partly because Newport is easy to romanticize and just as easy to misunderstand, especially if you never get past the mansions, the harbor, and the first lobster roll that wanders into view.

So I stay there anyway. I walk different neighborhoods, take the long way when I can, and keep ending up at new restaurants that make the city feel more interesting than its postcard version. Newport still has the history and the water views, sure, but lately it also has James Beard-recognized chefs, tasting menus, handmade noodles, serious Italian cooking, and new restaurants that give the old coastal town some needed momentum.

Here are the Newport restaurants worth building a trip around.

Audette

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Audette took over the former Bouchard space in 2025, giving one of Newport’s most familiar fine-dining addresses a new French chapter. Chef de cuisine Jasmine Watson, a 2026 James Beard semifinalist for Emerging Chef, leads a menu rooted in classic French cooking, with dishes like beef tartare, lobster thermidor, duck à l’orange, and Dover sole.

Best for: Classic French cooking in a serious new Newport restaurant

Aurelia

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Aurelia is the fine-dining restaurant at Castle Hill Inn, where chef Quentin Diez serves a six-course tasting menu built around coastal New England. The menu changes, but dishes have included local lobster with glazed green asparagus and nettle soup, confit lamb leg with wild watercress, and stuffed white semolina squid.

Best for: A coastal New England tasting menu

Bar ’Cino

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Bar ’Cino is Newport Restaurant Group’s easygoing Italian restaurant on Washington Square, and I like it most for the nights that don’t need to become a production. The menu keeps things familiar but polished, with grilled pizzas, rigatoni bolognese, spaghetti carbonara, chicken Milanese, and mushroom ravioli with marsala butter.

Best for: Casual Italian in downtown Newport

Cara at The Chanler

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Cara is Newport’s most formal tasting-menu restaurant, set inside The Chanler at Cliff Walk. Chef Jacob Jasinski offers five- and eight-course blind tasting menus, with the kind of quiet, polished service that makes sense for a restaurant built around a long dinner rather than a quick night out.

Best for: A special-occasion tasting menu

Flora

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Flora opened inside Gardiner House with chef Miguel Somoza leading a Mediterranean-leaning menu shaped by Spain, New England seafood, and his time cooking for Buckingham Palace and Richard Branson. The restaurant feels stylish without feeling stiff, with handmade pasta, steaks, and enough seafood to keep the whole thing grounded in Newport.

Best for: Mediterranean seafood in a polished hotel restaurant

Giusto

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Giusto is chef Kevin O’Donnell’s “freestyle Italian” restaurant, which means the cooking has Euro structure but with Rhode Island ingredients. O’Donnell, a 2026 James Beard semifinalist for Best Chef: Northeast, turns out dishes like steamed littleneck clams with guanciale, squid ink tempura calamari, and desserts that nod to Del’s Lemonade and coffee milk.

Best for: Italian cooking with a Rhode Island accent

Little Clam

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Little Clam opened at Wayfinder Newport with executive chef Antonio Wormley and consulting chef Jake Rojas building the menu around local seafood, farms, and fishermen. It’s a modern Newport seafood spot, with oysters, fluke crudo, seafood towers, and whole grilled fish. But it also heads on land, with, steak and eggs and a Blackbird Farm burger for anyone who insists on not ordering fish.

Best for: Local seafood in a fresh hotel restaurant

Mother Pizzeria

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Mother Pizzeria comes from the Giusto team of Kevin O’Donnell, Lauren Schaefer, and Kyle Stamps. The restaurant is built around naturally fermented sourdough pizza, local stone-ground flour, snacks, salads, cured meats, and preserved fish, making it one of Newport’s better casual meals from a kitchen with serious credentials.

Best for: Sourdough pizza from the Giusto team

Stoneacre Garden

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Stoneacre Garden started as a three-month summer pop-up during the pandemic, when Stoneacre Hospitality co-owners Christopher Bender and David Crowell needed more outdoor space than the sidewalk at Stoneacre Brasserie could offer. It stuck, becoming the group’s more relaxed, Asian-leaning counterpart to the Brasserie, with seafood, cocktails, a garden setting, and dishes like tuna poke tacos, green curry mussels, kale miso Caesar, and grilled salmon with dashi.

Best for: Seafood, cocktails, and Stoneacre’s looser side

Thames Street Kitchen

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Thames Street Kitchen, or TSK, has returned in a more steakhouse-minded form, but it still has more edge than the usual Newport dinner stop. The restaurant leans into big cuts of beef, cocktails, and a downtown energy that makes it feel more like a place locals would argue over than a restaurant built only for visitors.

Best for: Steakhouse cooking with downtown energy

White Horse Tavern

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White Horse Tavern has been operating since 1673, which makes it America’s oldest restaurant and a National Historic Landmark. The menu keeps the history tied to Rhode Island, with Narragansett Bay fish, clams, and lobster, plus local farm produce, beef Wellington, duck scotch egg, and New England clam chowder served in a colonial tavern that doesn’t need much dressing up.

Best for: Historic Newport with Narragansett Bay seafood

Yagi Noodles

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Yagi Noodles is chef Basil Yu’s handmade noodle shop, and it gives Newport something more interesting than another safe seafood dinner. Yu, a James Beard semifinalist, uses locally milled wheat and blends Japanese, Chinese, and New England influences into bowls and small plates that feel personal without needing a long explanation.

Best for: Handmade noodles from a James Beard-recognized chef