CITY GUIDES | PENNSYLVANIA

College’s Best Restaurants Go Well Beyond Game Day

By Maria Rodriguez | Aug. 5, 2026

Grace at Carnegie House

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 been traveling to State College regularly for years, often arriving to find blue-and-white flags hanging from porches and the sidewalks along College Avenue flowing toward Beaver Stadium. Penn State football supplies the city’s loudest identity, enough to make everything else seem like background noise. My trips now take me past downtown into Pine Grove Mills and over the ridges beyond, where chefs serve Cuban fritas in an old Odd Fellows hall and tasting menus beside creeks; back near campus, Oaxacan mole, and Sichuan maocai have joined taverns that predate several generations of students. After enough visits, I’ve learned that the best restaurants in State College begin to appear once the stadium slips out of view. Here are the best State College restaurants right now.

Allen Street Grill

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For more than 40 years, diners have headed to the second floor of Hotel State College, where tall windows look down on the comings and goings at College Avenue and Allen Street. After taking over the kitchen in October 2024, chef Alex Singh has brought a bit more adventure to the old perch, has put out dishes like foraged-ramp risotto with charred peppers, Parmigiano Reggiano, mozzarella, and pine nuts. Beverage director Chris Peters, meanwhile, has assembled a wine list heavy on biodynamic bottles, providing something interesting to drink while watching State College move along below.

Best for: Dinner overlooking downtown State College

Bistrozine

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Joe Liu spent years traveling through Europe and working in New York restaurants before opening Bistrozine in 2018, and perhaps that explains a menu that seems determined to keep going in every direction at once. There’s pork katsu curry with jasmine rice and a fried egg, kimchi seafood fried rice, crispy pork belly, and a beef stew that carries the chef’s signature. The restaurant can be hard to spot along Calder Way, but inside, Liu has somehow squeezed much of Asia into one dining room.

Best for: An Asian menu that keeps unfolding

Flour & Stone

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For years, Pine Grove Hall handled live music, cocktails, and serious cooking under the same roof, until its owners decided the food might appreciate a building of its own. They opened Flour & Stone next door in 2024, filling the menu with Mediterranean and Italian dishes like short-rib gnocchi, sausage rigatoni, swordfish a la plancha, and focaccia with whipped ricotta and honey. Come back in the morning, and the same kitchen turns out house-baked pastries and sandwiches, making this tiny stretch of Pine Grove Mills unexpectedly difficult to leave.

Best for: Handmade pasta five miles outside State College

Grace at Carnegie House

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At the edge of Toftrees, a road curls through the woods and ends at Carnegie House, a 21-room hotel that looks like it was built for dinners requiring reservations. Inside, Grace serves handmade pasta, oysters, and prime steaks, along with dishes such as ancho beef carpaccio with Worcestershire aioli, crispy potatoes, and a mequail egg. The cellar has earned recognition from Wine Spectator, which means the wine list offers plenty to study while deciding how long dinner ought to last.

Best for: A quiet dinner and a serious bottle of wine

Kitchen Garden

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The three Turkish families behind Kitchen Garden use recipes from their own homes, cooking dishes that weren’t especially easy to find in State College before they arrived. Manti come as tiny meat-filled dumplings covered with yogurt and spiced butter, while the menu moves through köfte kebabs, gözleme, and flaky börek stuffed with ground beef or spinach and feta. Breakfast may require the most table space, especially if you order serpme kahvaltı, the Turkish spread that arrives as a small fleet of plates.

Best for: A Turkish feast that’ll cover the table

Little Szechuan

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Little Szechuan has General Tso’s chicken and the other familiar dishes, but they’re merely the opening pages of a menu that gets far more interesting as it goes. There’s sliced beef with wild peppers, green-peppercorn chicken, spicy pork kidney, minced pork with cowpeas, and Sichuan maocai, a bubbling collection of meat and vegetables in chile-heavy broth. Order enough for the table, and the meal quickly becomes a negotiation over who gets the last spoonful.

Best for: Sichuan cooking with considerable heat

Lupita’s Authentic Mexican Food

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Before Maria Guadalupe “Lupita” Rojas and her husband, Emilio Lopez, opened their restaurant, the two spent years working on a dairy farm near Bellefonte. Rojas now makes mole negro, lamb barbacoa, plantain-leaf tamales, stuffed tlayudas, and quesabirria tacos with a cup of brick-red consommé waiting alongside. Lupita’s began inside a Uni-Mart south of town, proving once again that a gas station can contain far more than its exterior lets on.

Best for: Mole negro and deeply traditional Oaxacan cooking

Pine Grove Hall

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Owner Liz Grove turned a former Odd Fellows hall into a restaurant and live-music venue, where chef Brittney Pereda draws on her Cuban upbringing for masitas de puerco, ropa vieja stuffed into fried plantain cups, and a frita layered with caramelized onions and matchstick potatoes. Dinner downstairs often comes with the muffled thump of a band warming up overhead.

Best for: Cuban cooking before the music starts

Revival Kitchen

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For six months of the year, chef Quintin Wicks opens Revival Kitchen in downtown Reedsville and serves about 40 people a night. His five-course tasting menu changes monthly according to what arrives from nearby farms, with vegetables often taking over plates where another chef might have assigned them a supporting role. Reservations have been known to vanish within minutes, turning dinner here into something that requires an alarm, a calendar, and quick fingers.

Best for: A tasting menu worth setting a reminder

Studebaker House

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Derek Polay left State College for New York, working at Jean-Georges, Llama Inn, and Olmsted before heading to Peru for a stint at Central, once ranked the world’s best restaurant. He has returned home with plenty to unpack, serving eight-course menus that might pair blue crab with cucumber, melon, and nasturtium, then follow it with sardines, corn, romesco, and endive. Studebaker House occupies an 1868 farmhouse beside Standing Stone Creek, and there’s a guesthouse for anyone who prefers not to rush back to reality.

Best for: Central Pennsylvania’s most adventurous tasting menu

The Tavern State College Pennsylvania Best Restaurants

The Tavern Restaurant

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The Tavern has occupied College Avenue since 1948, expanding over the years until it swallowed parts of three connected buildings. Its menu has grown up alongside it, keeping steaks and seafood while adding Korean barbecue chicken with yuzu slaw, a Maine lobster Cobb salad, and bouillabaisse with fresh linguine, mussels, clams, shrimp, and scallops. On football weekends, the dining rooms fill with returning Penn State alumni, some of whom seem to regard their reservation as an extension of the university calendar.

Best for: Penn State history served with dinner