Fin & Fino

CITY GUIDES | NORTH CAROLINA

Charlotte Has Become One of the South’s Great Restaurant Cities

These 18 restaurants are evidence that the Queen City food scene is on fire.

By Eric Barton
Updated Aug. 3, 2026

AUTHOR BIO: Eric Barton is editor of The Adventurist and a freelance journalist who has reviewed restaurants for more than two decades. Email him here.

My first memory of Charlotte is a city leaving work and very quickly getting in their cars. It was 1991, and I met my uncle at the downtown television station where he worked. At five we stepped into a current of suits flowing out of those mirrored Uptown towers. By the time dinner crossed anyone’s mind, the sidewalks looked as if they had been rolled up and stored for the night.

Three decades later, Charlotte knows what to do after five. Uptown stays busy after dark, while NoDa, Plaza Midwood, Elizabeth, and Dilworth have all developed their own gravitational pull. The best restaurants in Charlotte are scattered among them: a six-seat omakase counter, tasting menus built around Radiohead, naturally leavened pizza, and scallop crudo at a neighborhood wine bar.

The restaurant scene finally feels proportional to the city around it. Charlotte still shows off its ambition in steel and glass. These days, it also serves it for dinner.

These are the best restaurants in Charlotte right now.

Albertine

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Albertine is Joe and Katy Kindred’s big Uptown move from people who already proved themselves in Davidson. Joe Kindred, a five-time James Beard semifinalist, built the menu with chef de cuisine Mark Machanic around Mediterranean cooking with Southern pull, so the table can swing from dates with country ham and deviled taramasalata to crispy pickle-brined quail in Aleppo pepper sauce, then over to grilled short rib with fattoush and peanut dukkah or a bone-in ribeye with labneh mashed potatoes.

Best for: A night out in Uptown at an ambitious restaurant

Bird Pizzeria

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It’s tempting to say Bird Pizzeria makes the best pizza in Charlotte, but that implies there’s even a competition. This tiny shop sticks to the fundamentals: a naturally leavened dough, just the right amount of char, and toppings that don’t overcomplicate things. Get the pepperoni or the mushroom, but don’t sleep on the kale salad, which somehow has a cult following.

Best for: Pizza purists and people who take crust seriously

Counter-

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Counter- is chef Sam Hart’s tasting-menu restaurant, and the whole point is that it refuses to settle into a greatest-hits act. The menus change quarterly, every dish is retired after its run, and the place keeps building entire seasons around ideas that can swing from modern fine dining to something as specific as Radiohead or Willy Wonka, which tells you a lot about how Hart thinks. What keeps it relevant five years in: for all the ambition, it is still grounded in the Carolinas, still pushing forward, and still the restaurant that made itself impossible to copy in Charlotte.

Best for: A tasting-menu night when dinner needs to feel like an event

Customshop

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Customshop in Elizabeth has been turning out some of the best food in Charlotte for years, somehow managing to avoid the hype machine. The menu reads like an Italian steakhouse and a Mediterranean bistro had a well-adjusted baby—think housemade pastas, grilled octopus, and dry-aged ribeye. If you’re the kind of person who judges a restaurant by its bread service (as you should), this place passes with flying colors.

Best for: A polished dinner that still feels relaxed

DŌZO

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DŌZO started with Katsu Kart, the food truck where chefs Perry Saito and John Gamble built a following for Japanese sandwiches and comfort food. They later moved into a 12-seat counter in Wesley Heights, then outgrew that too, opening this larger, lively Dilworth restaurant with a full bar and patio. Crab fried rice and okonomiyaki remain, joined by smoked blue crab dip with ikura and furikake kettle chips, hot honey karaage, A5 Wagyu gyudon with kimchi butter, and shokupan honey toast with miso caramel.

Best for: Japanese comfort food, cocktails, and a lively night out

Emmy Lou’s

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Only seven stools line the bar at Emmy Lou’s, with more than 20 wines waiting by the glass and a corner banquette, communal table, and patio for those Piedmont days where there’s nowhere better. Customshop owners Andres Kaifer and Alex Bridges handed the kitchen to former chef Adriana “Dre” Cavazos, whose small plates land with the command of someone who knows how to make dishes sing with few ingredients: pan con tomate with sourdough that’s soaked up garlicky tomatoes; hamachi tiradito with white ponzu and sweet potato causa; and seasonal sundaes that’ll take what’s fresh , like the recent orange and ginger ice cream topped with carrot caramel and pistachio. Sometimes it’s the smallest of places putting out the best of food.

Best for: Wine by the glass with scallop crudo close behind

Fin & Fino

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There’s a decidedly low-country Carolina vibe at Fin & Fino, which has locations in Uptown and Birkdale Village, not just because of the fresh seafood on offer but also for the beachy and airy feel of the place. Sustainably caught or raised seafood is the star here, headlined by the $150 Penthouse, a tower of oysters, mussels, shrimp, scallop ceviche and butter-poached lobster tails. There are plenty of non-seafood items on the menu too, like the duck breast and wagyu flatiron, but the truly adventurous eaters should opt for The Treatment, a $70 chef's choice.

Best for: A downtown dinner that feels celebratory

Good Food on Montford

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Good Food on Montford is a small plates restaurant, which usually means leaving hungry and irritated. Not here. The plates are large enough to be satisfying, and the menu doesn’t feel like it’s trying to be something it’s not. There are steamed pork buns, ricotta gnocchi, and even the occasional plate of beef carpaccio, all of which make for a meal that’s fun to eat rather than one you have to suffer through for the sake of culinary experimentation.

Best for: Sharing plates without leaving hungry

The Goodyear House

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When a restaurant opens in a gentrified mill district and immediately becomes the spot everyone in the neighborhood goes to every week, you know they’ve figured something out. That’s The Goodyear House. Their claim to fame is the “Family Meal” fried chicken, served with biscuits, honey butter, and collards, but the sleeper hit might be the charred broccoli. It arrives showered in pickled mustard seeds, fried shallots, and enough chili oil to make it unreasonably delicious.

Best for: Group dinners where everybody wants something different

L’Ostrica

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Eric Ferguson and Cat Carter built L’Ostrica around the kind of precise, personal cooking that makes a small restaurant feel like a destination. The six-course tasting menu changes with the seasons, but the restaurant now also offers à la carte dining on Wednesdays and Thursdays, plus à la carte options at the bar and on the patio on Fridays and Saturdays. Sunday Supper remains its own single-seating experience, giving regulars another way into one of Charlotte’s most thoughtful restaurants.

Best for: A small, serious dinner with people who care about food

Mariposa

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Mariposa is what happens when a restaurant refuses to be pigeonholed into a single cuisine and instead decides to borrow from everywhere. The menu jumps from chaat-style street snacks to Mediterranean dips to Latin-leaning small plates, yet somehow it all works. The best strategy here is to order generously—maybe the patatas bravas, the coconut curry mussels, and the lamb kefta—and just roll with it.

Best for: Ordering all over the menu and letting the table sort it out

Menya Daruma

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I wandered into Elizabeth last winter and found Menya Daruma—Ted Nakato’s noodle shop where house-made noodles and 18-hour simmered broths shine across four ramen bowls and a slick Abura Soba, all served in a minimalist, counter-style room modeled on Tokyo shops. Nakato leaned into tradition—importing Japanese soy sauces and salts, installing an open noodle-making window, and relying on QR-ordering and minimal service to keep the pace quick, the vibe casual. Menya Daruma hits like the perfect ramen bar: cozy, authentic, and exactly what Charlotte’s been craving.

Best for: Ramen people who notice the broth before anything else

Omakase Experience by PrimeFish

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Omakase Experience by PrimeFish gives Charlotte something the city used to have to travel for: a serious six-seat omakase counter. It’s run by chef Robin Anthony, who was named a 2026 James Beard semifinalist for Best Chef: Southeast and sources fish from Tokyo’s Toyosu Market. His seasonal 10- to 15-course tasting changes often, but expect otoro with caviar, uni, foie gras, truffles, and A5 wagyu, all served across a quiet little counter where you’re close enough to watch every cut, every brush of sauce, every piece of nigiri land one at a time.

Best for: Sushi obsessives and special-occasion dinners

Rada

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I slipped into Rada on Selwyn Avenue one quiet evening and discovered executive chef Callan Buckles—fresh from NYC kitchens like Claud, Momofuku, and The Four Horsemen—turning the former Little Spoon into a gleaming 50‑seat minimalist space serving shareable, globally influenced plates and biodynamic wine. Owner Eloy Roy and Buckles imagined a place that threads Basque‑leaning snacks like gilda skewers and squid pil pil with European‑tinged dishes like Dover sole and lamb bolognese—a menu that pushes Charlotte’s palate while staying unmistakably neighborhood-focused. Rada arrives as a measured culinary standout—elegant, approachable, and quietly thrilling.

Best for: A stylish night out that still puts the food first

Restaurant Constance

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Chef-owner Sam Diminich, a 2025 James Beard semifinalist for Best Chef: Southeast, named this 10-table Wesley Heights restaurant for his daughter and built it around local farms and a menu that changes with what those producers have available. Current dishes range from jalapeño cornbread waffles with pimento cheese and pepper jelly to South Carolina poussin with miso jus, pan-roasted grouper with clams and sausage, and red wine-braised short ribs. The small dining room and open kitchen keep dinner intimate, while Diminich’s cooking moves easily between Southern ingredients and Japanese, Mediterranean, and Italian ideas.

Best for: A small, polished dinner built around local farms

Stagioni

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Charlotte has plenty of Italian restaurants, but not all of them make their own pasta and bake their pizzas in a wood-fired oven. Stagioni in Myers Park does. The pappardelle with braised rabbit is what you want, unless it’s one of those nights where pizza feels more appropriate, in which case, the soppressata pie is the move. Either way, you’re eating well.

Best for: Pasta-or-pizza indecision in a handsome space

Supperland

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Supperland is what happens when a restaurant group gets hold of a historic church and decides to turn it into a steakhouse. The result is what they call a “Southern steakhouse meets church potluck,” which is a fancy way of saying they serve prime steaks and miso mac and cheese. The place looks like a Nancy Meyers set—vaulted ceilings, floral wallpaper, chandeliers—and it works, mostly because the food is as good as the design.

Best for: Big nights out, big rooms, and a table that wants steak

Zamindar’s Clubhouse

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Sometimes you walk into a restaurant that decidedly feels like somewhere else, and Zamindar’s Clubhouse feels very much transplanted from South Beach. Founder David Pandoria channeled his years working as a Charlotte DJ and built a restaurant that channels nightclub feels. There’s deep green walls, orange banquettes, murals, lots of brass accents, and chandeliers fill the 7,500-square-foot space, with a lounge in the back for those here for more than the curry. Luckily all this flash comes with the food to back it up, thanks to Hyderabad-born chef Vamshi Krishna Adi, whose New York restaurant Ishq earned a Michelin Bib Gourmand. Jalebi chaat pairs chickpea masala with beetroot and crispy sev, ghee-roast scallops get a dusting of gunpowder, and raw mango and coconut sharpen Calicut lobster curry.

Best for: A dinner that starts with chaat and may end with a dance party