Luminosa

ASHEVILLE | NORTH CAROLINA

The Best Restaurants in Asheville Are Still Getting Better

Asheville’s dining scene is busy, sharp, and full of new reasons to book ahead.

By Eric Barton
Updated July 9, 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.

After Helene in 2024, the worry was a chorus: shrinking hours, dark dining rooms, and the quiet that follows a disaster. Then the doors swung open, visitors returned, and Asheville’s restaurant scene came roaring back. New kitchens fired up in South Slope and West Asheville, while the stalwarts you figured might fade somehow got busier, their waitlists a weeknight problem again.

Menus feel sharper, farmers are still pulling up with crates before service, and the best restaurants in Asheville seem to have caught a second wind. If you’ve heard that Asheville is one of America’s great food cities, you heard right, my friend.

After 20 years of coming up here—and now living part-time in Asheville—these are my favorite places to eat in Asheville, 14 restaurants that prove the city’s dining scene is only getting better.

The Admiral

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The Admiral opened way back in 2007, before much of America discovered Asheville’s charms, as a serious restaurant in a dimly lit former dive bar. Chef Austin Inselmann’s menu changes often, but the sweet spot is small and medium plates with precision: snap peas with yogurt mousse, beef tartare with ramps, potato gnocchi with artichokes, and duck breast with morels and potato pavé. It’s not a place I’d bring my in-laws, but it’s my pick to impress the out-of-towner who wants great food in a charmingly keep-Asheville-weird setting.

Best for: Serious cooking, low light, and quintessential West Asheville

All Souls Pizza

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I was once halfway up an incline in Bent Creek when I stopped to ask a guy with a strange bag what he was up to. He was a mushroom forager, he told me, for All Souls Pizza, which should tell you how far this place will go for local ingredients. Those toppings, like cheeses from North Carolina growers, go on pizzas made from a naturally leavened sourdough that spends days fermenting. Along with them are salads full of things just delivered from farms and reasonably priced wines. If there’s a better way to spend a warm Asheville night under the twinkly lights hanging over All Souls’ picnic benches, I haven’t found it.

Best for: Sourdough pizza on a terrace that feels like an escape

Chai Pani

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It had become just too hard to get into Chai Pani until this Asheville mainstay moved to the South Slope into the former Buxton Hall Barbecue space. The vibrant new location looks like the set of a Bollywood wedding, a fitting display for the always colorful and deeply flavorful Indian street food served here. It’s impossible to go wrong with anything chef Meherwan Irani is cooking, but grilled cheese skewers, a new item since the move, and sloppy jai, essentially Indian sloppy joe sliders, are highlights. More good news: Irani’s order-at-the counter concept Botiwalla took over the old location.

Best for: Indian street food served in a Bollywood-looking dining room

Cúrate

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Chef Katie Button has handed the executive chef title to Angel Palacios, but luckily that’s changed little at what’s long been labeled as Asheville’s best restaurant. It’s still an always-reliable special night out, where the service is gracious, and the tapas will never fail. The clam broth still demands being sopped with crusty bread, the oxtail on a Spanish tortilla will convert non-oxtail eaters, and the fried eggplant topped with rosemary ice cream still ends a meal better than any real dessert. I’ve said Cúrate is my favorite restaurant in the world, and every time I go, I’m reminded why.

Best for: A night of Spanish tapas and service that never misses

Finest

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Founder Mike Bean turned his farmers market hit into a neighborhood hangout with co-owner and beverage lead Gabriela Bonfiglio and chef Brooke Adams leading the kitchen. They’ve channeled Northeastern deli swagger and red-sauce comfort into egg sandwiches by morning and big, saucy subs by lunch—like a chicken-parm cutlet nearly twice the size of the roll it barely fits. There’s cheap beer and Italian wine, a full dinner menu Fridays and Saturdays, and brunch already draws a line down the block. For anyone who says Asheville lacks great sandwiches, West Asheville now has an answer.

Best for: A deli run of egg sandwiches, big subs, and cheap beer

Jargon

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Shelly and Sean Piper run Jargon out of a small historic building in West Asheville, where the dining room feels inviting enough for a Wednesday and romantic enough for that big question that needs to be popped. Chef Aleksander Kubicki’s menu is modern American: local vegetables, seafood, pastas, a chef’s counter, and cocktails like the Jargon Slush or The Thin Man Martini. It’s the West Asheville date-night pick when you want good service, a little polish, and food that still feels relaxed enough for the neighborhood.

Best for: A West Asheville date night with clever plates and stiff martinis

Jettie Rae's Oyster House

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This quaint spot in North Asheville is a raw bar first, and it’s serious: rotating oysters, crudo, ceviche, and stacked towers, plus a cocktail list built for brine. The Charlotte Street room runs on seafood classics done clean. It’s the place you book for a seafood fix that feels like a Charleston house party, from the ice on the trays to the pacing of service. Owner Eric Scheffer keeps the operation tight; reservations help, but the vibe stays easy enough to make a weeknight feel like a trip.

Best for: A raw-bar fix, seafood towers, and a proper martini

Leo’s House of Thirst

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Leo’s House of Thirst is the kind of place where you show up for a casual drink and leave talking about terroir. It’s small, intimate, and lined with a rotating list of interesting wines that’ll have even the most devoted beer drinker pretending to detect hints of “wet river stone.” The regularly changing menu from chef Drew Wallace always includes lots of small plates like a tinned fish plate, sandwiches like meatloaf and a muffaletta, and larger plates like linguine with clams and Italian sausage. Inside, it’s tight but charming, the kind of cozy that makes you lean in. But if the weather’s right, grab a spot at the picnic tables outside—few places in town make a cool mountain evening feel this effortlessly good.

Best for: A neighborhood wine hang with stellar plates and bottles you haven’t seen

Luminosa

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Graham House grew up in Western North Carolina, cooked in Charleston and New York, and came home to lead the restaurant inside the restored Flat Iron Hotel. The menu runs Italian but keeps one foot in Asheville, with a wood-burning oven, handmade pastas, near-perfect pizza, and the kind of sourcing that helped earn Luminosa a Michelin Green Star and Bib Gourmand. Every time I’ve gone, service is spot-on and attentive, with knowledgeable servers who can tell you where the chanterelles were picked for the pizza, without ever making you feel like you should’ve dressed nicer. All of this has conspired to make Luminosa one of Asheville’s toughest tables: it’s regularly booked a month or more out, so plan your leaf-peeping trip accordingly.

Best for: Wood-fired Italian, handmade pasta, and exacting pizzas

The Market Place

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The Market Place has been around since 1979, which in Asheville restaurant years makes it basically a historic landmark, and its James Beard Awards nomination for Outstanding Restaurant in 2024 and Outstanding Chef in America in 2025 were reminders of just how good it is. Chef William Dissen was a champion of farm-to-table before it became a marketing gimmick, and it shows in the menu: Appalachian trout with roasted garlic, seared scallops, and a rotating cast of seasonal dishes that always feel like they belong exactly where they are. If you want to taste what made Asheville’s restaurant scene what it is today, this is the place.

Best for: A downtown farm-to-table classic that does seasonal right

Mother

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Mother started as a humble bread and wine shop in the River Arts District, but now it’s got a full-blown café on the South Slope, holding its own among the breweries. The menu from chef Casey Ruiz leans heavily on sourdough from head baker Heidi Bass, with sandwiches and tartines that change often enough to keep you guessing. But it’s the more composed dishes—maybe a confit duck leg with lentils, celery root purée, and black garlic molasses—that prove this place is more than just a sandwich shop. Brett Watson’s wine list leans funky and natural, and the staff knows their stuff, ready to help you find the pairing for that towering meatloaf sandwich you absolutely need to order.

Best for: A South Slope spot that elevates everything from avocado toast to wine pairings

Neng Jr.'s

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The back-alley door opens to an 18-seat, high-energy room where chef-owner Silver Iocovozzi and husband/co-owner Cherry Iocovozzi run a Filipinx-Southern conversation in real time. The menu shifts with the day, but a few signatures endure: an adobo oyster capped with a cured quail yolk and sea grapes; bright kinilaw; lumpia; and a coconut-rich duck adobo that reads like a love letter to Manila and the mountains. After Helene, they were down for weeks and came back swinging, so book ahead. The accolades are nice; the reason you go is that every plate feels entirely original.

Best for: A tiny room serving audacious Filipino plates

Piccolina

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Elana and Nathan Pearlman run this tiny Italian spot in a River Arts District building otherwise filled with galleries. The small lunch menu includes sandwiches made from pizza dough and a quite excellent Neapolitan-style margherita pie. The lunch move is to split a pizza and the Rossi, stacked with slow-roasted porchetta, prosciutto and stracciatella. At dinner, things shift to an always changing four-course prix fixe that revolves around what’s fresh and housemade pasta like cacio e pepe bucatini and buttery mafaldine spiked with pistachios.

Best for: Neapolitan pies and handmade pasta

Tall John’s

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Trevor Payne grew up in Asheville, cooked in Portland, then came home to open the neighborhood tavern he’d been thinking about since childhood. The restaurant took over a former Montford Avenue church, and the menu sticks to the kind of food that sounds simple until it shows up exactly right: steak tartare, roast chicken, frosty martinis, a good burger, and whatever seasonal dish Payne’s team has worked into the rotation, like this dynamite dish from a few nights ago of fresh veg with peaches and green goddess dressing. Reservations here are tough to come by, but luckily bar seating is often open early—and it’s also a spot where locals and tourists get talking, mostly about the incredible plates coming out of Payne’s kitchen.

Best for: Frosty martinis, careful tavern cooking, and a Montford dinner that feels like a habit

Xico

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Chef Scott Linquist built Xico around a raging Josper and a comal that keep steaks and tortillas coming, and the whole place feels calibrated for big-night dining on the South Slope. Start with the tuna tostadita, then let a server build the century-old Tijuana Caesar tableside like it’s a ritual worth watching. But the best dish I’ve had there, honestly one of the best things I’ve ever eaten, is the skirt steak, deeply marinated and served over refried beans with housemade tortillas on the side. If you have the bandwidth left, finish with churros dragged through caramel and a stein of Mexican hot chocolate wearing an indecent amount of whipped cream.

Best for: A destination-worthy Mexican dinner when you want smoke, drama, and serious cooking