CITY GUIDES | NORTH CAROLINA
The 12 Best Restaurants in Wilmington, N.C., Where the Food Scene is Even Better Than Advertised
By Eric Barton | May 21, 2026
Olivero
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.
When Michelin released its first guide to the American South, I scanned the list the way a person checks a wedding seating chart: looking first for the people who got invited, then for the names that somehow didn’t. North Carolina did fine. Asheville got attention. Raleigh got attention. Charlotte got a star. Wilmington, meanwhile, appeared to have been entirely left off the invite list.
That seemed like a big-old oversight. I’d been hearing a lot about Wilmington for a long time, with a downtown dotted by chef-driven restaurants and beachfront spots doing more than feeding low-country boils to tourists. So I went down to see whether the omission made sense.
And Wilmington, it turns out, is actually better than I’d heard. The city has polished seafood, serious cocktails, global cooking, beach breakfasts, old rooms that still work, and new restaurants that feel like they’re pushing the place forward instead of simply decorating it.
These are the restaurants Michelin needs to visit before updating the guide.
Brasserie du Soleil
$$$$$ | MAP | WEBSITE | INSTAGRAM
This is the Wilmington restaurant for escargot, mussels, steak frites, and raw bar towers. Chef Stephen Ollard’s menu has range beyond the usual bistro script, with burrata and speck, charred octopus with artichokes and sauce verte, and potato croquettes with Gruyère and truffle aioli. It’s more polished than risk-taking, which is sometimes exactly what you need on a Friday night.
Best for: French bistro habits done right
Caprice Bistro
$$$$$ | MAP | WEBSITE | INSTAGRAM
Caprice Bistro has passed the quarter-century mark, and it still makes a good case for dark wood, mussels, frites, and duck confit. The Belgian side of the kitchen gives it more personality than a standard French date-night room, especially when the order involves mussels in curry broth or the creamy Flemish soup Waterzooi. Chef James Iseton took over the kitchen last year, keeping the classics that have powered Caprice all these years, adding new specials like wild-game cassoulet.
Best for: Mussels, duck, and old-school downtown dinner
Ceviche’s
$$$$$ | MAP | WEBSITE | INSTAGRAM
Ceviche’s sits near the road to Wrightsville Beach and leans into Panamanian seafood. The menu moves through ceviche, empanadas, yucca fries, ropa vieja, curry, and fish with enough lime, coconut, and chile to make the meal feel as bright as a day on la playa. It’s casual, colorful, and more useful than another beach-adjacent seafood place.
Best for: Ceviche before or after the beach
Dram Yard
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Dram Yard chef Nick Chavez runs a menu with Southern coastal bones and global detours, and the $90, five-course tasting menu changes nightly, which gives the place more ambition than its breezy hotel energy might suggest. The courtyard in the middle of the charming ARRIVE hotel is one of the prettier brunch settings in Wilmington, the kind of place that makes eggs and a mimosa feel like a respectable weekend plan.
Best for: A tasting menu or brunch in the courtyard
Indochine
$$$$$ | MAP | WEBSITE | INSTAGRAM
Indochine has been feeding Wilmington Thai and Vietnamese dishes since 2000, but a big reason to go is the world it built outside. The koi ponds, lanterns, tropical gardens, and indoor-outdoor sprawl do a lot of the heavy lifting, turning dinner into a walk through one of Wilmington’s most memorable restaurant settings. The food is dependable, with roasted duck red curry, pad Thai, massaman curry, and noodle dishes.
Best for: Thai and Vietnamese food with full scenery
La Duna Paradiso
$$$$$ | MAP | WEBSITE | INSTAGRAM
At Trailborn Surf & Sound, chef Michelle Matthews brings coastal Italian cooking to a menu that can move from focaccia, crudo, and octopus carpaccio into seafood and pasta without losing the connection to the ocean. The ambition here is subtle, which is exactly what’s needed when the surf is right there out the window.
Best for: Coastal Italian near the water
manna ave. 123
$$$$$ | MAP | WEBSITE | INSTAGRAM
Downtown’s manna has been doing the fine-dining thing for more than 15 years, and the kitchen under chef Carson Jewell keeps things changing not just with the seasons but daily. The restaurant offers a four-course tasting menu with advance notice, along with events like its limited-capacity Beggars Can’t Be Choosers dinners, which is a useful reminder that Wilmington’s most established fine-dining room still has some mischief left in it. It’s polished, with an excellent cocktail and wine program, and willing to make dinner feel like an entire night out.
Best for: Wilmington’s sophisticated fine-dining restaurant
Olivero
$$$$$ | MAP | WEBSITE | INSTAGRAM
My favorite restaurant from my Wilmington tour, Olivero nailed the rare combination of service, food, and ambiance, making all of it feel very much like their default setting. Chefs Sunny Gerhart and Lauren Krall Ivey pull from Spain, Italy, North Carolina, and their family roots, building a menu that reads like Wilmington with a passport: handmade pasta, seafood, grilled meats, cocktails, and flavors that wander through Sevilla, Sicily, Tangier, and whatever they’re working on next. Honestly, I loved it all, but especially the n’juda-stuffed grilled dates, mafaldine pasta with chorizo fresco and romesco, and the lasagna, a multi-layer affair that changes regularly, served the night I was there with a Moroccan stewed spinach and whipped ricotta. Olivero is one of the clearest signs of the ascension of Wilmington’s restaurant scene.
Best for: The city’s most compelling new restaurant
Savorez
$$$$$ | MAP | WEBSITE | INSTAGRAM
Savorez is small, bright, and built around chef Sam Cahoon’s Latin-meets-North-Carolina cooking, which means the menu can run from lobster ceviche in coconut and ginger to chicken tinga empanadas, chorizo with goat cheese, and sweet potato-black bean fillings with chimichurri. The place has always had the advantage of being specific; it doesn’t read like a pan-Latin concept assembled by committee. It’s the rare casual restaurant that can make dips, empanadas, and daily specials feel like an actual point of view.
Best for: Latin-Southern cooking with a local accent
Seabird
$$$$$ | MAP | WEBSITE | INSTAGRAM
Seabird is the Wilmington restaurant with the résumé to match the handsome dining room, led by chef Dean Neff, a James Beard Outstanding Chef finalist in 2024 and semifinalist again in 2026. The menu changes with local seafood and produce, which is exactly how a coastal restaurant should behave when it’s serious about place instead of simply decorating with oysters. It’s seafood with restraint, technique, and a sense that the water outside town matters for more than scenery.
Best for: The essential Wilmington seafood dinner
The Southerly Biscuit & Pie
$$$$$ | MAP | WEBSITE | INSTAGRAM
On the road headed to Carolina Beach, this is an order-at-the-counter spot built around some truly incredible biscuits. They bake about 200 of them daily and often run out mid-morning. On my visit, as I was finishing a biscuit with country ham, cheddar, and egg around 11, they were hanging the “sold out” sign on the door. The lesson is to get there early and also, order a second one for the ride home—after all, the individual biscuits are a mere $2 each.
Best for: Fluffy, just-out-of-the-oven biscuits
Three10
$$$$$ | MAP | WEBSITE | INSTAGRAM
Three10 serves modern Southern seafood in the Brooklyn Arts District, inside a restored 1920 bungalow that gives the restaurant an actual sense of place before the first plate lands. The menu is chef-driven, coastal, and local-leaning, with the sort of Southern seafood framework that can handle both comfort and polish. It’s not chasing the same national attention as Seabird or Olivero, but it fills an important Wilmington lane: serious dinner in a room that still feels like a house.
Best for: Southern seafood in a bungalow
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