The Top 33 Restaurants Near Austin

A cave carved into the Sassi, restored from ruin into a Michelin-starred dining room, sets the mood before a single plate arrives. The chef builds modern creative tasting menus, five to ten courses, around Lucanian pantry staples, but interprets them with enough freedom that the food feels personal rather than folkloric. The sommelier's wine pairing is worth the conversation alone. Walk the lit alleyways afterward; Piazza Duomo at night does something to people.

1. Michelin Guide 1 Star

The summer terrace looks out over the Sassi, which is a view that tends to make people order another glass. Inside a carefully restored old palazzo, this is a tasting-menu restaurant built around three named journeys through modern cooking and the traditions of Basilicata, though you can also pick individual courses. The wine list leans local without going parochial, and the service has the rare quality of seeming interested in you.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

The dining room sits inside Matera's first pharmacy, and the view from the terrace takes in the Sasso Barisano in one unobstructed sweep. This is a creative Italian restaurant where the cooking leans toward restraint rather than spectacle, which in a town this photogenic is practically a political statement. Two tasting menus run alongside a full à la carte, so you can commit or hedge your bets depending on the mood.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

A family-run restaurant carved into the upper Sassi, with a small terrace and a dining room that feels like someone's home, if someone's home had a serious wine list. The father cooks contemporary Basilicatan food, while mother and daughter run the floor with the easy confidence of people who've been feeding strangers for years. Tasting menus and à la carte both available, which is a civilized way to operate.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

The dining room sits inside a former 16th-century church merged with an ancient wine press, and the stone bones of both are still very much present. Radino Wine Bistrot is a casual Italian wine bistro in Matera serving the kind of straightforward southern cooking that doesn't need explaining, cavatelli with Lucanian sausage being the anchor. There's also a snug room downstairs set aside for cigar smokers, which tells you something about the crowd's intentions.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

A few tables and a fireplace under a vaulted stone ceiling in a 16th-century building tucked into the old-town alleys of Putignano: the room alone sets the tone for this Michelin-starred fine dining restaurant. The chef's cooking draws on Apulian tradition without being enslaved to it, and his son runs the floor and a wine cellar deep enough to occupy two volumes and roughly three thousand labels.

1. Michelin Guide 1 Star
2. 50 Top Italy #23 · The Best Italian Restaurants - Grand Restaurants

Tiramisu arrives in a baking dish, served tableside the way it would be at home, and that tells you most of what you need to know about Botteghe Antiche. It's a country trattoria in Putignano, all checkered tablecloths and hanging pots, built around Apulian cooking that leans hard into Sunday-lunch memory: eggplant parmigiana, fresh orecchiette, slow ragu. The room smells accordingly. It landed on 50 Top Italy's list of modern trattorias and bistros.

1. 50 Top Italy #24 · The Best Italian Restaurants - Modern Trattorias And Bistros

1. Michelin Guide Bib Gourmand

1. Michelin Guide Bib Gourmand

Apulian trattoria that grew out of a family butcher shop and never really left those roots behind. Meat still anchors the menu, and the kitchen garden supplies vegetables that show up in a long procession of antipasti and fresh pasta. The wine cellar runs to over 300 labels, which is serious for a town this size. A Michelin Bib Gourmand, and there's a small B&B next door if the meal stretches, as it tends to.

1. 50 Top Italy #49 · The Best Italian Restaurants - Modern Trattorias And Bistros
2. Michelin Guide Bib Gourmand

A large fireplace anchors the dining room of this vegetable-forward restaurant set inside a rural villa on the Murgia plateau, where warm wood and old stone set the mood before the food says anything. The seven-course tasting menu shifts with the weather and the season, built around vegetables and wild herbs cooked quickly enough to stay themselves. The wine list leans toward natural and biodynamic producers from the region. Ranked third among Italy's vegetable bistros by 50 Top Italy.

1. 50 Top Italy #3 · The Best Vegetable Bistros

A centuries-old masseria outside Polignano a Mare, surrounded by ancient olive trees, sets the scene for this one-Michelin-star tasting menu restaurant. The chef reads Apulian tradition through a creative lens, with five or seven courses that move between the familiar and the unexpected. The wine cellar holds over a thousand labels, and a communal table sits right among them, which is either romantic or slightly unhinged, depending on your group.

1. Michelin Guide 1 Star

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

A cluster of trulli beside a small vineyard sets the scene at this rustic trattoria tucked behind a relais outside Martina Franca. The kitchen leans into Apulian tradition, with wood-fired cooking and a menu that shifts with whatever the market offers that week. The same team behind a nearby gourmet spot runs the stoves here, though the register is looser and the food earns a Michelin Bib Gourmand.

1. Michelin Guide Bib Gourmand

Vegetables get top billing at this Michelin-starred fine dining restaurant inside the Borgo Egnazia resort, where the kitchen treats a heritage Puglian carrot or fava bean with the same seriousness most chefs reserve for prime cuts. The team works closely with local growers, and the cooking tends toward intense, concentrated flavors with elegant plating. Even confirmed carnivores rarely seem to notice what's missing.

1. Michelin Guide 1 Star
2. 50 Top Italy #24 · The Best Italian Restaurants - Luxury

A cheese trolley stocked with Piedmont and French selections is an unusual flex for a restaurant on the Apulian waterfront, but Casa Sgarra has always done things its own way. This Michelin-starred fine dining room is a family operation, with brothers running the floor and the kitchen, and the service has the warm, unhurried ease that comes from people who mean it. The cooking roots itself in Apulian tradition, then wanders wherever the chef's curiosity leads.

1. Michelin Guide 1 Star

Homemade pasta rolled out every morning sets the tempo at this old-school trattoria in Taranto, where the menu leans heavily toward the land rather than the sea. Antonio works the room while his sisters cook, and the move is to skip the printed menu entirely and let him narrate whatever came in that day. Regulars know this and order nothing; newcomers figure it out fast. A place where the informality is the whole point.

1. 50 Top Italy #48 · The Best Italian Restaurants - Modern Trattorias And Bistros

A Michelin-starred restaurant tucked inside period walls across the square from Trani's Swabian castle, with a terrace that frames the cathedral bell tower on fine evenings. Four brothers run the room and the kitchen together, which sounds like either a sitcom or a dynasty, and in this case it's the latter. The cooking reinterprets classic Italian tradition through Apulian ingredients, leaning on flavor and substance over flourish.

1. Michelin Guide 1 Star

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

Named for a rare butterfly found only in the Vulture hills, this creative restaurant occupies a carefully restored ruin in a corner of Basilicata most people couldn't point to on a map. The dining room reads modern inside ancient walls, and the kitchen leans into tasting menus built around hyper-local Lucanian ingredients. The kind of place where the amuse-bouches alone make a case for the whole region.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Bib Gourmand

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Bib Gourmand

Three separate tasting menus, one each for meat, fish, and vegetables, give away what kind of dinner this is: a modern restaurant where the kitchen is the whole point. The room in Fasano is warm and convivial, the cooking precise and sensory-minded, and the story behind it, started by the chef and his partner after years in Australia, gives the place an unusually wide-angle outlook for a small Apulian town.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

A rural trattoria outside Potenza where the farm supplies the cheese and the menu reads like a plea for Sunday to last a little longer. The kitchen recovers old Basilicata recipes without fuss or theater, so the lamb comes marinated and slow-baked the way it always has, and the pasta dough is still made by hand. A small cellar leans local. The room is calm in a way that feels intentional rather than sleepy.

1. 50 Top Italy #36 · The Best Italian Restaurants - Modern Trattorias And Bistros