The Best Italian Food in the United States

The veal chop Milanese and baked clams here read like a syllabus for classic Italian-American cooking, and the menu is long enough that you could eat your way through Queens one visit at a time. This old-school Italian restaurant in Corona has been around forever, and the kitchen shows no interest in trends, which is exactly the point. Finish with tiramisu and limoncello and you'll feel like someone's grandmother is watching approvingly.

Housemade pasta is the whole point here, pulled from family recipes that the team takes seriously enough to name the restaurant after the grandparents who inspired them. It's a warm, mid-range Italian dining room where the menu stays short on purpose. The Sunday sauce, built around rich braised meats over spaghetti, is the kind of dish that explains why some recipes get handed down. Soft-serve gelato, taken as an affogato, closes things out properly.

The pizza dough ferments for 48 hours before it ever sees a oven, which tells you where this Italian restaurant's priorities lie. Tucked into a shopping center in Mount Pleasant, Savi runs lunch casual, sandwiches and salads and those pizzas, then shifts gears at dinner into pastas, steaks, and seafood. The wine list is the other serious thing here, and happy hour gives you a reasonable excuse to find out.

A narrow interior walkway leads you into what was once a carriage house, now a fine dining room with white-painted brick walls and wide plank floors that do most of the decorating. Alfred Portale, a name Chelsea regulars have followed for decades, runs an Italian menu that stays close to the Mediterranean without being precious about it. The primi, particularly the fresh pasta, tend to be where the kitchen is most at ease.

The brick oven sits in full view of the dining room, which at a Neapolitan-leaning pizza restaurant in Flatiron is either a statement or a dare. Audace is the kind of place where the dough does the talking: light, well-leavened, the sort that doesn't leave you horizontal by dessert. The room is calm and low-key, the service attentive without hovering. It landed on 50 Top Pizza USA and took their Best Cocktail List award, which is not a thing most pizza spots can say.

Pasquale Illiano left Naples and landed in one of Rhode Island's smaller towns, which is saying something in the smallest state in the union. The pizzeria runs the full range, Neapolitan, New York style, Grandma, and each style is treated as its own discipline rather than a casual option. The pasta dishes quietly hold their own alongside the pizza, which is not a given. Ranked fifteenth on 50 Top Pizza USA.

A Neapolitan pizzeria a short walk from Barclays Center, Pizza Secret lands at number 15 on 50 Top Pizza USA, which is not the kind of thing a slice shop does quietly. The dough is well-leavened and light, the kind that doesn't sit heavy, and the fried appetizers are worth ordering before the pie arrives. The room is renovated and family-friendly without feeling like a chain, and the service knows when to disappear.

The igloo-shaped Neapolitan oven is the anchor, but this Madison pizzeria runs a wider game than that. The chef, a Tony Gemignani protégé, turns out New York, Detroit, and by-the-slice styles alongside the Neapolitan, which is the rare pizza-school flex that actually makes sense on one menu. A wine list, beers, and cocktails round things out. It landed at number 12 on 50 Top Pizza USA, plus a special nod for its dessert list.

Neapolitan bingo tablecloths, Napoli soccer jerseys on the walls, and an owner who never steps away from the oven: this is a Neapolitan pizza spot in Miami's MiMo District that takes its identity seriously without taking itself too seriously. The dough is well-leavened with a high, airy crust, and the cooking is precise. It ranked 11th on 50 Top Pizza USA. Note that an 18% gratuity is included by default on the bill.

Roman trattoria cooking in a room that manages to feel elegant without making you feel underdressed. Antica Pesa is the Brooklyn outpost of a Rome institution, and it takes the classics seriously enough to go well past the obvious ones. The wine list is long, the hospitality is warm in that old-country way, and a spot on the 50 Top Italy list for the world's best Italian restaurants suggests the room is doing something right across the river.

A Neapolitan-style pizza spot in central Tampa where the dough goes into a screaming-hot oven and comes out fast, blistered, and surprisingly light. The menu is short on purpose: a handful of starters, a tight selection of pies, and some desserts. Beer and wine on tap keep things casual and the bill manageable. It has landed on the 50 Top Pizza USA list, which is the sort of thing regulars probably mention while waiting for a table.

A pizzeria in San Luis Obispo where you can order your pie by the half meter or the full meter, which is a sentence that doesn't get old. Flour House does both Neapolitan and "a metro" style, the latter a tradition from the Sorrento Peninsula that arrives on a long wooden board and invites a crowd. Pasta and appetizers round out the menu, and a patio out front makes the whole thing feel like it landed here from somewhere warmer.

Neapolitan pizza in the Financial District, which sounds like a setup to a joke but works out fine. Kesté is a cozy pizza shop with a rustic dining room and outdoor tables that catch the downtown foot traffic on good days. The crust is the point: light, properly blistered, and topped without chaos. The wine and beer list is short enough that you won't agonize. Ranked 21st on 50 Top Pizza USA.

Neapolitan-style pizza on the Pacific Coast Highway, where the crust stays soft and just barely charred at the rim, the way it should. This southern Italian restaurant keeps things unfussy: good product, warm service, a room that feels festive without trying too hard. It landed at number 25 on 50 Top Pizza USA, which tracks for a place where the pizza tastes like the owner is proving a point about where they're from.

Sourdough Neapolitan pizza in a cozy Bushwick spot where the lighting is dim enough to feel intentional and the wine list is longer than the beer list, which tells you something about the room. The crust is light and genuinely digestible, as opposed to the kind that sits with you on the subway home. Ranked in the 50 Top Pizza USA, if that's the sort thing you track. The veranda is lovely until it isn't.

A seafood osteria on Sixth Avenue that also happens to be a caffè, bakery, pasta lab, and gelateria, which could easily be a mess but somehow feels like a well-run corner of northern Italy. The kitchen leans on pristine fish and vegetables, with a nod toward Japanese technique that earns its place rather than announcing itself. Raw preparations are a reason to linger, and the wine list keeps markups reasonable. Ranked 34th on 50 Top Italy's list of Italian restaurants worldwide.

Amber walls, wine bottles stacked everywhere, and ceilings high enough that SoHo feels a little less cramped. Altro Paradiso is an Italian restaurant from Ignacio Mattos where the pasta rotates with the seasons and the salads get their own devoted following, which is not something you say about many places. It fills up fast, and the room has that rare quality of feeling both stylish and genuinely comfortable at the same time.

The penny-tiled floor and wood bar hit you before you even look at the menu, and the garden out back feels like someone transplanted a corner of Umbria to Williamsburg. This is a proper Italian restaurant, the sit-down-and-stay kind, with a seasonal menu that leans into shared plates and house-made pasta. The crowd tends to linger, which tells you something about the pacing. Wildflowers on the tables, olive walls, no fuss.

A converted house on Brookhaven Circle, divided into small, snug rooms that feel borrowed from a dinner party rather than a restaurant. The kitchen runs Southern Italian, with pastas and appetizers doing most of the heavy lifting, and a soft spot for pork that shows up everywhere, including breakfast-inflected openers that make you reconsider the day's first meal. Andy Ticer and Michael Hudman are Memphis names worth knowing. The Michelin Guide has taken notice.

The gold-and-red-etched window on Houston reads like a dare, and plenty of people fail it, assuming red-sauce cliché and walking on. Inside, the space is narrow and weathered, and the family crew runs it with the kind of unhurried warmth that suggests nobody's leaving hungry or in a hurry. It's an old-school Italian-American restaurant, the sort where the cacio e pepe and cannoli are doing the heavy lifting without making a fuss about it.

Black-and-white floors and a curved bar overlooking an open kitchen set the mood at this Oak Lawn trattoria. Homemade pasta is the point, from spaghetti with meatballs to lasagna Bolognese, backed by an all-Italian wine list. The room is bright and lively, the kind of neighborhood spot where the menu reads short because the kitchen means it. A Michelin Selected Restaurant.

Low lighting and large paintings set a chic tone at this upscale Italian spot in Newport Beach, where the open kitchen pulls the room's attention without trying too hard. The chef comes from a lineage of cooks and farmers in southern Italy, and the menu moves between wood-fired pizzas and house-made pasta, with tiramisu to close things out. Fine dining prices, but the mood is more candlelit dinner than white-glove occasion.

Double-height ceilings and exposed wooden beams give this rustic-chic Italian café in Scarsdale a barn-that-got-good-taste feeling. The two long, narrow rooms fill up fast, and the bar anchors the whole thing without trying too hard. The kitchen leans into comfort, the kind of Italian café where the broth in the tortellini en brodo tastes like someone's been at it since morning. Good for a leisurely lunch or an easy dinner when the city feels far away.

The open kitchen in back runs loud and visible, which sets the tone for this Southern Italian restaurant near Gramercy Park. Exposed brick, warm lighting, and tables full of people who dressed up just enough give it a convincing urban trattoria feel. The menu leans into the Italian-American canon with enough care to make it interesting again, and the amari list runs deep enough to suggest someone here has a hobby.

Carmelina's sends food to the table in the pans it was cooked in, which tells you most of what you need to know about this North End Italian. Garlic, butter, cream, and tomato do the heavy lifting across a seafood-forward menu, and the portions are large enough to require reinforcements. There's no dessert, though that turns out to be less of an omission than it sounds. Weekday lunch is your best shot at a table.

A horseshoe bar anchors the ground floor of Andrew Carmellini's Italian steakhouse at the South Street Seaport, with Tuscan leather banquettes, Venetian mirrors, and East River views upstairs. The menu signals more ambition than the genre usually delivers, from tableside salads to a gorgonzola-cured Wagyu strip loin that earns the detour onto the menu. Sharply dressed servers, the whole production.

A courtyard anchored by a large tree strung with twinkling lights sets the mood at this West Adams pasta-forward Italian restaurant. Chef Avner Levi started as a pop-up, and the laidback ease of that origin stuck. Pasta is the point, housemade and taken seriously, though the lamb ossobuco braised with mole earns its place on the menu too. The crowd tends toward neighborhood date-night, which the setting handles without trying too hard.

An Italian flag out front and a line out the door is the whole story before you even walk in. This NoHo sandwich shop keeps things unapologetically New York Italian-American, built around house-made schiacciata, a thinner, crispier cousin to focaccia. The Tony Piccante, a crispy chicken cutlet with vodka sauce and roasted red peppers, has developed its own following. Seats are scarce, the menu is short, and nobody seems bothered by either.

Exposed brick and tile floors mark the bones of what was once a Ford dealership, and Di Vino Rosso has been filling it with Italian food for what feels like forever. This sit-down Italian restaurant lists its local farmers on the back of the menu, which is either charming or a gentle flex depending on your mood. The Michelin Guide has selected it, and the pappardelle Bolognese made with wild boar gives you a pretty clear reason why.

High ceilings and chandeliers set the tone inside this Italian-leaning steakhouse at the Vinoy Resort, where the menu pivots between wood-fired cuts and house-made pasta without apologizing for either direction. The focaccia pull-apart rolls arrive glistening, and the radiatore alla vodka clings to every ridge the way a good vodka sauce is supposed to. The caramel coffee budino lands in a sundae glass, which feels right.

The menu changes nightly because the cook changes nightly, a rotating cast of nonnas from around the world who each bring their own country's food to this tiny, always-packed Staten Island restaurant. One evening it's Paraguayan chicken soup with cornmeal dumplings; the next, a Japanese seaweed salad with yuzu. The phone rings constantly, the tables fill fast, and Joe Scaravella's little place near St. George Terminal runs entirely on grandmotherly authority.

The São Paulo-based Fasano group has been running elegant hotels and restaurants across two continents, and their Midtown fine dining room fits the pattern: high ceilings, soothing proportions, and a menu that moves through northern Italy without apology. The pasta is genuinely the thing to follow here, and the vitello Milanese reminds you why classics became classics. Sophisticated without being stiff, which in Midtown is no small trick.

An open hearth warms the dimly lit room at this upscale Italian restaurant on Flatbush, where the sommelier-restaurateur's wine instincts shape the whole experience as much as the kitchen does. The pasta earns its reputation, and the menu leans into Southern Italian regional cooking without making a fuss about it. Bring a date or a small group; the room was built for exactly that kind of unhurried evening.

Massive pine trees ring the courtyard and string lights do the rest, which goes a long way toward explaining why this Italian-leaning restaurant on Wilshire has been an Angeleno date-night staple forever. The menu reads familiar until it doesn't, local organic produce turning up in directions that surprise. The Amalfi lemon mousse cake with limoncello granita is the kind of dessert you order before you've finished your entree.

A terrace right on the Potomac makes the room hard to argue with, and regulars who know this book outside before anyone else gets the idea. This is an upscale Italian seafood restaurant where the kitchen takes raw ingredient quality seriously and the service runs like a tight ship. Lunch keeps the bill from getting too philosophical. Chef Matteo Limoli turns out dishes like a liquid cacio e pepe that has no business working as well as it does.

The team is up before dawn baking trays of fat, fluffy focaccia, and everything else follows from that. This is a sandwich counter, a focaccia-forward one, where the bread lands somewhere between pillow and slab and carries fillings like prime rib with smoked horseradish cream. Half portions exist for those who haven't cleared their schedule. A few outdoor tables and some counter seats round out what is a charmingly low-frills operation. The Michelin Guide has it listed.

Pasta is the whole point at this cozy Lower East Side fine dining spot, and the set menu makes no apologies for it. Fried cacio e pepe risotto supplì show up early and disappear fast, but the real argument is the agnolotti packed with short rib and tossed in butter. Focaccia arrives warm, the room stays small, and weeknight cooking classes mean the regulars are occasionally trying to take the place home with them.

The name says it all: this is red-sauce nostalgia with decent sourcing behind it, an Italian-American restaurant where the menu reads like a Sunday supper at someone's grandmother's house, if grandma had a full bar and a buzzy crowd to match. Clams casino, chicken Vesuvio, and macaroni in garlic cream all show up. The pizza selection wanders usefully off-script too. Relaxed, loud, and unapologetically carb-forward.

The house-made mozzarella, pulled fresh and served as an antipasto before it meets a thin-crust pizza, is a reasonable place to start at this family-run Italian-American restaurant near the Monterey airport. The pastas are handmade and land al dente, which shouldn't need saying but does. Generous portions and a sizable menu make it a go-to for large groups, and the cannoli close things out without any fuss.

The building was once a post office, and the beamed ceilings still carry that civic grandeur, now filled with the noise of a Cal-Ital neighborhood restaurant doing brisk, happy business. The open kitchen anchors a room that works equally well for a date or a loud group. Focaccia arrives complimentary and is the kind you actually remember. Freshly made pasta leads into mains grilled over almond wood, the whole menu moving at an easy, convivial pace.

The dining room is also a working flower shop, which means your table arrives surrounded by actual blooms rather than the usual bad art. This contemporary Italian restaurant folds edible flowers into the cooking itself, from cocktails dusted with pine pollen to pasta tossed in a white Bolognese. The space is bright and spring-lit in a way that makes you feel underdressed even when you're not.

The exposed brick and high ceilings in downtown St. Pete signal that this is a proper fine dining Italian room, not a red-sauce joint. Creative pastas lead the menu, with the kitchen leaning into arrangements that look as considered as they taste. Steaks and lamb come from the butcher shop next door, and caviar doughnuts and wagyu show up for anyone who wants to push further. The servers keep the whole thing from taking itself too seriously.

Itameshi is the concept here, a genuine culinary tradition that blends Japanese and Italian cooking, and Kinjo leans into it with a straight face and a lot of skill. The open kitchen anchors a polished dining room where the menu moves from duck prosciutto éclairs to chawanmushi bobbing in Parmesan broth, sometimes in the same bite's worth of logic. The dessert arrives shaped like a tomato. It works, somehow.

Bright unframed paintings and shelves of canning jars set the tone at this cozy Italian restaurant in Ardsley, where the room feels warmer than its simple storefront suggests. The menu speaks Italian but thinks American, leaning on seasonal produce and well-made pasta. The pastry chef co-owns the place, which means dessert gets the attention it deserves rather than the afterthought it usually is.

A pasta tasting menu inside Chelsea Market where the counter seats thirty and the courses keep coming, each one a different shape. This is Pastificio Di Martino's New York outpost, and they are not here to be delicate about it. Plate after plate of pasta, in every format the canon allows, lands in front of you before a granita dessert arrives to cut through it all. Bring an appetite that means it.

Midnight-blue leather banquettes and exposed brick set the tone at this New Rochelle Italian restaurant, where the long bar fills early with regulars who seem to know everyone. The kitchen splits its attention between old-school classics and something a little more current, and Mom's meatballs in marinara with a scoop of ricotta make a convincing case for the old school. Chatty and unpretentious, the kind of place that makes New York's suburbs feel worth the commute.

Stefano Secchi, the chef behind Rezdôra, runs this Southern Italian restaurant in the Flatiron District with the cooking of Campania as its anchor. Pasta is the reason to come, most of it made in-house and portioned for the table to share, so ordering several is expected rather than greedy. The room has a rustic, unhurried feel, and the menu reads like someone who grew up near Naples rather than studied it.

Perched high inside The National, this Italian fine-dining room looks out over Dallas in a way that makes everyone feel like they're closing a deal. The menu runs handmade pasta, wood-fired meats, and premium seafood, with a wine list broad enough to keep the table arguing pleasantly. Dress up, bring an occasion if you don't already have one, and let the room do the rest.

The chocolate soufflé has its own fan club, which tells you something about a French-Italian restaurant that's been around forever on Durham's dining scene. New owners have kept the old favorites, including a North Carolina shrimp remoulade that predates them, while leaning into pasta and wood-grilled larger plates. The room has a warm, smart retro feel, the kind that makes a weeknight dinner feel like a small occasion.

The golden dining room with its low ceilings has the feel of a room that's been quietly full since forever, which in Gramercy is saying something. Novitá is a neighborhood trattoria doing Italian comfort food without any urge to surprise you, and the regulars who fill it seem to prefer things exactly that way. The service is warm in the particular Italian manner where you leave feeling slightly adopted.

Sleek banquettes and artwork-lined walls give this upscale osteria more warmth than you'd expect from a canyon-road address near the PCH. The menu reads like a tour of Italian classics, from stuffed zucchini blossoms to a proper bucatini all'amatriciana, with house-made desserts closing things out. The bar works nicely for solo diners who'd rather eat well than wait for a table.

All the pastas here are extruded and slow-dried in house, which is exactly the kind of detail that sounds fussy until you taste it. Olivia is a bustling Italian restaurant in South Tampa where the cooking leans on classic flavors without getting trapped by them, a Bolognese arrives with herbed ricotta, a pizza comes draped in truffle honey and speck. The room fills with the kind of crowd that orders confidently and stays for another round.

The glass garage façade on Armitage opens into a warm room of bare wood tables and glowing Edison bulbs, the kind of osteria that takes Piedmont seriously without taking itself too seriously. The menu stays tight and regional, meaning tajarin with ragù, hand-pinched cheese ravioli, and vitello tonnato done properly. The staff moves like they actually want you there, which in Chicago is not always a given.

The wood-fired oven does a lot of work here, from pizza through pasta and on to house-made ice cream. This wood-fired Italian spot off Magazine Street runs a menu broad enough that the table will agree on something, which in New Orleans is no small feat. Everything is made in house daily, and the room has that sleek-but-settled feel that suggests the place has been around forever without trying to look like it.

Every table at this cozy Campanian trattoria in Westchester starts the same way: a wooden board arrives loaded with caponatina and house-made focaccia before you've ordered a thing. The chef runs a scratch kitchen rooted in southern Italy, with hearty portions and specials worth circling. Finish with the house limoncello and you'll understand why the regulars never really need a menu.

One dining room looks out over Pilarcitos Creek and a garden, which sets the mood for an Italian American fine dining spot that leans into quality ingredients and house-made pasta rather than any fussy reinvention. The vaulted ceilings and open kitchen keep things lively, and Slow Food U.S.A. recognition signals the kitchen's sourcing instincts. Thin-crust pizzas and generous classics like eggplant Parmesan fill the tables with a steady mix of locals and coastal day-trippers.

The brick oven is the anchor here, turning out thin-crusted pizzas with just enough char on a Morris Park block that mostly ignores trends. Patricia's is a sit-down Italian restaurant with high ceilings, exposed brick, and a semi-open kitchen that makes the room feel lively without being loud. The wine list leans into obscure Italian varietals, and the cocktails are worth a look before you settle in for something from the sea.

The dining room is styled to look like an Italian estate, which suits the Antinori family just fine, given that they own one. This is a Tuscan restaurant inside the Inn at Spanish Bay, where the golf course views are decidedly Californian but the wood-fired cooking runs straight down the Italian peninsula. The Antinori wine list is long and pointed, and the menu leans hearty, the kind of rustic that still knows what it's doing.

Weathered wood, a playlist with opinions, and a menu that splits its loyalties between Sicily and the bayou. This small, intimate Italian-Creole restaurant on Chicago Avenue is the project of a chef paying tribute to his Sicilian grandfather, and the kitchen's personality comes through in calamari stuffed with jalapeños and banana peppers, and trenette with cognac-splashed shrimp scampi. The portions are built for sharing, so bring a table's worth of people.

White tile, long booths, and a spacious patio set the tone at this neighborhood osteria from a Jackson native who also runs the bar across the street. The Italian-American menu leans house-made pasta and shareable plates, with pork and ricotta meatballs in tomato gravy as a regular fixture. The kind of place where the menu is long enough that nobody at the table agrees on what to order, which is generally a good sign.

A two-story floral mural marks the entrance to this Neapolitan pizza spot on Melrose, where the room manages dive-bar ease and actual style at the same time. Black marble bar, varnished wood communal table, a covered patio, and a wood-fired oven you can watch from almost anywhere. The hand-stretched pies are the move, though the seasonal small plates keep the table busy between rounds.

Rossoblu is an Italian restaurant in the Fashion District that plants its flag firmly in Emilia-Romagna, the region where the chef spent formative summers eating very well. The pastas are made in-house, the ragu is slow and serious, and the tiramisu arrives as a proper brick rather than a cloud of pretension. Downtown shoppers and office lunchers fill the room, but the food is patient enough not to care.

Exposed brick, painted-tile floors, and photos of a Tuscan hometown set the mood at this neighborhood Italian restaurant in Shaw. The chef ran the kitchen at DC's beloved Tosca for years before opening this more personal room. Pasta gets serious attention here, and truffles show up more than once on the menu. The kind of place where the cooking feels like it has something to prove, in a quiet, unhurried way.

Perched on the seventh floor of the Embassy Suites, this rooftop pizzeria trades hotel-dining anonymity for glazed white tile, dark green walls, and a glassed-in kitchen open to the room. The wrap-around terrace puts the Blue Ridge Mountains directly in your eyeline. A wood-fired brick oven handles the main event, with pies built from house-made and artisanal toppings. The Michelin Guide has it listed as a Selected Restaurant.

The bar runs deep on cicchetti and cocktails if you're just passing through, but Sorella is really a sit-down Northern Italian restaurant with California instincts and house-made pasta that takes the job seriously. It shares DNA with the more formal Acquerello nearby, though the room here trades white tablecloths for something louder and younger. Polk Street regulars fill it fast, so book ahead.

Look for the "S" on the door and you'll find a fine dining room that leans into 1930s speakeasy atmosphere without irony, all dim glamour and low voices. The menu moves across Italian regions rather than planting its flag in one, which means ribollita shares the card with a very serious Milanese di vitello. The crowd dresses up a little, as if the room demanded it.