The Best Italian Food in the United States

You walk through a working Italian grocery to reach the dining room, which is the first sign this isn't a place with a lot of interest in minimalism. Red-and-white checkered tablecloths, Chianti bottles overhead, and long family-style tables built for birthdays and rehearsal dinners. It's a red-sauce pizza and pasta joint with a cheap check, and the antipasto salad and garlic bread arrive like they were never optional.

An Italian American restaurant in Midtown that has been a fixture for Midtown media types and political regulars since the nineties, run by the Scotto family with the kind of front-of-house warmth that makes you feel like the reservation mattered. The linguine vongole and a chopped salad are the moves. Arrive late and you may find a DJ has materialized, followed shortly by a conga line, which is not something most pasta dinners promise.

Il Culaccino is a sit-down Italian American restaurant across from Wintrust Arena, which explains the pre-game crowd and the chicken Vesuvio. The menu runs red-sauce classics, prime steaks, and lighter pastas, all under burgundy leather banquettes that look like they've heard a few secrets. A wine bar spills onto a covered patio for warmer nights, and the owners also run Franco's in Bridgeport.

Mona Lisa is an old-school Italian deli and red-sauce restaurant on India Street, run by the family's third generation and still stocked like somebody's nonna is checking the shelves. The market side carries packaged goods and wine, and the counter builds the kind of sub that needs two hands and a napkin strategy. Next door, lasagna and pasta come in half portions, which feels like the restaurant admitting you also have a day to finish.

Officina is a multi-story Italian restaurant on the Wharf, and the second-floor dining room looks like a Campari ad, all art deco light fixtures and golden-green everything. The menu roams the whole country with a strong lean toward seafood, plus housemade pastas for when you want a linguine that stays on message. Upstairs, a plant-filled terrace gets a lovely view south and a less lovely one of the overpass north. Dress like you're in Milan.

Sunday Sauce is an Italian-American restaurant on North Killingsworth that treats New Jersey red-sauce comfort food as a cuisine worth remastering. The decor is a loving nod to Y2K little league pizza parties, which is a sentence nobody expected to write about a pasta joint. It works for a date or a Tuesday, and the lunch menu now runs to heroes and subs, with the Bergen County line debate left to you.

The Roost is a Capitol Hill food hall where you order from your phone and the food finds you, which spares everyone the usual tray-and-buzzer shuffle. Under one roof you get Cameo Coffee, Hi-Fi Taco, and a craft beer bar pouring Bluejacket brews. There's also Caruso's Grocery, a sit-down red sauce joint with faded red booths and chicken Parmigiana, doing a convincing impression of a place your grandfather had a table at.

A post-fire renovation gave this Abbot Kinney neighborhood restaurant a fresher face, but the kitchen's restless energy is the same. Chef Casey Lane shops the farmers market in the morning and writes the menu by evening, so the charcoal-kissed dishes you order barely existed as an idea at breakfast. Pasta, whole fish, and whatever looked good at the stalls that day fill a room that Venice locals treat as a standing appointment.

A Sicilian family splits the room between a bakery counter stacked with lobster tail pastries and sweet cannoli and a full sit-down dining area with a bar, so you can eat chicken parm and lasagna, then carry dessert home. The savory cannoli, stuffed with sausage, jalapeños, and oozing mozzarella, has earned its own following. Finish with the house limoncello, made cream-style in the Sicilian way, which lands somewhere between a digestif and a milkshake.

The Ra Ra Room is a supper club tucked inside PHX Arena where entry runs $15,000 a year in membership fees, which means most people get in by befriending someone richer than themselves. Major Food Group runs the room, and the menu leans heavily on steaks and Italian. The real closer is the candy alcove at the end of the night, a small room stocked with lollipops, peanut brittle, and jelly beans that guests take home freely.

The bucatini arrives spun tableside inside a wheel of parmigiana, which tells you immediately that this Arlington red-sauce Italian spot has more going on than the checkered-tablecloth classics. Chef Mike Cordero keeps inventing, so the menu shifts, but the instinct stays the same: familiar comfort food pushed somewhere unexpected. The room fills with people who came for spaghetti and meatballs and end up ordering whatever the server talks them into.

The focaccia-stacked lamb burger keeps regulars coming back, but at this Sterling neighborhood restaurant, even the fritto misto and a bowl of rigatoni Bolognese feel like they got the same amount of thought. Housemade bread arrives with cultured butter, seasonal cocktails shift with the calendar, and the kitchen seems constitutionally unable to phone anything in. A place that treats a Tuesday dinner like it matters.

The sourdough under the roasted chicken isn't an afterthought; it sits in the pan and drinks up every drop of stock and butter until it becomes the point. Nancy Silverton's Georgetown Italian restaurant is a Stephen Starr co-production that landed as a full-blown scene, the kind where former presidents apparently just show up for dinner. The room runs loud and the pastas are homey, but the chicken alla diavola is the dish people are still talking about.

A server once warned a full room of strangers, "It's a marathon, not a sprint," and they were not wrong. This tiny North End prix-fixe seats guests at two long communal tables for six courses of Italian comfort, the kind that leans into abundance rather than elegance. Staff T-shirts reading "Come hungry, be friendly" set the tone before the focaccia even lands.

The name is a tribute to two grandmothers who believed life's best moments happen when everyone squeezes around the dinner table, and the dining room, with its exposed-beam rafters and rosemary focaccia drifting from the open kitchen, takes that mandate seriously. This is a neighborhood restaurant in the warm, come-as-you-are mold, where the menu leans into comfort food handled with care, pasta buried under braised brisket and meatballs being the kind of dish that turns a Tuesday into something.

The pasta is hand-cut and the regulars are on a first-name basis with the staff, which tells you most of what you need to know about this Italian trattoria on East Passyunk. The kitchen draws from Abruzzo, the rugged, largely overlooked region where rustic presentation and serious technique are the same thing. Desserts are priced like it's still a neighborhood joint, because it is, and they're open every day, which feels increasingly rare.

The name nods to the signature dessert, but an Italian restaurant tucked into a Manassas strip center probably shouldn't lead with sweets. The chef works an open kitchen, sending out grilled romaine with a light Caesar dressing and biquinho peppers, housemade pasta, and a New York strip with wild mushrooms over cheesy polenta. The kind of neighborhood spot that rewards people who wander past the big-box anchors.

The stracciatella cheese is pulled by hand, and the dough ferments for 72 hours before it ever sees a topping. This Roman-style pizzeria in Alexandria started as a food truck and now draws a wait for tables, which people seem willing to endure. Specials rotate fast, salads lean seasonal and serious, and the mainstay pies hold up without leaning on novelty. Order by QR code; the servers are worth talking to anyway.

Clifton is small enough that you'll probably drive past it once before finding it, which makes this warm Italian trattoria feel like a proper discovery. Focaccia with olive oil arrives first, and the menu runs from Caesar salads and calamari through baked meatballs and stuffed gnocchi to a seven-layer chocolate cake that earns its place at the end. A raw bar adds a little ambition to what is otherwise honest, home-style cooking served with genuine care.

Every entree at this old-school Italian chain restaurant comes with bread, soup or salad, coffee or tea, and spumoni ice cream, which makes the price feel almost suspicious. It's casual and family-friendly, the kind of place where portions are generous and no one is pretending otherwise. The Mizithra cheese with browned butter has a following of its own. Phoenix New Times named it the best haunted restaurant, so apparently there's atmosphere in more ways than one.

The meat and cheese counter anchors this Italian deli in West Phoenix, where a full antipasto bar, housemade sauces and dressings, and shelves of pasta and olive oil fill out the rest. Sandwiches are built to order, and the Italian bread carries them better than the alternatives. Homemade lasagna, meatballs, and cannoli round things out for anyone who came in for cold cuts and left with dinner.

Neapolitan pizza next door to an Irish pub, sharing the same owners and roughly the same spirit. The Desmond is a casual pizza and cocktail spot in downtown Phoenix where the crust comes wood-fired and the drinks lean toward craft cocktails and imported beers. The pies run from burrata and prosciutto to spicy salami with roasted peppers. It sits a short walk from the ballpark, and the pre-game crowd has clearly figured that out.

An Italian cafe tucked inside a streetwear and sneaker shop, which is either a strange choice or the most Pioneer Square thing imaginable. Counter-service focaccia sandwiches and housemade pasta land in that comfortable zone between careful and fussy, and happy hour swings toward spritzes and antipasti without much ceremony. The kind of spot that handles a pre-game and a leisurely lunch date with equal ease.

A paper bowl at a picnic table outside a rural Virginia brewery is where this tasting trailer does its finest work. Sumac is exactly what it sounds like: a fire-cooked, hyper-local tasting menu served from a trailer parked in a field, with ingredients sourced within 150 miles. The menu shifts with whatever the land offers, and the New York Times put it on their 2024 Restaurant List, which seems about right for somewhere this quietly serious about a paper bowl.

Arancini the size of baseballs are the opening argument at this Italian restaurant tucked into a southwest Valley strip mall. The room runs small and lively, with couples and regulars filling tables over Neapolitan-style pies, both red and white. The pizza list skews local-neighborhood-Italian in the best way, and the Phoenix New Times named it Best Pizza in 2024. Worth the drive from central Phoenix if you're tired of pretending the closer options are just as good.

The focaccia here bakes thin with a crackling golden crust, and that alone makes Bread Head worth finding on Montana Ave. It's a sandwich shop, counter service, the kind you'd walk to on a Saturday. The mozzarella sandwich landed on the New York Times list of best dishes eaten across the country in 2024, which is a strange thing for a $14 half-sandwich to do, and yet here we are.

The strip-mall address on East Alameda is doing this Italian restaurant no favors, but the inside goes full fine-dining with veal marsala, house pasta, and pizzas that take themselves seriously. The kitchen also folds in the brothers' Mexican heritage on the brunch menu, which keeps things from getting too reverent. Regulars apparently start with the calamari and work backward from there.

Savarino's is a small Italian bakery in Columbia, Tennessee, where the cannoli, sfogliatelle, and bomboloni come out of a family operation that started in a Walmart shopping center and now sells to the public only on Fridays and Saturdays. Plan accordingly, because showing up on a Tuesday gets you a locked door and a lesson in wholesale. Nashville Scene named it the Best Reason to Go to Columbia, which is a narrow field, but still.

Urban Cowboy Public House is a casual East Nashville restaurant, the kind where you can walk in wearing whatever you slept in and no one blinks. The kitchen turns out a cheese plate of stracciatella, a word meaning "little rags" that sounds like an insult but describes cream and mozzarella scraps. It's the dish people post about, which is how you know the cheese is doing a lot of the marketing here.

Wood-fired pizza shop in Denver's LoHi neighborhood, where the charred, garlicky pies lean into their New Haven roots without being precious about it. The menu runs white and red, and a frozen Negroni is always on offer, because of course it is. The team also runs a Mexican spot around the corner, and that same willingness to ignore what a dish is "supposed" to be carries over here. Casual, counter-order energy with pizzas that tend toward crisp, smoky, and just cheesy enough.