The 16 Best Places to Eat in Staten Island

A whole snapper, deep-fried twice for a crunch audible from across the room, arriving upright as if still swimming, tells you everything about what kind of soul food restaurant this is. Six tables on Staten Island, pitchers of rum punch and sangria on nearly all of them, and a dining room that always feels like a party that forgot to wait for a reason. The New York Times named it one of New York's best new restaurants in 2024.

1. The New York Times 2024 · 2 stars, Critic's Pick · Restaurant Review
2. The New York Times 2024 · The Restaurant List
3. The Infatuation #16 · The 25 Best Restaurants In NYC

Murals, sculptures, and flags cover every surface floor to ceiling, so you've found the place before you've read the sign. Lakruwana is a Sri Lankan restaurant on Staten Island where street food drives the menu, the room runs loud and colorful, and the owner works every table like it's a reunion. The New York Times put it on their 100 Best Restaurants in New York City list, which tracks for a room this unignorable.

1. The New York Times 2013 · 1 star, Critic's Pick · Restaurant Review
2. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant
3. The New York Times #93 · The 100 Best Restaurants in New York City

Waterfront light floods a sleek, airy pizza bar on Staten Island's Navy Pier, where the cocktail menu leans savory and spicy rather than cloying. The Morty pizza, a pistachio pesto base loaded with burrata and mortadella, is the kind of combination that sounds fussy until you taste it. Baked wings with a serious char and a cacio e pepe round out a menu built for sharing. The Michelin Guide has it listed.

1. AAA Approved
2. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. AAA Three Diamonds

1. AAA Three Diamonds

A vaulted stone bridge leads to this steakhouse on the edge of Clove Lakes Park, where the terrace sits close enough to the water to feel like a small, private Central Park. Steaks, chops, and prime seafood pull the birthday-and-anniversary crowd, which is to say the room is perpetually celebratory. The menu is classic steakhouse, nothing that will surprise you, which is precisely the point on a night like that.

1. AAA Three Diamonds

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.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. AAA Approved

1. AAA Approved

1. AAA Approved

1. AAA Approved

A short walk from the Staten Island Ferry, this old-school steakhouse keeps the lights low, the wood dark, and the ambitions firmly on the plate. Dry-aged steaks anchor the menu, with oysters close behind. No spectacle, no trend-chasing, just that particular outer-borough calm that suggests the room has been quietly holding its ground for a very long time and sees no reason to stop.

1. AAA Approved

1. AAA Approved

Staten Island's thin, crackery-crusted pizza has its own grammar, and this old-school pizzeria on Victory Boulevard is where that grammar was written. The vodka pie, draped in a creamy tomato sauce, is the one people make the trek for, though the cheese and pepperoni hold their own just fine. Calamari and clams show up as toppings, which is either ambitious or correct depending on how Staten Island you are.

1. The New York Times The 22 Best Pizza Places in New York Right Now

The retro rotating oven here has no cold spots, which is the explanation for the char-marked, toothsome crusts coming out of this Great Kills slice shop. The New York Times put Nonna's on its list of the 22 best pizza places in the city, and the schlep to Staten Island is part of the deal. Don't skip the upside-down triangle, built cheese-first the way brick oven places do it, and the clam slice is worth the detour on its own.

1. The New York Times The 22 Best Pizza Places in New York Right Now

1. The New York Times 2018 · Critic's Pick · Restaurant Review