13 Best Restaurants in New Haven, Connecticut

Osteria Food & Wine

Location: 261 College St, New Haven, CT 06510
Cuisine: Italian

With its homemade pastas, fragrant wines, and dishes made in the Milanese way, Osteria Food & Wine takes its customers to Italy. As a husband and wife team, Cesare Casella and Costantino Mangione use family recipes to make meals that are true to the flavors of their home country.

Start by trying salumi and cheese or burrata cheese spread with aged balsamic vinegar. Then move on to house favorites like the famous lasagna at Osteria, which is made with layers of Bolognese sauce, béchamel, and Parmigiano Reggiano.

For a fancier meal, try grilled scallops with cauliflower puree, capers, and golden raisins. A wine list with only Italian wines is the perfect addition. The whole experience is better because the servers are knowledgeable and the place looks sleek and current. Osteria Food & Wine is a great place to eat Italian food that is on par with restaurants in big towns outside of Italy.

Junzi Kitchen

Location: 260 College St, New Haven, CT 06510
Cuisine: Chinese

That’s where you should go if you want fast, relaxed Chinese food made from scratch. The small chain began as a food stand in one of Yale’s residential schools and then grew to include restaurants on their own. People place their orders at the bar, and when their food is ready, food runners bring it to their tables hot and fresh.

Menu staples at Junzi, such as scallion pancakes, mapo tofu packed with meat and spices, and beef noodle soup scented with star anise and cinnamon, keep people full.

If you want something lighter, you can get a salad or a bowl of rice with roasted eggplant, spiced beans, and carrots on top. In a city known for pizza, Junzi Kitchen stands out by using high-quality ingredients to make regular Chinese takeout taste better. This is a popular place for students to eat lunch because the prices are low.

Union League Café

Location: 1032 Chapel St, New Haven, CT 06510
Cuisine: French

Union League Café is located in a historic building downtown and has one of the most elegant dining experiences in New Haven. The setting is full of Gilded Age charm. High ceilings with stained glass, fires that work, and white tablecloths set the scene for Executive Chef Jean-Pierre Vuillermet’s elegant French food.

Some of the best meals on the seasonal menus that change often are the roasted Nantucket bay scallops and the braised beef short ribs. The multicourse meals are nicely finished off with a long list of wines and rich desserts like hazelnut dacquoise, vanilla crème brûlée, and warm Valrhona chocolate cake. The food and atmosphere at Union League Café are perfect for celebrating special events or just treating yourself.

Shell & Bones

Location: 100 Waterfront St, New Haven, CT 06512
Cuisine: Seafood

Shell & Bones is the best place to get fish. As the name suggests, the mussels, lobster, and crab are very fresh and come from the cold North Atlantic and local shellfish vendors. The specials change every day based on what fish comes in, like roasted whole fish with salsa verde or linguini with clams. Shell & Bones also has a great raw bar with dishes like yellowfin tuna poke, giant chilled shrimp cocktail, and Little Island oysters from Long Island Sound, which is close by.

For lighter tastes, there is garlic bread, New England clam chowder, and fish that has been cooked simply. The site of the converted warehouse right on New Haven Harbor makes it a great place to enjoy seafood. At any time of the year, Shell & Bones is still one of the best places to get fresh fish.

Pacifico

Location: 220 College St, New Haven, CT 06510
Cuisine: Mexican

With Pacifico, famous cook Michael Schlow brings modern coastal Mexican food to New Haven. Colorful Baja fish tacos are made with grilled or fried mahi fish, red cabbage, avocado cream, and salsa verde. The tacos are then wrapped in yellow corn tortillas that were pressed by hand. The Pacifico burrito is packed full of Mexican fried rice, Oaxaca cheese, pepper jack cheese, and roasted skirt steak.

You can get lighter choices like the Pacifico salad with Little Leaf Farms greens, pepitas, and sherry shallot vinaigrette, or you can make your own tostadas. This lively downtown restaurant is a great place to meet up with friends after work because it has daily happy hour deals on margaritas, beers, and some snacks. Pacifico’s lively, up-to-date vibe and homemade cooking give Mexican food and drinks a more sophisticated twist.

Olmo

Location 868 Whalley Ave New Haven, CT 06515
Cuisine: Italian

A cozy restaurant called Olmo is in the middle of Westville Village. The owners, Julian Cardillo and Manuel Romero, change up Italian classics by using fresh, local food from New England. You could start with burrata cheese and wood-roasted eggplant caponata. Then you could move on to squid ink pasta tossed with grilled octopus or pan-seared salmon served with Swiss chard rice.

Each part is carefully thought out so that the tastes and textures work well together on the plate. The wine list is all Italian and has a lot of choices from both the Old and New Worlds. The open kitchen and simple dining room make guests feel like they are part of the family while they eat. Olmo stands out because it combines Italian tastes with very fresh local ingredients in a way that is all its own.

Caseus

Location: 93 Whitney Ave, New Haven, CT 06510
Cuisine: Cheese and Sandwiches

Caseus is more than just a cheese shop; it’s also a fancy sandwich shop and a craft beer bar. The menu is based on cheese, with over 200 artisanal cheeses, house-made salamis, terrines, and aged balsamic vinegars that go well with them. You could put Ossau-iraty (Raw Sheep’s Milk from the French Pyrenees), Délice des Crémiers (Triple Cream Cow’s Milk from central France), or aged Dutch goudas on a custom cheese plate.

You can get standard sandwiches like the braised short rib panini with blue cheese and crispy onions or ham and gruyere on house-made focaccia. The staff is happy to give you good advice on which cheeses go best with which. Caseus is still the place to go for cheese fans and people in the middle of downtown who want quick, casual food.

Barracuda

Location: 1 Broadway, New Haven, CT 06511

Cuisine: Spanish

Barracuda is a restaurant inside the historic Taft Hotel that serves modern Spanish food in a sleek and stylish setting. People can snack on tapas like patatas bravas drenched in hot tomato sauce or dates wrapped in bacon and filled with almonds and Valdeón blue cheese. As an appetizer, you can get seafood paella or a meatier version with chorizo, chicken, and pork belly.

The plates that can be shared come with crispy calamari, diver scallops that have been grilled, and a tasty lobster risotto. Barracuda’s signature gin and tonics and a long list of wines that are all Spanish go well with the food. People who stay out late keep the kitchen open until 1 a.m. on the weekends, so this downtown center is great for getting drinks and snacks late at night.

Sally’s Apizza

Location: 237 Wooster St, New Haven, CT 06511
Cuisine: Pizza

Famous Sally’s Apizza has to be on every list of New Haven’s best places. Sally’s has been a Wooster Street institution since 1938. It serves famous thin-crust pizza in a simple room with memorabilia on every wall. Yalies of all ages have squished into vinyl seats to get a taste of the delicious hot tomato pie.

The perfect chewy-crispy crust is made in a coal-fired brick oven at Sally’s. The menu is kept simple with toppings like pepperoni, mushrooms, eggplant, mozzarella, tomatoes, and pepperoni. You may have to wait in line for a table, but every bite will be worth it. This laid-back pizza shop has everything that makes New Haven pizza so great.

Zinc

Location: 964 Chapel St, New Haven, CT 06510
Cuisine: American

At the classy downtown restaurant Zinc, chef Paulo Martins adds a dramatic twist to modern American food. Chef Martins is very good at putting together different tastes, textures, and colors on one plate, as shown by dishes like foie gras terrine, Nantucket bay scallops, and dry aged strip meat. The menu changes all the time to feature fresh foods at their best.

People can make their own sample menus with several courses or order dishes à la carte, such as diver sea scallops with salsify, black trumpet mushrooms, and truffle emulsion, or a burrata cheese salad. The fine dining experience is rounded out by a cool downtown vibe, informed staff, and a long wine list. Zinc should be at the top of your list if you want to treat yourself on a special event.

Miya’s Sushi

Location: 68 Howe St, New Haven, CT 06511
Cuisine: Sushi

Miya’s Sushi is very different from other sushi places because they make creative sushi and care about the environment. Chef Bun Lai was praised for being one of the first people to use ingredients he found in the woods and at sea to make a menu that was deeply connected to nature and protection. People who eat there might get peanut butter miso with jellyfish or seaweed salad with invasive dead man’s fingers sea squirt.

Chef Lai goes even against sushi norms by making dishes like the Miya’s Memphis BBQ eel roll, which is covered in bourbon-molasses barbecue sauce. The simple eating room lets the sushi’s artistic skill shine. Part meal, part mission, Miya’s Sushi is a one-of-a-kind experience that uses sustainable ingredients and raises knowledge about the environment in a tasty way.

Heirloom

Location: 840 Whalley Ave, New Haven, CT 06515
Cuisine: American

Before going out on their own, the people behind Heirloom worked in the kitchens of well-known New Haven restaurants like Ibiza and Roia. The result is a cozy restaurant in the neighborhood that serves modern comfort food like chicken schnitzel and cast iron Brussels sprouts salad. A variety of house-made pastas, flatbreads baked in a brick oven, or a dry-aged burger on a pretzel bun with charred onions and black garlic aioli could be written on the wall every day.

Heirloom is a great place to hang out with friends for lunch on the weekends or a casual dinner because the prices are fair. Good cooking skills and a cool, understated vibe help this newbie to New Haven feel right at home.

Conclusion

There are a lot of great places to eat in New Haven. People may know this college town for its pizza, but there is so much more to enjoy in its diverse restaurant scene today. Iron Cast Brussels sprouts salads, sushi rolls made with sustainability in mind, and hand-made pastas served with refined technique: these restaurants show a sophisticated and always-improving level of cooking skill. Traditional tastes from around the world are added by immigrants. Skilled chefs take traditional New England dishes and make them their own by using seasonal, locally-sourced products.

Oysters and lobsters that come straight from the water are served at seafood places. When put together, all of these exciting restaurants make it hard to decide where to eat in New Haven. Because there are so many great options here, it’s easy to see why smart tourists and food critics now rank this city as one of the best places to eat in the United States that isn’t in a big city. Anyone who lives in New Haven will tell you that there are so many great restaurants that tourists are truly spoiled for choice.