6 Best Italian Restaurants in New York

What comes to your mind when you hear Italy? Just pasta and pizza? Italy isn't just known for its beautiful scenery but also its amazing dishes ranging from lentil soup to chicken parmesan and many more.

Ever tried pancetta-wrapped rabbit? You may be in luck to eat an Italian meal made with love by all the Italian grandmas the kitchen hires. If you're in the ever-buzzing city of New York, check out these top best Italian restaurants in NYC.

Frankie’s 457 Spuntino

This warm Brooklyn neighborhood restaurant is a fine dining restaurant featuring an exposed brick wall and a picturesque cozy backyard space open to customers on warm evenings in summer.

Frankie’s is well- known for its excellent brunch, lunch, and impromptu dinner, and house made pastas. The restaurant is famous for its sandwiches (like the eggplant marinara and meatball parm sandwiches) and pasta, especially the cavatelli with browned sage butter and hot sausage. You can also buy affordable wines at the long wooden wine bar to go with your meal.

Bamonte’s

Bamonte’s, a legendary Italian restaurant in Williamsburg, was founded over a century ago in 1900 by the same family that currently runs it. The restaurant offers impressive, grand hospitality with its suited servers at your beck and call.

Bamonte’s interior décor includes velvet curtains, white tablecloths decorated with one tomato-red flower in a vase and cut-crystal votive candles, and fading signed photographs of past celebrities.

Italian dishes you shouldn’t miss when you visit the restaurant include the famous pork chops garnished with pickled peppers, spaghetti and meatballs, and briny clams oreganata.

Dominick’s

Dominick’s is among the best Italian restaurants in New York City and it is located in the borough’s Little Italy (aka Bronx’s Arthur Avenue). This restaurant has served well-sauced delicious pasta dishes to locals and visitors for over fifty years in its dining room.

It may appear more like a dining hall than a restaurant, but its servers have exceptional knowledge regarding the lengthy tasting menu and wine list guiding the customers.

Other excellent meals on the tasting menus include smoked potatoes, veal parmesan, roasted mushrooms and stuffed artichoke.

Via Carota

Via Carota is among the Italian restaurants in NYC serving authentic Italian food, where you might bump into a celebrity and wait hours to get a seat any day.

Rita Sodi and Jody Williams own the restaurant, and despite being sparsely decorated, the fine dining restaurant is cozy and inviting with exposed bricks and a lot of wood.

A plate of chewy cacao e Pepe and a glass of wine at night is a memorable experience you would love. On the other hand, you may desire thin crust pizzas or spicy rigatoni vodka.

For the main course, you might want to try tomato sauced potato gnocchi or a classic meal like the tagliatelle with prosciutto and grilled chicken. 

These are the star cuisines of Via Carota; however, the options frequently change, and it’s impossible to go wrong with your choice.

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Don Angie

Don Angie is a Wes t Village restaurant owned by Scott Tacinelli and Angie Rito with exceptional Italian cooking skills. It has opened the door to a new age of tomato sauce cuisine with extraordinary creativity with Italian-American foods.

The pair are known to offer unexpected but incredible dishes with pasta; an example is the caramelle pasta with buffalo milk mozzarella and pickled cantaloupe. Also, the grilled octopus served is another Italian dish you should try out in this Greenwich village restaurant.

Another star cuisine of this restaurant is their garlic bread made with sesame-seeded flat bread stuffed with Parmesan and stracchino. The executive chef also makes his amaro using sarsaparilla, resulting in a slightly alcoholic beverage.

Lilia

Lilia is a star Italian restaurant in Williamsburg and owned by one of the best pasta chefs in New York, Missy Robbins. The restaurant is famous among New Yorkers and tourists for traditional Italian food like gnocchi, ravioli, Bolognese, and other carby dishes. 

You might need to make a reservation in advance (probably a month or two), and if you’re lucky, you might meet Robbins cooking her lamb steaks near the wood grill.

Lilia's entire menu is exquisite but the must-try dishes in Lilia include the mafaldini (rippled noodles topped with pink peppercorns), Cacio e Pepe Fritelle and Robbins’ strong suit, seafood dishes. 

You can also order luscious braised rabbit, the grilled clams with Calabrian chilies. Whatever your choice is, you can be sure you’ll get the best dishes from the best chef.

To Wrap It Up

Nothing screams yummy than fresh mozzarella on your pizza or homemade ravioli at Gramercy park hotel.

Or eating Italian dishes made from wood-fired ovens in an Italian restaurant at Central park South. Also, with so many options to choose from such as fried artichokes, chicken Parm, pancetta-wrapped rabbit, and stuffed mushrooms, you keep going back for more.

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