The best restaurants in Seattle for 2026

James Beard Award-winning chef Holly Smith opened Café Juanita in 2000 to celebrate her passion for the cuisine of Northern Italy interpreted through the Pacific Northwest, and over two decades later it remains one of the finest Italian restaurants in the country. Seasonal tasting menus — including a dedicated plant-based option — draw on the best of both traditions: house-made pastas, rabbit braised in Arneis wine, carefully sourced produce from sustainable local farms, and an award-winning Italian-focused wine list. The dining room, redesigned in 2015 and set beside Juanita Creek in Kirkland, is warm and intimate, and the service is consistently among the most highly decorated in the region. A multiple James Beard Outstanding Restaurant nominee. One of the best Italian restaurants in the Seattle area and a Kirkland destination for where to eat on the Eastside.

There is no other restaurant in Seattle quite like The Pink Door — an unmarked entrance off Post Alley, a terrace with sweeping views of Elliott Bay, and a dining room where live cabaret and trapeze performances share the evening with house-made pasta and long bottles of Italian wine. Open since 1981, this Belltown institution has built its identity around the conviction that dinner should be an occasion in every sense: the food is warmly executed Italian-American, anchored by pasta, antipasti, and fresh seafood, but it is the atmosphere — theatrical, romantic, irreplaceable — that makes The Pink Door one of the most distinctively Seattle experiences on any list of the best restaurants in the city. One of the best Italian restaurants near Pike Place Market and essential for where to eat in Belltown.

Master sushi chef Shiro Kashiba trained under the legendary Jiro Ono in Tokyo before spending decades teaching the city of Seattle how to eat Japanese food — first at Shiro’s, then at the restaurant that now bears his name. Sushi Kashiba at Pike Place Market is where that lifetime of craft lives: edomae-style nigiri of pristine precision, a seasonal omakase that draws on the Pacific Northwest’s remarkable seafood alongside fish flown from Japan, and a soba noodle menu that deepens the experience. The intimate counter is the place to sit. Kashiba’s influence on Seattle’s Japanese dining culture is immeasurable, and his restaurant remains one of the best sushi restaurants in Seattle and a Pike Place Market essential.

The most acclaimed new restaurant in Seattle in years, Atoma opened in late 2023 in the same century-old Wallingford Craftsman that once housed James Beard Award-winner Maria Hines’ Tilth — and immediately made the space its own. Chef Johnny Courtney, a Canlis alumnus, and his wife and business partner Sarah run a kitchen that takes Pacific Northwest produce and proteins as its foundation and layers them with European technique and the team’s global culinary backgrounds. The signature rosette cookie with farmer’s cheese and Walla Walla onion jam was named one of the New York Times’ best American dishes of 2023. Esquire’s Best New Restaurant in America 2024 (sole Pacific Northwest entry), Seattle Met’s Restaurant of the Year 2024, and a James Beard semifinalist for Best New Restaurant 2025. One of the best new restaurants in Seattle right now.

Chef Kristi Brown opened COMMUNION in December 2020 in the Liberty Bank Building at the corner of 24th and Union — a site that once housed the Pacific Northwest’s first Black-owned bank, two blocks from where she grew up in Seattle’s Central District. Her cooking is called “Seattle Soul,” and it earns the name: Southern staples — BBQ shrimp and grits, collard and mustard greens, neck bone stew — are woven with the Asian, Filipino, East African and Creole influences of the neighbourhood Brown grew up in. Condé Nast Traveller named it one of the 12 best new restaurants in the world six months after opening. The New York Times named it one of the 50 places in America it was most excited about. A James Beard Award semifinalist. One of the best Southern restaurants in Seattle and a Central District essential for where to eat and drink in Seattle.

One of Seattle’s most enduring and best-loved restaurants, Lark on Capitol Hill has been a standard-bearer for seasonal, locally sourced American cooking since it opened in 2003. The menu is designed for sharing — small plates, cheese, charcuterie, and thoughtfully sourced mains — and the kitchen’s commitment to Pacific Northwest producers has remained the anchor of everything it does through two decades of evolution. The room is warm, the wine list is one of the finest in the city, and the service has the ease of a restaurant that has always known what it wants to be. A James Beard Award semifinalist for Outstanding Restaurant. One of the best Capitol Hill restaurants and a go-to for where to eat and drink in Seattle.

Tom Douglas’s late-night Belltown kitchen has been one of Seattle’s most beloved gathering places since it opened in 1996, and the kitchen’s consistent warmth and confidence are the reason regulars keep returning. The wood-fired oven and rotisserie define the cooking — rotisserie chicken, wood-grilled meats, seasonal small plates, and one of the best cheeseburgers in the city — while the long marble bar and the late-night menu have made Palace Kitchen a neighbourhood fixture for the theatre crowd, the restaurant industry, and anyone who wants a serious meal after midnight. A James Beard Award-winning restaurateur’s most accessible room. One of the best American restaurants in Belltown and a reliable anchor for where to eat near Pike Place Market.

Chef Melissa Miranda opened Musang on Beacon Hill in 2020 as a tribute to her father — a Filipino immigrant who settled in the neighbourhood in the 1970s and whose nickname, Musang, means “wild cat” in Tagalog — and the restaurant has become one of the most important tables in Seattle. Miranda was named a Food & Wine Best New Chef in 2022 and a James Beard Award nominee; her cooking pairs seasonal Pacific Northwest produce with the flavours of her family’s Filipino cooking: short rib kare-kare basted with peanut butter bagoong, buttermilk fried chicken, pork lumpia with sawsawan, pinakbet made with Washington-grown vegetables. The restaurant operates as a community-centred space, and the warmth of that mission comes through in every meal. One of the best Filipino restaurants in America and an essential address for where to eat in Seattle.

Husband-and-wife chefs Rachel Yang and Seif Chirchi opened Joule in 2007, and their four-time James Beard Award-nominated Korean steakhouse remains one of the most original and compelling restaurants in Seattle nearly two decades on. The concept is focused and confident: nontraditional cuts of beef — flat iron, hanger, kalbi short rib, wagyu — are grilled and served with bold Korean-inflected accompaniments, alongside shareable sides like rice cakes with chorizo, smoked tofu, and white kimchi. Yang trained at Daniel Boulud and Per Se in New York; the classical foundation shows in every dish. Named one of Bon Appétit’s Best New Restaurants in America when it reopened in its current form in 2013. One of the best steakhouses in Seattle and a Wallingford anchor for where to eat and drink in Seattle.

When chef Brady Williams announced he was leaving the helm of Canlis — the legendary restaurant he had led to a four-star Seattle Times review and a Food & Wine Best New Chef award — to open a 28-seat restaurant next to an adult video store in White Center, the online waitlist hit 15,000 names before the restaurant opened. TOMO, named for Williams’ Japanese-American grandmother Tomoko Ishiwata Bristol, is a prix-fixe tasting menu that draws on his Japanese-American heritage, the team’s global kitchen backgrounds, and the Pacific Northwest’s exceptional produce. The kitchen leans plant-forward, with vegetables as the main event and meat and seafood as seasoning. Ranked 30th on Esquire’s Best New Restaurants list in 2022. James Beard Outstanding Wine Program semifinalist. One of the best tasting menu restaurants in Seattle and the best reason to head to White Center right now.