From our Top 50 list, here are our picks for the best restaurants in Durham

For more than a decade, Durham has been at the heart of the Triangle’s food scene.

Here are the Durham restaurants that made The News & Observer’s Top 50 in the Triangle.

Aaktun

The trend of all-day cafes is suddenly everywhere, promising coffee and pastries, sandwiches and late-night cocktails. No one does the all-day café quite like Aaktun, which looks more like a seaside Mexican cave than a restaurant. Created by current “Top Chef” contestant Oscar Diaz, the walls at Aaktun are lined with curved pink grottos that can carry whispers across the table while the sun beams in through skylights. Even still, your rum punch is the brightest thing in the room, a blend of pucker and bite.

704 Ramseur St., Durham and 401 E. Main St., Clayton | aaktun.info | $ - $ $ $

Cheeni

The depth and warmth of Cheeni surrounds you when you walk through the door. There’s a rattan rocking chair draped with a blanket, curious in a restaurant, but familiar in a home, which, of course, is what Cheeni conjures, filling a menu with regional Indian dishes from the memories of James Beard-nominated owner Preeti Waas. Don’t be embarrassed if you can’t move beyond the craveable chaat section on the menu, where masala fries in the aloo chaat or the bread pakora, essentially fried cheese sandwich, touch the deepest parts of our snacking souls. Larger dishes bring the family together; the Mangalorean chicken, a coconut curry with a slowly building heat, like being warmed by a fire.

202 Corcoran St., #100, Durham and 3151 Elion Drive, #101, Research Triangle Park | cheenidurham.com | $ $ - $ $ $

The Chicken Hut

Now in its seventh decade, the Chicken Hut is Durham’s oldest Black-owned restaurant, remaining with its founding family. The superb fried chicken is served every day, though the specials change daily, sometimes smothered pork chops or braised oxtails in a rich gravy. Though it’s named for its signature dish, it’s hard not to make a vegetable plate of boiled cabbage, collards, mac and cheese and okra. Recently Durham made the obvious official, declaring the Chicken Hut a historic landmark, noting its role as a community hub during the Civil Rights Movement and legacy as the city’s oldest Black-owned restaurant.

3019 Fayetteville St., Durham | chickenhutnc.weebly.com | $

Dame’s Chicken & Waffles

Dame’s perfected sweet and savory and helped establish Downtown Durham’s dining scene. To this day, a weekend brunch table remains one of the hottest tickets in town. There are many flavorful adventures to choose here, smears of housemade butters and syrups adding sweetness and searing spice. But don’t let the pizzazz distract you — the fried chicken really is that good.

455 S. Driver St., Durham | dameschickenwaffles.com | $ $

Elmo’s Diner

Elmo’s is proof that those charming diners from the movies truly do exist in real life. From the basic mugs filled with Counter Culture coffee, the dapple pancakes and perfectly runny eggs, everything at Elmo’s takes the mythic model of the American Diner and makes it a little bit better. Here, breakfast feels like an event and biscuits and gravy feel life-affirming, which is why if you’re searching for Elmo’s on a Sunday morning, just look for the crowd on its porch, eagerly awaiting tables.

776 9th St., Durham | elmosdiner.com | $

Ex-Voto

This isn’t the restaurant Angela Salamanca and Marshall Davis imagined they’d open, conceived in a different time as a love letter to heirloom corn, to the richness to be found in artisan tortillas. Instead, Ex-Voto is an irreverent ode to fast-food nostalgia — specifically the crunchwrap supreme. A celebration of form, these fancy crunchwraps are stuffed with braised short ribs or spicy fried shrimp, bacon-fat beans and salsas, and sealed closed with griddled cheese. Add jalapeños to truly take it over the top.

430 W. Main St., Durham (in Durham Food Hall) | exvotonc.com | $

Fonda Lupita

A phenomenon since it opened, Fonda Lupita brought the gordita to the mainstream in the Triangle. These pockets of thick, griddled tortillas are stuffed with braised meats — shredded pork in green salsa is peak comfort food. You may get lucky and run into a bowl of fiery red menudo, sometimes a weekday special.

1952 S. Horner Blvd., Sanford and 905 W. Main St. #21A, Durham | fondalupita.com | $ - $ $

Gocciolina

The view from Guess Road can be unassuming, but inside Gocciolina is one of the Triangle’s most legendary chalkboard menus. The specials, scrawled by hand before service, are the best motivation to book an early reservation, lest you miss out on lemony sauteed clams, or a pork chop we should all be talking about more. But the regular menu is also studded with bangers, including the richest, sweetest pork meatballs in existence, and a carbonara etched on the hearts of anyone in Durham who loves pasta.

3314 Guess Road, Durham | gocciolina.com | $ $ $

Ideal’s Sandwich & Grocery

By the time you walk back to your car, part of the paper wrapped around your roast pork sandwich has already turned translucent, offering a greasy glimpse at the bright green broccoli rabe, the smear of garlic mayo and all the other indulgent wonders that await inside. Ideal’s happens to serve sandwiches. That is, this tiny East Durham shop, helmed by two grads of a fancy culinary school, seems able to do anything it wants, and it happens to serve otherworldly, regionally specific, frenzy-inducing sandwiches. If you’re not feeling the Philly-style roast pork on a particular day, maybe it’s time to try the chopped cheese, a Harlem icon, recreated on a Durham griddle with all the peppery, gooey, beefy intensity that a sandwich could possibly muster. Make sure you grab a bag of paper thin potato chips and at least one brown butter chocolate chip cookie.

2108 Angier Ave., Durham | idealsdeli.com | $

Little Bull

Make sure you bring enough friends to tackle the large barbacoa plate, where succulent beef cheeks and tongue are steamed in banana leaves and pulled apart for indulgent make your own tacos. More than any other chef in the Triangle’s talented dining pool, Chef Oscar Diaz crafts an especially personal menu, using Little Bull to showcase bites, cravings and ideas he’s carried around all his life. It’s a place where velvety rich consommé is poured tableside over goat dumplings, leaving little doughy pockets of pleasure in the bright red soup. And one of the area’s most respected smashburgers is served up, but only at the sleek marble bar.

810 N. Mangum St., Durham | littlebullnc.com | $ $ $

M Sushi

The flagship of the Michael Lee restaurant empire, M Sushi established a new standard for sushi in the Triangle that no other restaurant has been able to match. Now a decade in, the hype continues to be real and deserved, with Lee still venturing to the airport to personally inspect the restaurant’s imported fish. A stool at the live edge bar at M Sushi is one of the most coveted perches in the Triangle, where astonishingly fresh cuts of fish appear as they’re ready, many seasoned with barely more than the sea itself, others with a punch of ponzu or a miraculously thin serrano pepper.

311 Holland St., Durham and 4 Fenton Main St. #120, Cary | msushidurham.m-restaurants.com | $ $ $ - $ $ $ $

M Tempura

We take frying for granted, dismissing it as common or ordinary just because you’ll most likely find it in a drive-thru. But there’s nothing ordinary about Chef Michael Lee’s M Tempura, the Triangle’s finest fry bar, where only astoundingly special things happen. The place to sit is at the bar itself, where a succession of bites will appear as they’re ready. You’ll want the scallop, arriving plump and cut in half, revealing the shimmering translucent bite of sweetness, wrapped delicately in a bit of crunch. A barely cooked scallop will always be delicious, or a head-on shrimp or fatty salmon, and M Tempura takes them to greater heights. But something totally different happens to the sweet potato, tasting like creamy candy in its own thin tempura wrapper. Certainly, frying is an art form.

111 Orange St., Durham | mtempura.m-restaurants.com | $ $ $ - $ $ $ $

Mothers & Sons

Before dinner service each day, the pasta is made and rolled by hand at a large communal table near the kitchen, where later that night, strangers or large groups of friends will find it as tender tagliatelle or thin dramatic tonnarelli, dyed black with squid ink. As the name suggests, Mothers & Sons is a kind of nostalgic homecoming, where diners find the immense warmth of a bowl of freshly made pasta. Or perhaps that warmth comes from the flames of a wood-burning grill, tucked just behind a serving table stacked with books and bowls, where the fire is fed with fat dripping from a porchetta. Or warmer still, a coveted seat at the bar with a half-dozen stools, where you’ll find Durham’s most vast selection of amaro, but how do you not order a Negroni?

107 W. Chapel Hill St., Durham | mothersandsonsnc.com | $ $ $

Nanas

Chef Matt Kelly is obsessed with nostalgia, but nostalgia can be a dangerous thing, longing for some real or imagined past like a golden age that slipped away. But then a server pokes a spoon through the cloud that is your real-life chocolate souffle, filling the center with hot fudge that drips in a thick, bittersweet ribbon. Or oysters, grilled over wood coals until the silky brine is just warmed and, in 2026, topped with foam of all things. Nanas doesn’t live in the past, but instead makes the timeless feel avant garde. In this velvet dining room of pure midcentury glam, you will feel cared for like you’re at your grandmother’s house.

2514 University Drive, Durham | nanasrockwood.com | $ $ $ - $ $ $ $

Nikos

The leader in a culinary revival of Durham’s Brightleaf Square, Nikos is the most personal in the vast restaurant empire of Giorgios Bakatsias. An homage to coastal Greek cuisine, a meal at Nikos begins with meze, platters of dips and vegetables to share at the table. But it’s not all comfort food; Nikos serves a stunning octopus carpaccio, arranged like a bright mosaic. As one of Durham’s Michelin-rated restaurants, Nikos proves Bakatsias still has his fastball.

905 W. Main St., Durham | nikosdurham.com | $ $ - $ $ $

Pizzeria Toro

There’s an enormous warmth in the dining room at Pizzeria Toro, perhaps fueled by the orange flames dancing in the wood-burning oven, perhaps from the feeling of being in Durham’s most effortlessly comfortable restaurant. Before the Triangle had a dozen great pizzerias, it only had one, Pizzeria Toro, turning out charred, chewy and gooey pies that elevated our sense of the slice. There’s the spicy lamb meatball, rich and bitter with crispy kale leaves, or the wild mushroom, studded with chanterelles when in season, or the clam pie, with open shells still warm from the oven and a zing of roasted garlic. And as excellent as the pizzas are, despite all that, the most famous dish is somehow, astoundingly, improbably, a kale salad, the leaves gently softened by dressing, with a salty punch of shaved parmesan cheese.

105 E. Chapel Hill St., Durham | pizzeriatoro.com | $ $ - $ $ $

Rose’s Noodles, Dumplings & Sweets

Not that long ago, Rose’s wasn’t a restaurant at all; it was a whole-animal butcher shop that ran a ramen special for lunch one day a week. That ramen is truly something special, changing weekly and seasonally, but always a reliable umami bomb, often riffing on traditional miso and tonkotsu, even appearing as a cold tomato ramen in the searing Durham summertime. Don’t miss the steamed pork bun, pillowy and sweet, and never skip dessert, including the Triangle’s very best ice cream sandwiches — like burnt honey ice cream between gingersnap cookies.

121 N. Gregson St., Durham | rosesdurham.com | $ - $ $

Saltbox Seafood Joint

Even 150 miles inland, it seems like a wave could break in the dining room of Saltbox Seafood Joint. Of all the restaurants in the Triangle, Saltbox has the simplest concept — fried seafood — and the most difficult to pull off. In this A-frame shack, decorated with crab traps and buoys, Chef Ricky Moore keeps his promise of fresh North Carolina seafood, delicately fried, assertively seasoned and painstakingly sourced from the deep waters and cozy inlets along our coast. The James Beard Award winner draws on decades of fine dining training and experience, yet serves his sea-soaked childhood memories in paper boxes. The shrimp, oysters and grouper are as fine as fine can be, but Moore evangelizes the underloved bonefish, the croaker and spot, and looks to the seasons to write his menus. You’ll wonder if perhaps you’re tasting flounder, blue fish or mullet for the very first time.

2637 Durham-Chapel Hill Blvd., Durham | saltboxseafoodjoint.com | $ $

Viceroy

Inside, Viceroy is a mashup of British pub and family parlor, with antique portraits staring out from the walls. Irresistible crispy bites like gobi sukka and samosas are popular, as are some of the Triangle’s best curries, fiery and familiar. The cumin-scented jeera wings could make for a meal if you’re, understandably, unwilling to share.

335 W. Main St., Durham | viceroydurham.com | $ $ - $ $ $

Vin Rouge

When you order the chocolate mousse at Vin Rouge, it arrives in a giant enameled terrine, scooped tableside as a kind of final performance to the meal. As dense as lava, but as ephemeral on your tongue as a whispered secret, this dessert remains one of the Triangle’s sweetest moments. Each dining room at Vin Rouge offers a different experience: an intimate, quiet celebration in the back, a luscious garden on the side (perhaps best suited for a shellfish tower), and a raucous front room, where no one will hear you slurping the broth from your moules frites.

2010 Hillsborough Road, Durham | vinrougerestaurant.com | $ $ $ - $ $ $ $

Zweli’s Ekhaya

We miss the peanut butter collard greens from the now-closed Zweli’s cafe. But some of the dishes and flavors live on in Ekhaya, one of the Triangle’s most vibrant and personal restaurants, and the only Bantu tapas restaurant in North Carolina, if not even further. The peri peri wings are a signature dish, smoky and sharp, or reach beyond for skewers of nutty, suya-crusted chicken, or Bobotie, similar to a Shepherd’s pie, with sweet minced meat covered by savory custard.

406 Blackwell St., Durham | zwelisekhaya.com | $ $ - $ $ $

This story was originally published April 3, 2026 at 10:35 AM with the headline "From our Top 50 list, here are our picks for the best restaurants in Durham."

Drew Jackson

The News & Observer

919-829-4707

Drew Jackson writes about restaurants and dining for The News & Observer and The Herald-Sun, covering the food scene in the Triangle and North Carolina.