Midtown isn’t a destination; it’s where you end up between obligations. Nobody goes there on purpose—they come through a glass revolving door at 11:42am, late to their meeting or timed museum visit. The likelihood is that you’re in midtown because your family is visiting. They want to see a show or something. Well, with our help, you can power lunch them silly. Just don’t make eye contact with the work-shirts hunched over martini lunches, humming the 1% blues. The truth is that under the starch, glass, and car-choked avenues, midtown, like every other neighborhood in this city, plays home to a staggering diversity of cultures, ethnicities, interests, religions, socio-economic statuses, and every other thing. The point is that, no matter what you’re looking for and unlikely as it may seem, there’s a restaurant in midtown that ticks your boxes. So what we’ve got for you, intrepid sojourner, is a slew of options from the depths of food halls to the tippy top of the culinary mountain—all of them worthy of being one of the best restaurants in midtown.
RECOMMENDED: The best restaurants in NYC
September 2025: Some places have moved, others closed, still more are exactly where we left them. It’s hard to sift through what makes a place worth recommending; beyond what we’ve listed here, there are a slew of other excellent restaurants worth your money and time but the thing is that we tried to narrow our selections down a bit to places that are exceptional, singular, unique–the kind of place that is worth going out of one’s way for or at least a place that would please everyone in a large group of family visitors. Outside of that, we tried to add a mixture of high and low, and put aside at least some of the cynically fancy places that know the suits who work in that neighborhood will shell out the big bucks.
