The 13 best seafood restaurants in NYC

For food with a view closer to sea level than many of its competitors, The Fulton’s your tip-top spot. The Seaport restaurant has equally beautiful tableaus from its ground floor patio as its dining room upstairs. Its seafood-centric menu includes red snapper ceviche, grilled swordfish and black sea bass in surroundings that’ll tickle even longtime New Yorkers, especially with a glass of something sparkling. 

Relatively new to Prospect Heights, Leland Eating and Drinking House is already a popular destination for brunch and dinner, inside and out. Though it isn’t exclusively a seafood restaurant, some of our recent favorites include the smoked steelhead trout roulette, charred lemon skillet mussels and whole fried scup. 

Long Island City’s Astoria Seafood has been serving up an immersive dining experience since before the category formally emerged. You’ll choose from its selection of raw scallops, shark, snapper and octopus, bag it up yourself and choose from preparations like grilled, fried, baked or broiled. And with its option to BYOB, this is as close as some of us will get to cooking at home. 

Scuffed into submission by owner Joshua Boissy and the designers behind nearby Moto, this gorgeous salon—its green walls fogged with a faux patina that suggests decades of Gauloises smoke—is devoted to the twin pleasures of oysters and absinthe: two French Quarter staples with plenty of appeal in Brooklyn.

Now open exclusively for outdoor dining, Greenpoint Fish & Lobster serves raw bar platters, smoked fish spreads, lobster rolls and tuna burgers right outside its beachy, narrow corner spot. Our go-to drink is Narragansett, but wine and a few other beers are available too. 

A family-owned downtown favorite since 2016, Fish Cheeks’ contemporary Thai recipes feature a bounty of seafood served family style in a bright, lively dining room. Try the slightly spicy grilled branzino to perk up your palate, or keep it mellow with the crab fried rice. Stop by during happy hour any day from 12pm-3:15pm and 5pm-6pm for $6 beer, $10 wine, $11 cocktail and a half-dozen oysters for $9.

Russ & Daughters has been serving lox, herring and other specialty foods since 1914. But one of our favorite delicacies here is a more recent creation: the Daughters' Delight, with Gaspé Nova smoked salmon, wild Alaskan salmon roe and cream cheese on a bagel or a bialy

This convivial, New England–style joint was a forerunner of the city’s fish-shack trend. The outstanding lobster roll—sweet, lemony meat laced with mayonnaise on a butter-enriched bun—is Pearl’s raison d'être, but more sophisticated dishes fare equally well: A bouillabaisse features briny lobster broth packed with mussels, cod, scallops and clams, with an aioli-smothered crouton balanced on top.

Nodding to nearby Gowanus Canal, this New England–style seafood joint (funded in part by a Kickstarter campaign) sports a nautical look, featuring a salvaged ship portal and an eight-foot piece of driftwood draped with thick ropes. The short menu highlights Northeast clam-shack grub, including an Ipswich clam roll and a Maine-style lobster roll, plus raw-bar plates. Eight tap lines dispense seasonal brews at the zinc-topped bar.

This bright fish shack, with wainscoting and whitewashed walls, offers a the bill of fare balanced between the curated raw bar (16 oysters, as well as clams and lobster) and plated dishes that salute seafood favorites, ranging from greaseless clam strips with a tangy tartar sauce to a robust shellfish-enriched lobster bisque.