How to Find the Best Black-Owned Restaurants in America

Looking to support black-owned businesses in the world of luxury? If you love trying new restaurants, this one’s for you. We’ve reported on black-owned wineries and craft beer breweries,  and now we’re turning our attention to the world of fine dining. Wondering how to help and support black-owned fine dining restaurants and black chefs? Our ace correspondent Abbie Martin Greenbaum has curated a list of the best black-owned fine dining restaurants in America.

how to support black-owned fine dining restaurants and black chefs

We’re all looking for ways to support Black-owned businesses. Whether it’s the clothes we buy, the beauty products, or the food, the movement to Buy Black has taken hold, and it’s wonderful news all around.

But we know how difficult it is to find the right information in the age of the Internet, so we’ve made a guide to help you. Listed below, we have links to the best, biggest, and easiest resources for finding the Black-Owned restaurants, bars and cafes in your city. From Los Angeles to New York, and all the way across the ocean to London, we’ve got you covered.

And If you don’t live in one of the cities we explore below, you don’t have to worry. You can find all of the Black-owned eateries in your area by checking out the website EatBlackOwned, and by downloading the much-lauded app EatOkra. Both make it easy to find the Black-Owned restaurants near you, wherever you happen to be.

how to find the the best black-owned restaurants in America

1. Washington DC: YurePlace

Black People Eats is a database for finding Black-owned restaurants, and one of the cities they feature happens to be Washington DC. The site is a fantastic place to start your search, with nine pages of selections located throughout the Greater Washington DC area.

It’s also definitely worth perusing this list of 100 places to try from YurePlace. And if you want more – of course you do! – there are excellent guides from Feed the Malik and Bon Appétit as well.  We love their recommendation of NuVegan Café, a trendy and delicious-sounding spot for all-vegan soul food.

And make sure to mark your calendars, because November 8^th – 15^th is Black Restaurant Week in Greater Washington DC. Expect important conversations, special events, and of course the opportunity to eat some delicious food and support local Black-owned businesses.

2. Chicago: Black Chicago Eats

Chicago has their own directory of restaurants, called Black Chicago Eats. They host articles and features, as well as a full, searchable roster of places to dine.

And if you want more information, or if you prefer the format of a numbered list, this piece from Secret Chicago has an additional 115 suggestions for you to eat your way through.

Not sure where to start? We love the sound of Sweet Maple Café, a brunch spot that serves comfort food, and boasts more than a thousand five star reviews on Google. You can find it near Chicago’s Little Italy.

3. New York City: Crowd-sourced Recommendations

If the past few months have taught us anything, it’s the power of crowd-sourcing.  Public, community spreadsheets have become perhaps the most powerful and most accurate resource we have at our disposal.

Our personal favorites are Marcus Samuelsson’s Red Rooster and Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem. But there are so many great ones!

Check out these suggestions for New York, made by your neighbors, and then check out delightful Brooklyn coffee shop BitterSweet, or the well-known Manhattan restaurant Melba’s.

We also love Black Owned Brooklyn , the Brooklyn-focused directory that lists (and maps!) Black-owned businesses of all kinds.

And of course, there are plenty of helpful, curated lists, like the ones from Untapped Cities, Infatuation, and Eater.

4. Boston: BostonBlack

Lists from BostonBlack and Edible Boston are a great place to start when looking for Boston’s Black-owned restaurants. And their communal spreadsheet – which includes an interactive map and links to other Boston-specific resources – fills in the gaps, with nearly two hundred suggestions.

.Get out your calendar and note that August is Boston Black Restaurant Month. The initiative was started by the Boston Black Hospitality Coalition, as a way of helping businesses who have been negatively impacted by COVID-19. When you head to popular Black-owned Boston spots, like Darryl’s Corner Bar & Kitchen, make sure to use the hashtag #BostonBlackRestaurantMonth with your posts.

5. Atlanta: Black and Mobile

Our favorite restaurant in Atlanta is Paschal’s, an iconic eatery that has served luminaries for over 60 years, including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his wife Coretta Scott King.

Black and Mobile is a brand-new delivery service that partners with Black-owned restaurants to help them get more exposure and better serve their customers.  And Atlanta just so happens to be one of the three lucky cities where they work. Make sure to check them out.

If you’re looking for places to eat, of course, you have the Black People Eats page for the city, as well as this list from Atlanta Eats. And if you love desserts as much as we do, you’ll want to visit the epic My Fair Sweets, as well as the rest of their recommendations.

6. LA: Black Book L.A.

If you’re an LA resident, you’re definitely going to want to bookmark Black Book LA. Not only do they have a comprehensive guide to Black businesses in LA – including restaurants – but their goal is to provide a general, all-encompassing resource for Black millennials in the city. Look to them for housing, jobs, events, and more.

And for the foodies among you, LA’s community spreadsheet has nearly four hundred different recommendations for Black-owned spots, and the LA Times published a compilation of more than two hundred places as well. Consider starting your eat-venture with Natraliart Jamaican Restaurant & Market.

7. San Francisco: Shea’d

Your first step: download Shea’d, an app with an in-depth guide to more than a hundred Black-owned businesses in the Bay Area. Log on to read the stories behind the brands, and to learn more about a huge number of beauty salons, bars, and of course, restaurants.

There’s also this community-made map to give you a visual representation of where some of the same spots fall within the city. And yes, there’s a San Francisco spreadsheet.

Still not enough? Check out the fantastic lists from Infatuation and from Berkeleyside, as well as the searchable directory from SFChronicle.

And if you are interested in tasting San Francisco from a distance, Red Bay Coffee does mail-order delivery of their terrific beans.

8. Seattle: Black Owned Restaurants in Seattle app

This easy-to-use app can be added to your phone with a simple screen-scan, and will prove your most useful tool in locating all of Seattle’s Black-owned restaurants.

Our personal favorite is JuneBaby – a place we could happily visit on the regular.

We also love this formidable list made by King5, as well as the Instagram account Seattle.Black.Bussinesses. Both lists praise the scrumptious-looking Brown Sugar Baking Company, which is woman-owned and one hundred percent vegan.

9. Houston: Black People Eats

Lucky for us, Houston is another one of the cities covered by Black People Eats.  And if that’s not enough, this list from HoustonHotSpots and this directory from BuyBlack also have enough suggestions to keep you busy for the rest of the year. If you’re somewhere in the surrounding area, this enormous Texas guide has listings for Black-owned restaurants all over the state, including in Houston.

You may want to first head to Ray’s BBQ, which is a Houston staple with almost three thousand five star reviews. Personally, we’re starting at Glazed The Doughnut Cafe, launched by Nigerian-American siblings in 2014 as Houston’s first 24-hour gourmet doughnut restaurant. The coffee is great and the sweets are even better – plus, where else can you find a hamburger served on a doughnut bun?

10. London: Black-Owned London

Not in the US? We still have resources for you! Black-Owned London has a map of Black-owned businesses in the city, and Black2Business has a directory of places all over the United Kingdom.

Plus this list from the Strategist and this list from the Infatuation will help you find all the best spots.  One special place that both mention is Dark Sugars, a gourmet chocolate delivery company – perfect for getting your quarantine sugar fix.

What are the Best Luxury Black-Owned Restaurants?

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Abbie Martin Greenbaum grew up in New York City and currently lives in Brooklyn, where she drinks a lot of coffee and matches roommates together for a living. At Oberlin College, she studied English and Cinema, which are still two of her favorite things, along with dessert and musical theater. She believes in magic.

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