The Hot 20: the most popular Liverpool restaurants

With simple, regularly changing menus to showcase the best seasonal ingredients available at market, you can expect carefully prepared plates of stylish food at this equally chic wine bar and bistro tucked away on a “secret” jigger just off bustling Castle Street. 

The name says it all: La Famiglia Bar & Restaurant is a family-run outfit serving fresh, traditional Italian cuisine rethought, using the finest ingredients. It’s also The Best Restaurant in the North West according to the 2024 Italian Awards.

Just a chopstick’s throw from Liverpool’s Chinese Arch, the original Chamber 36 serves specialities from across East Asia including a strong selection of traditional Chinese dim sum.

Liverpool’s award-winning, fine-dining restaurant The Art School brings together inventive Modern British cooking and an impressive historic setting.

With its six foot chandelier and gold leaf ceiling Restaurant Bar & Grill Liverpool is one of the city’s most spectacular dining settings. A £500k refurbishment in 2021 brought to life the original features of this Grade II Listed heritage building. Now it’s one of the most photogenic backdrops in Liverpool, and the food’s not half bad too.

Man Tsuen Ho’s may be a relative newcomer to Liverpool’s Chinatown but you wouldn’t know. Everything about it looks like it has been on the spot since 1988 and not changed a jot.

Sometimes you don’t want glamour and modern fusion though. You want exactly what made you fall in love with Chinese food all those years ago. It’s prawn cracker as a madeleine moment.

Chung Ku is very different from Liverpool’s other Chinese restaurants. It’s a modernist icon on the waterfront just south of Brunswick that looks like a marooned sampan or a strange fish with architectural fins. Its floor-to-ceiling windows flood the place with light and the views across the water to the Wirral are stunning.

This impressively ornate pub was built over 120 years ago and stands proudly on the corner of Hope Street. The Philharmonic splits off into separate rooms, each more show-stopping than the next.

Hawksmoor Liverpool opened in the beautiful Grade II-listed India Buildings, to much excitement in late 2022.

Voyagers in The Halyard Liverpool is in the league of hotel restaurants that become a destination in their own right. A sophisticated and well-travelled menu of small plates combined with inviting modern design make it a standout addition to the Ropewalks. Expect an individual take on cool, casual dining.

There’s a bonhomie and a sense of welcome at Vetch, marking it out as a friendly neighbourhood restaurant and simultaneously one of the best fine dining establishments in Liverpool.

Ye Hole In Ye Wall is not, as you might imagine, an ancient times ATM, but it is Liverpool’s oldest pub, dating from 1726. There’s a definite sense of history but one that hasn’t been beautifully refurbished; it’s still very much a boozer.

Doctor Duncan’s is named after Britain’s first Medical Health Officer, William Henry Duncan, who was born and raised in Liverpool. Its ornate, beautifully tiled interior makes it one of the North West’s most gorgeous pubs.

The manifesto at industrial-chic restaurant and “dine-at-wine-bar” Manifest is “seasonal plates and famous Liverpool hospitality”, with the Modern British menus regularly changing to reflect both local produce availability and the wines that will be matched to the food.

One of the buzziest spots in the Georgian Quarter, Frederiks models itself on the neighbourhood bars of Brooklyn. Think casual eats, coffee and lounging, with live music and quality cocktails as the day turns into night.

If you don’t like being told what to do, then Cowshed is probably not for you. The self-described beefhouse (as opposed to steakhouse) offers four types of steak, each served how they want to serve it, not how you ask them to serve it – “trust us”, they implore on the menu.

Chef and co-owner Andrew Sheridan (who you might recognise from Great British Menu) has uprooted Restaurant 8 from Birmingham and returned to the city of his birth. It’s a tough blow for the Brummies; the restaurant had built up a mighty reputation in the city, being awarded three AA Rosettes. But it’s excellent news for Liverpool.

Rocking up in the picturesque village of Aughton in West Lancashire, renowned chef Tim Allen (whose Flitch of Bacon bagged Essex’s only Michelin star in 25 years) loved the sandstone building and sunny terrace of the former Seafood Pub Company Wine Bar, and sō-lō was born.

Defunct red phone boxes are always being re-purposed as mini libraries, homes for defibrillators, or, in this case, an entrance to a cocktail bar.

From the traditional British landmark, you’ll be led to a modern drinking den with fluorescent brights and glitterballs.

Its website proclaims ‘authentic Chinese food’, but the menu at Maggie Fu’s stretches way beyond the borders of the People’s Republic, and the bustling open kitchen serves up plenty more than just its classic stir fries with rice, dim sum dumplings and steamed bao buns.