These North Carolina restaurants rank among the most romantic places to eat in the US

Simone Jasper
·2 min read

If you’re searching for a top-notch restaurant for date night, you might not have to travel far from home.

That’s because North Carolina boasts five of the nation’s most romantic places to eat, new rankings show. Here are the restaurants that earned top honors from the reservation website OpenTable:

The results were published Jan. 31, two weeks before Valentine’s Day. Last year, OpenTable said the holiday was one of the most popular times of year for restaurant reservations.

To create the list of “Top 100 Romantic Restaurants in America for 2024,” OpenTable said it studied more than 12 million reviews that customers left across the country.

None of the North Carolina restaurants on the list are strangers to earning recognition, having made their marks on past lists from OpenTable, Forbes Travel Guide and Microsoft Start, according to McClatchy News and The News & Observer.

What makes the restaurants romantic?

Steak 48 landed on the latest OpenTable list after previously ranking among the best places to eat. Recently, customers of the steak and seafood restaurant in Charlotte’s Apex SouthPark shopping center have gone online to leave rave reviews for customer service.

Fans also praised the ambiance at Madison’s and The Dining Room, two restaurants nestled inside mountain hotels. Madison’s said it focuses on bringing “farm-fresh” food to the town of Highlands, while The Dining Room draws inspiration from the Vanderbilt family — who once lived at the iconic Biltmore Estate in Asheville.

Also on OpenTable, customers couldn’t get enough of the steak and other fan-favorite dishes at Ryan’s Restaurant in Winston-Salem. Roughly 25 miles northwest in Pilot Mountain, people said they loved the picturesque setting at JOLO Winery & Vineyards.

OpenTable didn’t share additional details about how it created its romantic restaurant rankings or say whether the top U.S. restaurants were listed in ranking order. McClatchy News has reached out and is awaiting a response.

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