These two North Carolina restaurants rank among the nation’s best. What’s on the menu?
Customers can’t get enough of two North Carolina restaurants — and now they rank among the nation’s best places to enjoy a meal.
Geno D’s Pizza in Charlotte joins Freeman’s Grub & Pub in Greensboro on a list of “Top 100 Places to Eat in the United States,” according to results published Wednesday, Jan. 25.
To create its annual rankings, the review website Yelp said it asked users to share their favorite restaurants and then curated the submissions.
“From food trucks and sandwich shops to fine dining establishments, the Top 100 list reflects the diverse tastes and uniqueness of our community of users,” Tara Lewis, a trend expert at Yelp, said a news release. “It is powered by the people, not a small group of restaurant critics.”
Of the two North Carolina restaurants that received praise, Geno D’s Pizza ranked the highest at No. 32. The shop — located in The Market at 7th Street in Charlotte — serves sandwiches, garlic knots and “New Jersey-style pizza.”
“It’s your basic, go-to old-school pizza stand,” Gena DiPaolo, part of the father-daughter duo who opened the restaurant, told The Charlotte Observer in 2021.
On Yelp, several customers raved about the sauce and crust that reminded them of pizzas served in the Northeast. The restaurant, which earned five out of five stars, also recently ranked on a separate list of best pizzerias in the nation.
Also named among Yelp’s best restaurants of 2023 was Freeman’s Grub & Pub, which landed at No. 75. Though the business on Spring Garden Street in Greensboro has a rotating menu, customers have shared praise month after month.
Some Yelp users praised the pub for serving a variety of cocktails in a welcoming atmosphere. Others were fans of wings, loaded poutine fries and other snacking staples, helping the restaurant earn more than four out of five stars.
The business approaches its menu in a way that’s “more complex and sophisticated than what you would expect from a pub,” one Yelp user wrote.
Overall, Yelp said the nation’s best place to eat was Broken Mouth, a “Hawaiian-Korean cafe” in Los Angeles. Other top-ranking restaurants were in California, Hawaii and Florida.
The dining spots topped the list after Yelp said it studied “submissions from the community to determine the top restaurants by ratings, number of reviews, and volume of submissions, with geographic representation based on equal share of submissions of top-rated restaurants nationally.”
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