HYEHOLDE | PHOTO BY LAURA PETRILLA

Bar Marco, Casbah, Dish Osteria and Bar, Eleven Contemporary Kitchen and Hyeholde.

These five dining spots made Pittsburgh Magazine’s Best Restaurant list a decade ago. And they’re still here, selected among our 26 Best Restaurants of 2025. They’ve upheld the quality, innovation and resilience — even during the tumultuous pandemic years — to be included again in our top picks.

The restaurants listed in this month’s magazine, starting on page 25, “exemplify the best of what’s out there,” according to Emily Catalano, our partner at Good Food Pittsburgh who compiled this year’s list.

For many years, Pittsburgh Magazine assembled an independent Restaurant Review Panel of culinary experts and movers and shakers to put forth the annual list. That was the case in 2015, when the group selected 33 establishments. I was sad to see how many of those restaurants have closed: Cafe Zinho, Cure, E2, Grit & Grace, Legume (which survives under new ownership as Butterjoint), Nine on Nine, Root 174, Salt of the Earth, Sienna on the Square, Stagioni, Spoon and Tender Bar + Kitchen. Butcher and the Rye, also on that list, has announced it will reopen “soon,” after being closed since the pandemic.

It’s admirable that those five restaurants have kept up their quality. Dish owners Michele and Cindy Savoia actually took a two-year break between 2017-2019 but this South Side spot has continued to be a favorite place that chefs visit on their night off.

Bar Marco in the Strip District was opened by four friends in 2012; only Justin Steel remains today. By 2015, it was considered “one of the most dynamic kitchens in Pittsburgh,” according to PM’s former food columnist, Hal B. Klein. (Its executive chef at the time, Jamilka Borges, is now co-owner of Lilith in Shadyside, also tapped for this year’s list).

Hyeholde in Moon has endured as a special-occasion spot for more than 85 years. Casbah in Shadyside is often mentioned among my friends as their favorite restaurant (on my visit last month, Steelers Coach Mike Tomlin was there with his wife, Kiya), and the dining room of Eleven Contemporary Kitchen, open in the Strip District for more than two decades, “remains one of the city’s most effortlessly elegant spaces, modern, warm and open,” according to Catalano.

Her list includes some exciting ventures, a variety of cuisines and even some highly touted breakfast places.

“After a few years of uncertainty and shifting models, the city’s restaurant scene is finally breathing again,” she says in additional reflections. “Not just surviving, but evolving in sharp, thoughtful and quietly thrilling ways.”