Restaurants in Winston-Salem

Firestorm Pizza

If you love customizing your meal, you’ll love Firestorm Pizza. Here, guests walk down a line, choosing which sauce and toppings they want on their pizza. They can also customize the thickness of their crust, and make it gluten-free. The custom concoctions then head into a 515-degree pizza oven that cooks up the pizzas in about three minutes. Perhaps even more fun is the beer wall, where customers pour as much or as little craft beer as they like and then pay by the ounce.

Mellow Mushroom

Sure, this is a chain, but it still serves up darn good pizza (on our site, Mellow Mushroom has a 4.8-star rating out of 2,598 ratings). People especially love the topping-heavy house pizza, with sausage, pepperoni, ground beef, ham, and bacon, plus a ton of veggies. The fresh salads and gluten-free options are also a big hit, as are the local microbrews that fill the taps.

New York- vs. Chicago-style Pizza

New York

• Thin triangle-cut slices
• Thin layer of sauce, often accompanied by creative toppings (macaroni, anyone?)
• Pliable dough meant to be folded and stuffed into your mouth
• Eating this with a knife and fork will make any nearby New Yorkers angry

Chicago

• Usually refers to deep-dish, a thick-crust pizza baked in a deep pan. It resembles a pie.
• Contains an unholy amount of cheese and ladles of chunky sauce
• Not a crime to eat it with a knife and fork

Bernardin’s Fine Dining

When you want a fine-dining experience in Winston-Salem, it makes sense to head to the place the Greensboro News and Record once called “the Triad’s only five-star restaurant.” Since 1992, Bernardin’s chefs have been preparing impeccably plated veal, seafood, steak, and duck dishes for diners celebrating special occasions. Bernardin’s also has some more creative entrees on the menu, including Australian camel tenderloin with bone-marrow truffle butter and pan-seared North Carolina emu in a madeira cranberry sauce.

Ryan’s Restaurant

This may not be the most elegant name for a steakhouse, but there’s a reason Ryan’s has been around since 1977. Or several reasons, rather. First, there’s the really great food—classic steakhouse dishes such as oysters Rockefeller and steak au poivre with a cognac cream sauce.  Then there’s the wine list, which has garnered the restaurant the Wine Spectator Award of Excellence several years in a row. Plus, Ryan’s has one of the best views in town, with expansive windows and a starlight deck overlooking large oaks and a burbling stream.

James Bond’s Martini Order Is All Wrong

The British special agent famously orders his martinis “shaken, not stirred.” And that seems fine, right? After all, it’s pretty common to see bartenders shaking a martini in a cocktail shaker. However, shaking a martini can actually over-dilute the alcohol AND over-aerate the spirits, which can hugely affect the flavor.

Plus, martini purists would argue that 007’s preference for vodka martinis is blasphemous, and that real martinis are made with gin, not vodka.

So either you can order like a cool British spy, or you can be right.

Cowboy Brazilian Steakhouse  

If you’ve never eaten at a Brazilian steakhouse before, you’re in for a treat—and potentially a night of the meat sweats. Because at Cowboy Brazilian, you will eat meat until you want to die. And you will not regret it.

Cowboy Brazilian Steakhouse’s Brazilian cowboy servers, AKA gauchos, walk around with skewers of USDA prime cuts of meat, which they carve onto plates until diners are stuffed. That if-I-eat-anything-else-I-will-pop feeling may come sooner than expected because Cowboy also has an extensive salad bar with more than 30 dishes. A walk-in wine bar and caipirinha cart add to the indulgences.