Best Restaurants in Graz

Graz is Austria's second-largest city and, in per-capita fine-dining terms, probably its most underpriced. The UNESCO old town is a compact grid of Renaissance courtyards, 17th-century arcades, and the distinctive red-tiled roofs that give the city its photographic signature from the Schlossberg above. The Kunsthaus — Peter Cook's biomorphic 'Friendly Alien' — is the only piece of 21st-century architecture in the old town, and it sits across the Mur river from everything else.

The Styrian cooking tradition is the ingredient story. Dark-green pumpkin-seed oil (Styrian Gold, PDO-protected) finishes nearly every salad, soup and ice cream in the city. Schilcher rosé — a locally fermented, aggressively pink wine from the Blauer Wildbacher grape — is drunk with everything. Styrian beef (Alm Ox, pasture-raised in the Koralpe mountains) is the better-reared equivalent of Tuscany's Chianina. And the Käferbohnen (runner beans) and Kürbiskernöl combination on a slice of Jausebrot is the Styrian definition of a quick lunch.

Practical notes. Graz eats earlier than Vienna — lunch 12:00 to 14:00, dinner 18:30 to 22:00. Reservations are required at the starred tables but rarely more than three or four days ahead. Service is relaxed; tipping is 5-10 percent rounded up; the local dialect (Steirisch) is thick enough that menu Austrian will be more helpful than English in some places. Summer terraces operate May to September; the Schlossberg funicular is the correct transport for Aiola Upstairs after dark.

For a deeper editorial read, see our ongoing Editorial coverage — including pieces on the Best Restaurants for Every Occasion, and our Impress Clients and First Date occasion guides.