Restaurants in Wilmington, NC

Wilmington, a city of 125,284 people, has 945 places listed in this guide, including 625 restaurants, 66 quick service spots, 99 cafes and 144 bars. Bars top the category counts at 125, ahead of Coffee shops and cafes at 105 and Pizza at 53 in the listings.

With 75.4 listed places per 10,000 residents, Wilmington sits well above the 41.8 median for all cities in this guide. That reflects the listings in this guide and not every business operating in town.

658 listings are independent; the chains that show up most are Starbucks (16), Subway (8), Chick-fil-A (7) and Port City Java (7).

In the Servestack Independent Restaurant Index, Wilmington ranks #97 of 332 large US cities for the share of places that are independent.

Food in Wilmington by cuisine

Own a restaurant in Wilmington?

841 of the 945 places here (89%) list a website. When a guest searches for food in Wilmington and lands on a delivery app instead of your site, the app takes a commission on the order and shows them your competitors. Servestack gives you your own ordering site with zero commission, POS sync and loyalty, and Studio makes the menus, flyers and posts to promote it. See what you would keep with the commission savings calculator, or browse the restaurant marketing guides.

Place data from the Overture Maps Foundation (overturemaps.org), which includes data from Meta, Microsoft and Foursquare, used under the CDLA Permissive 2.0 and Apache 2.0 licenses. Restaurants open, close and move; check with the restaurant before you go. Data refreshed 2026-10-11.