My Take on Morgantown Restaurants

There are plenty of good places to eat in Morgantown. There are plenty of the ho-hum chain restaurants, but Morgantown has great places to eat in town. These are all sit-down places of varying degrees of formality. Most of them casual is just fine. The ones listed below are all operated locally by genuine entrepreneurs.

Blue Moose—downtown Walnut Street corner of Spruce Street. This is my favorite coffee shop. They serve good breakfasts and they have lunch service too for sandwiches.

Black Bear—Pleasant Street, downtown. They serve everything as a burrito, and they have a huge variety of meals. It’s all good, really good. A good place for kids too. In the evenings they have live music, which packs ‘em in. Not expensive and very casual for lunch or dinner.

Puglioni’s—Evansdale at the TCBY plaza off Van Vorhis Rd, down the hill from the hospital. Really good Italian food, great homemade bread, nice kids meals like personal pizzas. I always get Calzones. It’s all good here too. Dinner not open for lunch.

Madeline’s—downtown on High Street across from the Warner Theater. I like Madeline’s for dinner and we go there every once in a while. Good food and good specials too. They are open for lunch but I think of it as a dinner place. I returned there for lunch recently, and it was good. I had a chicken salad, a simple meal to mess up and a difficult meal to impress with. I was quite satisfied.

Maxwell's—on Wall Street, off High Street downtown. Maxwell’s has been around forever, good college town eats with good vegetarian food as well as a great variety of dinner specials. I eat there for lunch and always get the Elsie. I have had the same lunch meal for years, perhaps decades, and I love it. Love it. Sunday brunches are the best in town.

Yama—Fayette Street off High Street downtown. Yama is the Japanese restaurant in town where all the Japanese students eat. Win and I eat there together for lunch and we get chicken, soup, and sushi. Great for the winter when you want a nice bowl of soup. I went with a friend a few weeks ago. It was cold and she got soup. We admired it for a bit before eating, and it was a pleasure for the eyes and tongue.

Ogawa—University Ave in Evansdale down the hill from the Law School, near Towers. Another good Japanese place. Yama for lunch and Ogawa for dinner is good in my book. I like their sushi more than their meals.

Asian Garden—Evansdale on Universuty Ave. Threepeat Asian food with Thai, Chinese, and Malaysian. Really good, quaint little spot.

Lavender Café—Beechurst Avenue near downtown at the bottom of Stewart Street where it hits Beehchurst, near Papa John’s pizza. A new place and one of the best new places in town. They serve Taiwanese food. The new fave place for me and Win to go even though I feel like I am cheating on Yama. Winnie has been sneaking over there for lunch without me a lot lately. She loves it so much.

Pizza—Lots of good pizza places in Morgantown. The kids love Casa D.Amici at the top of High Street for slices and garlic knots. Pizza Al’s on University Ave near the 7-11 by Towers is good. And Pizzeria Italia at Suburban Lanes is the best cheap extra large cheese pizza ever, still. There is a calzone-only place on High Street called DP Dough—really good stuff.

Glasshouse Grille—On beechurst in the Seneca Center (an old glass factory turned shopping center) A nice place, take-your-date-out-to-dinner kind of place with very good food and excellent service. I go there for dinner a lot. I can't remember the last time I was in there without a tie, and the food is always very good. It is one of the few places where I will listen to and order the specials. They added an excellent fish market to the Seneca Center recently, a nice aaddition to the complex, and a great source of food for the Glasshouse menu.

Sargasso—Don Knotts boulevard on the river near Med Express and Sherwin Williams. It opened up not long ago and Win says the food is really good. I ate there for the first time with an august company of legal geniuses, and they judged it a fine place, a very good place from the appetizers to the desserts.

The Boston Beanery—downtown on High Street and in Evansdale on Patteson Drive across from Kroger. The kids love the Beanery. It is classic American food: burgers, sandwiches, big salads, etc. A Morgantown mainstay. Pat McAfee convinced me to chug a beer with him there recently.

For true Morgantown ambience, go to Gene’s for a chili dog or two and some red eyes (Wilson Ave, South Park) or to the Fishbowl for a big plate of food and one of those big beers.

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