Portsmouth is said to have more restaurant seats per capita than any city in America (indeed it has 36,000 registered restaurant seats for its 22,000 residents), and anyone who lives or visits here would agree that the Port City (as it is sometimes called) has an abundant variety of restaurant options that run the gamut from to lobster shacks and informal seafood restaurants with outdoor seating on the waterfront decks, to fine dining in Portsmouth’s centuries-old red brick buildings.  Happily, if every man, woman and child in Portsmouth picked the same evening to go out to dinner, there would still be about 14,000 seats left for visitors.

It is our pleasure to recommend (or not recommend) the following Portsmouth restaurants, based entirely upon anonymous, unannounced and uncompensated visits to the various establishments.

We want to give you good advice, because we want you back, so “we call ‘em as we see ‘em”, and we rarely “call ‘em” with a particularly high recommendation, or a particularly tepid one, based upon only one visit.  Indeed, we have visited most of the restaurants reviewed here on multiple occasions.