The Split Dining Guide 2026: Best Restaurants, Neighborhoods & Food Culture

Alberto Garcia Perez's Michelin-listed contemporary kitchen inside Diocletian's Palace — Split's most considered tasting menu. Worth the flight.

ZOI sits inside the walls of Diocletian's Palace with a terrace that looks out over the Adriatic — a property whose lease alone would tell you the restaurant means business. The kitchen is run by Spanish chef Alberto Garcia Perez, who came to Split via Madrid and Mallorca and has held the room's Michelin listing through three successive guides. The tasting menu runs €120 to €180 per person and reads as the meal a chef cooks when the rent is paid and the next decision is about ingredients rather than positioning.

Garcia Perez's signature plates: the Adriatic langoustine with citrus and chili, the lamb shoulder with Dalmatian thyme and aged sheep cheese, and the seasonal sea urchin course that arrives between April and June. The wine list runs deep on Plavac Mali from Pelješac and on smaller-grower whites from Korčula. Service is led by general manager Ivan Bilić and reads as the most polished in the city.

Book three to four weeks ahead in summer. The terrace seats roughly twenty and is reserved on a first-come basis with the booking platform; specify when you reserve.

The only restaurant actually inside the Palace walls with vaulted stone and Roman arches — Split's most photogenic table. Reserve weeks ahead.

Storija Fine Dining occupies a stone-vaulted space inside Diocletian's Palace itself — the only restaurant in Split that can actually claim that lease line. The room runs across two levels of original Roman arches, and the chef's table at the back faces the open kitchen. The cooking is modern Croatian with a strong Adriatic seafood spine: monkfish, Dalmatian prosciutto, Istrian truffles, and a heavy use of fresh local herbs.

Tasting menus run €75 to €130. The Adriatic monkfish with white-bean cream is the room's most defended dish, and the langoustine carpaccio with pink pepper is the entry course that the kitchen will not change. The wine list reads as a tightly chosen tour through Croatia's smaller producers, with verticals of Cattunar and Kabola from Istria.

Book two to three weeks ahead. The chef's table seats four and gets the kitchen's best attention — request it when you book.

Chef Hrvoje Zirojevic's seafront kitchen at Firule Beach — Split's most romantic Adriatic terrace. Reserve weeks ahead.

Restaurant Dvor sits directly on Firule Beach, about a fifteen-minute walk east of Diocletian's Palace, in a stone building whose terrace looks straight across the Adriatic toward Brač and Hvar. The room is Michelin-recommended and chef Hrvoje Zirojevic has been running the kitchen since 2018 with a modern Dalmatian menu rooted in fresh fish from the Split fish market and produce from the kitchen's own herb garden.

Zirojevic's signature plates: the Adriatic tuna with capers and aged sheep cheese, the slow-cooked octopus with Dalmatian thyme, and the lobster pasta with langoustine bisque. Tasting menus run €90 to €140. The wine list runs deep on small-grower Pelješac and a small but considered list of Istrian Malvazija whites.

Book three to four weeks ahead in season; the terrace tables go first. The room is open year-round but the experience is materially different in winter when the heated indoor space replaces the seafront terrace.

Split's consensus best pizza — 48-hour dough, Neapolitan fire, truffle and smoked shrimp toppings. Try it once.

Bokamorra (Haute Couture Pizza & Cocktails) is the pizza room every food-attentive Splićanin will direct you to. The dough goes through a 48-hour cold fermentation, the oven reaches Neapolitan temperatures (around 450°C), and the toppings list runs more ambitiously than the format suggests — Istrian truffle, smoked shrimp, aged Dalmatian prosciutto and the local pršut from Drniš.

The Bokamorra (the namesake pie) is the kitchen's most distinctive: truffle cream, smoked mozzarella, aged prosciutto, finished with a tableside truffle shaving. The cocktail list runs to roughly thirty signatures and is the rare Split bar list that takes its bitters and amari seriously.

Walk-in possible at the bar; book for table seating one to two weeks ahead in summer.

Forbes 30 Under 30 chef Mario Mandaric's Gothic-courtyard kitchen near the Golden Gate. Worth the flight.

Kinoteka sits in a fifteenth-century Gothic palace courtyard near the Golden Gate of Diocletian's Palace, and the room itself is one of the most beautiful dining spaces in Croatia. Chef Mario Mandaric, a Forbes 30 Under 30 alumnus, runs a kitchen that explicitly sets out to reimagine forgotten Dalmatian cuisine — dishes from the older island traditions that disappeared between 1960 and 2000 as tourism standardised the coast.

Mandaric's tasting menu runs €70 to €120. The peka course (meat slow-cooked under an iron bell with charcoal on top) arrives at the table for the whole party to share, and the dried mackerel with caper bud and aged sheep cheese is the menu's most archaeological recovery. The wine list is short and deliberately Croatian.

Book two weeks ahead in summer. The courtyard seating is the room's selling point — request it when you reserve.

Split's Bib Gourmand family konoba in Varoš — market-fresh Dalmatian seafood without pretence or markup. Try it once.

Konoba Fetivi is the family-run tavern in Split's Varoš district that has held its Michelin Bib Gourmand listing through multiple guides. The room is small (around twenty-five seats) and the menu is whatever came out of the market that morning. The owner's father still runs the dining room and the kitchen is built around one fish display case that holds the day's catch.

Order the whole grilled sea bass or sea bream by weight — the room's main move — and add the pašticada (slow-braised beef in red wine and prunes, the Dalmatian standard) or the black risotto with cuttlefish ink as a starter. The wine list is Croatian-only and the owner will steer toward Pelješac Plavac Mali for reds and Korčula Pošip for whites.

Walk-in possible at lunch; dinner needs a phone booking one to two weeks ahead. Cash preferred.

Five-year Michelin listing with panoramic ACI Marina views and Adriatic fish from the display case. Pencil it in for sunset.

Zrno Soli has held its Michelin Guide Croatia listing for five consecutive years from a first-floor terrace above the ACI Marina, looking back across the harbour at Diocletian's Palace and the western basin. The fish display case at the entry tells you what the kitchen is serving that day; the wine list runs to roughly two hundred labels with a clear bias toward Pelješac, Korčula and Istria.

The signature plates: Adriatic monkfish with capers, langoustine carpaccio with pink pepper, and the grilled-by-weight whole sea bass. Mains run €30 to €60; a full tasting with wine pairing lands at €90 to €140 per person. The terrace has thirty covers and gets the sunset from June to September.

Book two to three weeks ahead and request the terrace. The room is closed on Sundays.