Christini’s Ristorante Italiano

Christini’s Ristorante Italiano has been open on Restaurant Row in Dr. Phillips since 1984, making it one of Orlando’s longest-running independent fine dining restaurants. Chef and owner Chris Christini built the restaurant around northern Italian cooking, handmade pasta, and a dining room designed to feel like an occasion rather than a quick dinner out, and more than four decades later he’s still the owner of record for a single location, not a group of restaurants trading on his name across multiple cities or states. That single-location focus is part of the pitch: one restaurant, one kitchen, one chef paying attention to it.

The restaurant leans into a formal, old-school approach: original Italian artwork on the walls, a strolling musician working the room most nights, complimentary valet parking, and a long-running tradition of presenting a rose to women at the end of the meal. The menu runs through fresh seafood, prime cuts, and pasta made in house daily, with a wine list substantial enough to have earned a Wine Spectator Award of Excellence over multiple years running. It’s the kind of restaurant built for anniversaries and proposals as much as for a serious Italian dinner on its own merits, and the two aren’t mutually exclusive here, plenty of regulars come back just for the food and the familiar service.

The accolades have piled up over the decades. Christini’s has been inducted into the Florida Restaurant Hall of Fame and the Nation’s Restaurant News Fine Dining Hall of Fame, holds a AAA Four Diamond rating, and picked up multiple OpenTable Diners’ Choice awards in 2024, including recognition as Orlando’s most romantic restaurant according to that survey. Business Insider has named it among America’s most iconic Italian restaurants, and it’s been written up over the years in the New York Times, Gourmet Magazine, and the Orlando Sentinel, coverage that reflects four decades of consistency rather than a single good review cycle or a passing viral moment online.

Dinner is served seven nights a week from 6 to 10pm, with curbside takeout available during a shorter window from 6 to 7pm, and reservations are recommended given the restaurant’s reputation and relatively intimate dining room. It’s closed only a handful of days a year, around July 4th, Christmas, and New Year’s. For visitors staying near the Orange County Convention Center or Restaurant Row’s cluster of dining options, Christini’s stands out as a genuinely independent, family-run alternative to the chains that otherwise dominate that particular stretch of Dr. Phillips, and it’s the kind of restaurant where a phone call to reserve still gets you a real conversation rather than an automated system.