The Best Places to Drink and Stay in the United States

Perched on the Palos Verdes Peninsula with Catalina Island sitting offshore like a postcard prop, this Forbes Four Star coastal resort sits just 30 miles from downtown Los Angeles and manages to feel like another country entirely. Eight restaurants and bars, a sprawling spa with treatment rooms facing the water, kayaking, tide pooling, and falconry keep guests occupied long enough to forget the freeway exists.

Fifty-four acres of north-shore Maui with Pacific views that reach Molokai on a clear day. This Forbes Four Star resort sits inside the larger Kapalua property, which means guests get two championship golf courses, miles of hiking trails, marine sanctuaries, and a tennis garden without ever hitting the tourist scrum down in Lahaina. The three-tier pool and its 20,000-square-foot sundeck handle the days when doing nothing is the whole point.

The cocktail menu changes every time the gallery does, which tells you most of what you need to know about Papercut. It's a minimalist East Austin cocktail bar where the drinks are keyed to whatever paintings are currently on the walls, so ordering becomes a little like picking a favorite piece. A back bar called Konbini serves Mexican-Japanese sushi when you need something to eat. The team came up from San Francisco, and the room feels it.

Original Warhols and Picassos hang in the Gallery Suite, which tells you something about how this 23-story downtown hotel sees itself. The lobby reads as a working gallery, with rotating exhibitions from the Long-Sharp Gallery filling the walls while guests drift between the lobby bar and a Capital Grille. A sixth-floor indoor infinity pool and a spa give you every excuse to ignore the Indiana Repertory Theatre two blocks away.

The curving Morris Lapidus facade alone tells you this is the kind of hotel that wants you to notice it. A big, loud Collins Avenue resort with over 1,500 rooms, multiple pools, and a nightclub, LIV, that keeps the lobby moving well past midnight. Bachelorette sashes and convention lanyards coexist peacefully by the pool bar. The Lapis spa offers a quieter counterpoint, with extensive wet areas that feel genuinely removed from the spectacle outside.

The mirrored back bar, lit from behind like a stage set, makes the priorities clear before you even sit down. Midnight Rambler is a subterranean cocktail lounge under the Joule Hotel, all art deco bones and low light, with a soundtrack chosen as carefully as the drinks. The cocktail program leans neo-classic, and the bartenders are the kind who can track down whatever obscure thing you're about to describe to them.

Every cocktail on the menu comes in a spirited or spirit-free version, which sounds like a gimmick until you're sipping something smoky and elaborate at midnight with nothing to dread by morning. This plush cocktail lounge inside the Dubbel Dutch Hotel leans into big ice, smoked drinks, and deadpan drink names, "garnished with disaster" being an actual garnish note. A James Beard nominee for Best New Bar in 2025.

This is a bowling alley that got turned into a cocktail bar, which means the lanes, pin setters, and ball returns all stayed, and you can still keep score by hand. The green walls came from the one patch of paint nobody touched, and a skylight now floods the room above a curved mahogany rail. The menu is frozen White Russians and 80s throwbacks, and North America's 50 Best Bars gave it the Bareksten Best Bar Design Award.

A former church in Downtown LA, now a contemporary restaurant with an open ceiling that lets the room breathe and the people-watching practically do itself. The crowd comes for small plates and cocktails at the two circular bars or settles into the sofa-stuffed lounge like they own the place. The menu roams globally, though the kitchen keeps one foot planted in the familiar. Loud, beautiful, and a little theatrical.

A boutique hotel in a downtown Phoenix high-rise, which tells you something about how much the city center has changed lately. Rooms feel pulled together rather than chain-generic, and the location drops you into a neighborhood that has sprouted college campuses and light rail where there used to be very little reason to linger. A good base if you want Phoenix proper rather than a resort bubble somewhere out in the sprawl.

A 32-story tower designed by Chicago firm bKL, Thompson Austin cuts a noticeable line into the downtown skyline just off the East Sixth Street strip. The hotel occupies the lower floors, so you get the address without the altitude, which is fine given what's walkable. Sleek without being cold, it's the kind of place that suits Austin's current chapter better than its old "keep it weird" bumper sticker ever did.

The Art Deco bones of this West Hollywood hotel go back to the golden age, when the apartment tower housed the kind of tenants whose names still sell magazines. The renovation kept the earth-toned, mid-century atmosphere without turning it into a theme park, which is harder than it sounds on the Sunset Strip. Michelin has given it a Key. The guests leaning into the bar look like they have meetings, not autograph books.

The resort is poured into a canyon floor in the Four Corners desert, its low concrete pavilions shaped around a natural rock outcropping so the land stays the main event. Amangiri is a remote luxury resort on 600 acres of Utah scrubland, the kind of place where the silence is the amenity. It holds a spot on the World's 50 Best Hotels list. Slot canyons and mesa views come standard; crowds do not.

Views of the Gateway Arch from a good chunk of the rooms set the tone at this luxury hotel sitting right on the Mississippi. The modern building and contemporary interiors read less "chain hotel sameness" than you might expect from a Four Seasons, and the spa and fitness center are suitably extensive. Gerard Craft, a James Beard Award winner, runs Cinder House downstairs, which keeps guests from having to venture far for a serious meal.

The room tiers at this 28-room boutique hotel in downtown Palm Springs are simply Good, Better, and Best, which either signals confidence or a refreshing allergy to hospitality jargon. All rooms come with original artwork and Waterworks bath hardware; Better adds a wet bar, and Best earns mountain views with a private balcony. The Michelin Guide awarded it one Key. Midcentury Palm Springs, so pack accordingly: linen and sunscreen.

Nine rooms, suites, and cottages tucked into a Mediterranean Revival estate in Silver Lake that has, over the years, been a silent-film star's mansion, a girls' school, and a Franciscan convent. The interior designer who eventually bought it had a conventional boutique hotel in mind; the building had other plans. It holds a Michelin Key, and the rooms feel less like accommodations than borrowed sets from a film that never got made.

Ivy creeps up the facade of this all-suite boutique hotel one block from the Santa Monica Pier, where every room faces the Pacific and comes stocked with Frette linens, local art, and a minibar that takes itself seriously. The courtyard pool, ringed with lemon trees and James Perse loungers, is the kind of spot that makes you cancel afternoon plans. Sandpiper, the open-air restaurant, leans into California seasonal cooking.

Floor-to-ceiling windows frame views of Tampa Bay and Amalie Arena from every room in this 27-story hotel, which anchors the Water Street mixed-use development downtown. It's a full-service JW Marriott: modern and warm without tipping into excess, with a spa, resort-style pools, a rooftop bar that climbs high enough to see most of Tampa, and dining options ranging from a street-level window to a proper American bistro beside the pool.

The cocktail menu pays tribute to Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees, which makes sense given the museum is practically next door. This is a full-service luxury hotel in downtown Cleveland, where housekeepers note which side of the bed you sleep on and leave the water bottle there accordingly. The Club Floor runs food from breakfast through cordials and opens the bar at noon, which is a civilized policy. Pets are welcome, too.

Five minutes from Reagan National and steps from the Pentagon City mall, this Ritz-Carlton pulls off the usual trick of making a business-travel corridor feel like somewhere you'd actually want to be. Rooms come with feather beds and Egyptian cotton linens, the club level adds its own quiet remove, and the on-site restaurant, Santé, runs a Mediterranean menu with a fireside lounge good for a post-flight drink.

Perched at the base of Camelback Mountain, this Scottsdale resort is less a renovation of the old Rat Pack haunt that once stood here than a complete reinvention, the original having been nearly leveled before the reboot. The result is a sleek, contemporary desert property where the mid-century glamour gets reimagined rather than preserved. It holds a Michelin Key, which in resort terms means the vibe and the views both earn their square footage.

A mid-century chain hotel on Lady Bird Lake got the full renovation treatment, and the result is a boutique hotel that makes the retro bones look intentional. Architect Michael Hsu and designer Sean Knibb folded in industrial textures and quiet nods to Hill Country geology, so it reads as Austin rather than anywhere-with-a-lobby. The Michelin Guide selects it among its hotels, which is the kind of quiet endorsement that doesn't need a billboard.

Tangerine doors set into a 23-foot breeze block wall are your first clue that this Palm Springs resort operates on its own frequency. Jonathan Adler designed the interiors, so a suit of armor guards the lobby, groovy carpeting climbs the stairs, and eccentric glamour is the unifying theory. Lanai rooms, a pétanque court, and a hammock by the pool suggest a schedule built around doing very little with great commitment.

Belted Galloway cows still graze the pastures of this converted dairy farm turned country inn, midway between Chapel Hill and nowhere in particular. The 32 rooms are individually designed, with fresh flowers cut from the grounds and a decanter of port left at your bedside each evening. Tennessee fainting goats add an absurdist footnote to the strolls. The restaurant leans European-Southern, and afternoon tea is a thing here, taken seriously.

The Rockwell Group's renovation of this 27-story tower turned it into the most polished address on an already sprawling waterfront resort, and a Michelin Key and Forbes Four Star followed. Rooms look out over 200 acres of pools, a marina, a private beach, and enough dining options to skip the car entirely for days. It's a hotel-within-a-hotel concept, which means you get the full Boca Raton complex and then a quieter, considerably chicler retreat inside it.

The original Art Deco bones of a 1920s Coca-Cola bottling plant are still very much the point here, with exposed industrial detail running through the rooms in the old wing alongside genuinely comfortable modern furniture. The newer addition trades some of the patina for polish, which is a fair swap. The surrounding development packs in coffee, a food hall, and enough going on that you could stay a long weekend without really needing to leave. Michelin awarded it one Key.

The chefs live upstairs, which explains why this Craftsman-on-5th Avenue bistro feels less like a restaurant and more like a very good dinner party you somehow got invited to. The cooking leans Mediterranean with a California coast accent, prix fixe, and a Michelin star to its name. The canelés alone have sparked quiet obsession among regulars. A James Beard nominee, and the kind of place Carmel somehow earned.

Old movies flicker on the back wall while a dozen taps keep the noise level honest in this sprawling Mission dive bar. The high-ceilinged room is hung with oversized art and loud enough that conversation is more of a suggestion. Duck through to The Hideout in back and the whole register shifts: a quieter, more considered cocktail bar hiding inside the chaos. Esquire put it on their Best Bars in America list, and the two rooms together explain why.

The dirty pasta water martini has its own Esquire listing, which tells you something about how Fiorella operates. This South Philly pasta spot, a Michelin Bib Gourmand, runs a short, handmade menu out of what used to be a three-generation butcher shop. Marc Vetri's name is on it, the room is small, and the cacio e pepe is the kind that makes you stop talking mid-sentence.

Pisco is doing serious work here, with Esquire naming the pisco martini among the best in the country. La Royal is a handsome Peruvian restaurant and bar in Cambridge where the menu wanders across the full breadth of Peruvian cooking, including Chifa, the country's Cantonese-inflected tradition. Ceviches are sharp and citrus-forward, and the room has a genuine going-out energy. A James Beard semifinalist for Best New Restaurant.

Sapphire velvet banquettes and jacketed servers signal exactly what this is: a fine dining room where Angie Mar fuses classic French technique with her Chinese heritage in a Greenwich Village townhouse that glitters like a jewel box. The cooking leans rich and saucy, the way haute French is supposed to, and a tasting menu is available for those who want the full ceremony. James Beard semifinalist, 2026.

The name comes from South Korea's first carrier rocket, which tells you something about the ambitions in the room. Naro is a fine dining Korean restaurant in Rockefeller Center from the team behind Atomix, and where that room chases reinvention, this one returns to classics. The New York Times gave it three stars. Order the Dongji Martini, which made Esquire's list of the best martinis in the country, and let the evening unfold slowly.

A five-course prix fixe of modern Korean cooking in a sleek Flatiron room where the staff outnumbers the guests by a comfortable margin. The chef takes a restrained approach to bold flavors, which sounds like a contradiction until you're eating it. The cocktail program is sharp enough to earn its own following. Michelin awarded it a star, and the James Beard Foundation named the chef a 2025 semifinalist for Best Chef: New York State.

Charleston's Lowcountry pantry filtered through a Mediterranean lens, The Grocery is a neighborhood restaurant where seasonal produce and local seafood share the menu in ways that feel natural rather than calculated. Fried oysters with deviled egg sauce have been here since day one, which tells you something about the kitchen's instincts. The room runs warm and unhurried, the kind of place locals treat like a standing reservation they never made.

A two-story room of wood, stone, and skylights on the Fillmore, this California-meets-Nordic restaurant is built around sharing plates bold enough to stop conversations mid-sentence. The Liberty Farms duck, arriving with a mountain of peanut fried rice, tends to get a round of applause from neighboring tables. The Progress holds a Michelin star and a James Beard nomination, and the martini has its own press clippings.

Ten suites on a tree-lined street in downtown McMinnville, steps from boutiques and bakeries, with an organic farm supplying the kitchen. The Tributary is a Forbes Four Star boutique hotel that leans closer to an upscale inn than a grand resort, and deliberately so. The amenities list is short: a good book, a roaring fire, a deep bath. Wine-country excursions and hot air balloon rides can be arranged when the fireplace loses its pull.

The Elysian Bar is a cocktail bar in the Marigny, tucked inside a converted church-turned-hotel, where the atrium bar is so relentlessly yellow it feels like a secret study belonging to a pipe-smoking baron. Cajun and Creole small plates, like focaccia with honey butter, keep company with a Hibiscus 75. It's elegant without being stiff, and it made Food & Wine's list of top hotel bars in the country.

The lobby reads less like a hotel and more like a country house that got very ambitious, with deep sitting areas, Regency columns, and ironwork that quietly signals this is not the Hampton Inn down the road. The Williamsburg Inn sits just across from Colonial Williamsburg's historic district, holds a Forbes Four Star, and connects via the back terrace to a full spa with indoor and outdoor pools. Comfortable, formal-ish, and unapologetically old-money in atmosphere.

Adobe walls, lushly planted courtyards, and the Santa Catalina Mountains framing everything you look at: Hacienda del Sol is a historic guest ranch resort tucked into Tucson's foothills. The 34-acre property has been around forever, and the old-school architecture still holds the place together in a way no renovation could fake. Rooms are spread across the grounds, service runs unhurried, and the mountain views make the phone feel optional.

The restaurant is a Nobu partnership and the pool is lined with lava rock, but Sensei Lanai exists firmly in the wellness-resort category, not the beach-vacation one. Set upcountry on a quiet island, it trades ocean views for gardens, guided fitness, nutrition consultations, and the kind of sleep you forgot you could have. The rooms run spare in their design and lavish in everything else, which is more or less the whole philosophy.

Cowhide armchairs in the lobby set the tone: this is a luxury hotel that committed to being Texan rather than just landing in Texas. Part of the Auberge Collection, Bowie House brings the brand's polished design sensibility to Fort Worth's Camp Bowie corridor, pairing it with local artwork and upscale Texan cooking. Rooms, suites, and the pool terrace all lean spectacular. The Michelin Guide awarded it 2 Keys.

Every evening at sunset, someone opens a bottle of Champagne with a saber. That sets the tone for this bed and breakfast in two joined 19th-century Italianate houses on one of Savannah's quieter streets. The 16 rooms mix antique bones with modern comfort, and breakfast skews Indian, which is a welcome departure from the usual biscuit routine. The Michelin Guide awarded it one Key.

A Michelin Key hotel anchoring Kansas City's Crossroads arts district, set inside a converted industrial building where exposed brick and timber beams do the decorating. The 131 rooms lean into the warehouse bones rather than paper over them. Percheron, the rooftop bar, adds bocce and skyline views, while the Italian restaurant Lazia handles dinner. Coffee and casual bites live at XR Cafe, so you rarely need to leave the block.

The team behind the Sunset Tower brought this residential-style luxury boutique hotel to West Hollywood, and the neighborhood pedigree shows. It sits at the quieter, leafy edge where the Hills meet Beverly Hills, a world away from the frenzy further east. Expect the kind of considered, old-Hollywood polish that never needed to announce itself. The Michelin Guide awarded it one Key.

A handful of rooms inside a carefully restored Irving Gill house a short walk from La Jolla's water, this boutique hotel runs on the contactless end of the hospitality spectrum. The rooms are elegantly done and the courtyard, shaded by olive trees, is the communal living room nobody has to share with strangers. Borrow something from the curated book collection and pour your own coffee. The Michelin Guide awarded it one Key.

You will walk past it. That's by design. Apothecary is a dark, hushed cocktail lounge on Greenville where the seasonal menu gets a full thematic overhaul each year and bartenders can narrate the origin story of every pour from memory. The team spends months developing each recipe, and it shows. A James Beard Outstanding Bar Semifinalist, it draws the kind of crowd that actually reads the menu before ordering.

Nine pools connected by a lazy river, a grotto bar you swim up to and order a mai tai while watching sports on TV, and a separate adults-only pool for those who did not come to Maui to dodge pool noodles. This sprawling Waldorf Astoria resort on the Wailea beachfront also runs seven restaurants and bars, a 40-treatment-room spa, outrigger canoe tours, and access to nearby golf and tennis.