The Best Places to Drink in the United States

This Gaslamp patisserie lets you do France on a lunch break: grab a croissant at the counter and keep walking, or sit down for a quiche Lorraine or a crêpe folded around Nutella and strawberries. The cases are lined with macarons, and the iced coffees come in flavors like coconut and cinnamon brown sugar, which is not how anyone in Lyon takes their coffee. Dress is whatever got you through the Gaslamp.

Liberty started as a butcher shop and sandwich counter, and the meat is still broken down in the basement, from a ranch down in Minden, before it meets the wood-fired oven upstairs. It's a casual downtown Reno restaurant a few steps from the Riverwalk, where black-and-white photos of 1980s celebrities watch over the dining room. Mark Estee runs it, and he's about as close as Reno gets to a local celebrity chef.

Missy Robbins runs an open kitchen inside a former car body shop in East Williamsburg, which tells you something about the bones of the room before a single plate arrives. Lilia is the kind of Italian pasta restaurant where everything is handmade and the mafaldini with pink peppercorns has turned regulars into a kind of informal cult. The New York Times gave it three stars, and a James Beard semifinalist nod followed.

A two-level seafood restaurant in the Pendry Hotel, where the Gaslamp's night-out dinner crowd comes dressed for it and the menu leans on sustainable fish. Sushi-bar nigiri and oysters make an easy opening act, and the real commitment is a whole grilled fish or a wagyu tomahawk the size of a toddler's arm. Reserve ahead, because everyone else already thought of this.

Counter-service seafood in Fremont, where the chef sources directly from local fisheries, a supply-chain headache most spots at this price point don't bother with. The menu reads like Pacific Northwest bar food done with actual conviction: rockfish banh mi, salmon teriyaki, home fries tangled with smoked cod. The crab roll on a split-top bun comes out only on weekends, so plan accordingly. The New York Times put it on their Seattle list, which tracks.

Lou & Mickey's is a Gaslamp steakhouse with a lounge attached, built on the idea that a chophouse should still look like a chophouse. The beef gets aged in-house for a month, and the menu runs from grass-fed rib-eye to Japanese wagyu, with halibut and clam linguine for anyone dragged along against their will. It holds AAA Three Diamonds, so expect an expense-account dinner, not a quick bite before the ballgame.

This is a Basque restaurant in an old three-story hotel building, where dinner arrives as a parade: soup, salad, beans, fries, bread, and a glass of house wine, with a main course somewhere in the middle. Strangers share long tables, so you'll make friends whether or not you were planning to. Most people order the Picon Punch, a brandy-and-grenadine thing in a bell-shaped glass, and nobody tries to talk them out of it.

Lumi is a rooftop restaurant in the Gaslamp where Akira Back's Nikkei cooking, Japanese technique with Peruvian instincts, comes with downtown views and fire pits. Wagyu gets cooked tableside on hot stones, so dinner doubles as supervised arts and crafts. A highball machine handles the drinks, a mystery box handles the decisions, and on Mondays you can get a discount if you can prove you live in San Diego.

A Greek restaurant in the Gaslamp that mostly skips the blue-and-white postcard act in favor of California-leaning Mediterranean plates and portions sized for a table that's still arguing about who's driving. Someone usually flambés shrimp in ouzo beside your chair, which counts as dinner and a show. There's a patio for watching Gaslamp foot traffic and a happy hour that runs Sunday through Friday afternoons.

Mink is an oyster and tinned seafood bar in Corktown where the shuckers are the floor show, so grab a seat at the counter and watch them work. It's small and low-key, the sort of place a first date can pretend was casual all along. You can graze on oysters from around the country, or book the monthly five-course tasting menu, which reads like a church potluck that went to culinary school.

Mudgie's is a Corktown sandwich counter and wine shop, which is a combination that sounds like a compromise and works like a plan. The big patio gets a seasonal tiki bar and live music in summer, and Sundays bring a brunch menu where the sandwiches show up wearing fried eggs. It's casual, order-at-the-counter territory, with a James Beard Outstanding Hospitality semifinal nod on the record.

A small "Cocktails" neon sign is the only clue visible through the net-curtained windows of this Williamsburg cocktail bar, which occupies a former auto-parts store near McCarren Park. Inside, ornamental plates crowd the walls, tasseled fittings hang overhead, and ceramic tiles fool the eye into reading as rugs. It feels like a great-aunt's drawing room, if your great-aunt had excellent taste and kept unusual hours.

A Turkish American tech worker turned pitmaster drives an hour a day just to source the right bread for his chopped beef sandwiches, which tells you everything about the commitment level here. This is a Texas-style BBQ beer bar in Fremont where the brisket, salt-and-pepper only, runs through the smoker for upward of twelve hours and comes out glossy and dark-edged. The sweet pickles in the potato salad are made in-house purely to be an ingredient, not a garnish.

This is the downtown branch of a Houston steakhouse dynasty, all dark wood, low lights, and the hush of people who have expense accounts. The wine list is built like a library, with a sommelier who can talk you through it without making you feel graded. Expect crab cakes, a dry-aged rib-eye under bearnaise, and a slab of New York-style cheesecake that locals treat as a civic duty. Dress like you're closing a deal.

Perenn is a bakery-cafe in a farmhouse-styled outdoor plaza, where the wifi password is "glutenlover" and the pastry case is clearly the main event. Everyone orders at one counter, so the line doubles as browsing time, with croissants, griddled banana bread, and cakes to stare at while your patience gets tested. The Turkish eggs and a salmon cooked just past rare cover the savory side, and it's come-hungry, order-at-the-counter casual.

PJ & Company is a diner-style breakfast spot dressed as a Route 99 saloon, with mismatched dining rooms, neon signs, and racing memorabilia on the walls. Eggs Benedict is the main event, and most versions arrive under a cream cheese sherry sauce whether the menu mentions it or not. Breakfast runs until 11:30 on weekdays and 1 on weekends, and after 5 a separate Tex-Mex menu takes over. It's listed among Eater's best Reno restaurants and bars.

POST Market is a food hall under one very cool roof, where deciding what to eat becomes a group negotiation with dozens of vendors. Suya beef skewers, pad Thai, Filipino barbecue, hand rolls, and hot chicken all share the same neighborhood, so nobody has to lose the argument. Order at the stalls, grab a drink at one of the bars, and carry it up to Skylawn for a Downtown skyline view.

Potente is a fine-dining Italian restaurant across the street from the ballpark, which means the bar fills with people in jerseys making a plan for the evening. The spaghetti al tartufo gets its truffles shaved over the plate right at your table, a bit of theater that suits a place owned by the Astros guy. Expect linen-adjacent prices and a dress code of whatever you wore to the game, within reason.

Rustic Root is a Gaslamp Quarter restaurant built around fried chicken and waffles, chicken pot pie with a biscuit on the side, and a dessert cart that rolls up before you've admitted you want dessert. The rooftop tables overlook the neighborhood, so book one. Weekend brunch comes with a Champagne-and-berries setup, where you build your own mimosa and everyone at the table briefly becomes a bartender.

Saint James is a French bistro that dresses like an American diner, or the reverse, and the blue-and-beige checkered floor will not settle the argument. The menu runs croquettes, steak frites, and a bouillabaisse loaded with snow crab and sausage, while weekend brunch brings bottomless mimosas and a Comté omelet. Sit in a booth or on the patio, which exists largely so people can be seen on it.

Smokin J's is a casual barbecue joint in the Gaslamp, the largest of its three locations, with exposed brick, checkered floors, and enough flat screens to keep a game in sight from any stool. Meat comes by the plate or by the pound, and the sides include a pork-belly-laced navy bean dish called bean crack. The family platters run up to $300 and arrive with white bread, a group project with a sponge.

Süp is a soup restaurant, pronounced exactly how you'd hope, set in a little bungalow on Virginia Street that used to be a dental office. The stocks are made from scratch, the menu rotates daily, and there are usually six soups to choose from, one of them vegan. Chowder shows up Fridays, chili on Saturdays. Sandwiches and salads fill out the rest, and regulars bring their dogs to the outdoor deck. It's casual and cheap-ish, and nobody makes you feel bad about ordering a bowl.

Tacos El Franc is a Tijuana taqueria that planted its flag in the Gaslamp, a few blocks from Petco Park, which tells you who's standing in line. The trompo-sliced adobada, vampiros, and mulitas are counter-service cheap, and the doors stay open until 2 a.m. on weekends, so it's equally plausible you're pre-gaming or post-regretting. Tacos El Gordo sits down the street, and locals have opinions.

A Tijuana-born taqueria where the trompo of al pastor spins in the window like a lighthouse for the post-bar crowd. You order at the counter, get tacos fast and cheap, then dress them yourself at a salsa bar stocked with radishes and limes. The line looks like a hostage situation but moves briskly, and it stays open until 2 a.m., 4 on weekends, for people with a long night behind them and no regrets yet.

Takoi is a Northern Thai restaurant in Corktown whose dining room looks like a spaceship that landed on Michigan Avenue and decided to stay, moody lighting included. Much of the produce comes from its own farm a mile north in Core City. The plates are meant for sharing, the cocktails are fussed over, and vegans eat well. Reservations help, and the patio is enclosed, so winter doesn't get a vote.

The Blind Burro is a Baja-leaning Mexican restaurant on a Gaslamp block that sits close enough to Petco Park to plan your whole evening around it. The menu takes familiar Mexican dishes and gives them a few upgrades, like machetes, which are quesadillas stretched out to the length of a forearm. Brunch brings a churro waffle, and the all-day beer-and-shot deal was clearly written with a ballgame in mind.

The Finn is a Main Street food hall where ten vendors and a pair of cocktail bars share one roof, which solves the group chat problem of nobody agreeing on dinner. One stall has been doing Texas barbecue since 1957, another presses its own nixtamalized corn tortillas, and a third sends out smashburgers with tallow fries. Order at the counters, carry it all to one table, and let the bars handle the rest.

The natural wine list here won a James Beard Award, and the Michelin star belongs to the kitchen, which tells you this Williamsburg bar is doing two things at once and doing neither halfway. The room is famously small and the wait is famously brutal, but Nick Curtola's seasonal menu follows its own logic, landing somewhere between a great wine bar snack and something you'll think about for weeks. James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem is a co-owner, which explains the playlist.

The Godfrey is a hotel in Corktown with a few places to eat, and the one you're after is Hamilton's, the all-day restaurant on the ground floor. It's run by the group behind Phoenicia and Leila, so the new American menu keeps leaning Mediterranean when no one's looking, which is how you end up with halibut and chips on pea mash and carrots dressed in zhug. Expect hotel-restaurant prices, cocktails, and a reservation on Tock.

The Grant Grill is the dining room of the old U.S. Grant Hotel in the Gaslamp, still running on the energy of a 1960s power lunch, minus the three-martini part. It's white-tablecloth California cooking with a seasonal bent, covering breakfast through dinner, and AAA gives it Four Diamonds. Dress like you might close a deal, and if you're feeling flush, there's a caviar-and-Champagne order waiting for you.

The Nolen is an open-air rooftop lounge on the 14th floor of a Courtyard by Marriott, which is the sort of address that makes the view do all the introductions. It's cocktails and shareable plates, think shrimp tacos and flatbread, timed for sunset with the Gaslamp grid laid out below. Hotel guests, visitors, and locals with a free evening settle in here, and happy hour and weekend brunch each get their own menu.

The caesar comes buried under a snowfall of cheese and pankogratto instead of croutons, which tells you everything about how Tivoli works. It's a slice shop and full-pie pizzeria in Fremont that wanders comfortably between New York and Naples without apologizing to either. The pies skew classic-ish, the sandwiches on sesame focaccia could pass at a proper bistro, and the black garlic knots are just there being excellent about it. Ranked #10 on 50 Top Pizza Slice USA.

Toro Toro is a Pan-Latin steakhouse inside the Downtown Four Seasons, where the meat shows up on a cart and gets finished at your table, as if the steak needed an entrance. Richard Sandoval's menu also runs a ceviche and sushi bar, so the table can split between the cow people and the fish people without a fight. Expect hotel-dining prices and a room dressed for business dinners and anniversaries.

UFO Bar is a Corktown indie music bar that doubles as a hot dog stand, which is a less strange pairing than it sounds at midnight. The weenies come topped with elotes or kimchi, with halal beef or vegan sausage as the base, and the kitchen is a food truck's worth of ambition. Shows and events run most nights, and when the weather cooperates, everyone drifts up to the rooftop. Eater lists it among Corktown's best.

This is a white-tablecloth steakhouse downtown, part of the Landry's empire, where the dry-aged cuts arrive after a round of caviar and oysters Rockefeller. You can go formal in the dining room or sit in the bar, where a pianist plays nightly and nobody checks your cufflinks. Expect expense-account prices and a crowd that treats a Tuesday like an occasion, which the bubbly is happy to support.

Water Grill is an upscale seafood restaurant in the Gaslamp, where live tanks of lobster and crab sit in the dining room like a very polite audition. The leather booths and nautical wood paneling suggest a nice dinner, not a casual one. The oyster list pulls from across the country and into Mexico, and whole fish come charcoal-grilled or oven-roasted. It holds AAA's Three Diamonds, so a collared shirt wouldn't hurt.

Hugo Ortega's Oaxacan restaurant inside the Marriott Marquis is the kind of place that makes you think differently about mole, a sauce most people treat as a single thing rather than a whole universe. The kitchen explores that universe seriously, working through pipián, mole negro, and variations in between. A James Beard Outstanding Pastry Chef nominee rounds out a meal that doesn't skimp on the sweet end. The Sunday brunch draws a devoted crowd.

Zaranda is a sit-down Baja restaurant from Hugo Ortega, with big windows looking out over Discovery Green, so even the people watching are scenic. The namesake fish is butterflied and cooked over flames in a wire basket, then brought out with giant tortillas and a trio of salsas. Ortega's name has been a semifinalist for Outstanding Restaurateur from the James Beard Awards, and brunch and dessert both get their own following.

The back bar holds somewhere north of 300 gins, which tells you everything about what kind of place this is. A neighborhood gin bar tucked into south St. Louis, it runs tastings, classes, and flights for the curious, though you can just order a Negroni and mind your own business. The team landed a James Beard semifinalist nod for Outstanding Bar. Regulars know to ask for whatever the staff are excited about that week.

Sotol on the menu is a flex few New York bars can match. This Hell's Kitchen tequila and mezcal bar leans deep into Mexican spirits, with a list that runs well past the usual suspects. Sotol, distilled from the Desert Spoon plant and sometimes called tequila's northern cousin, is a rarity here, and finding it alongside a serious mezcal selection gives the drinks menu a reason to linger over it.

Apotheke sits on Doyers Street, the crooked Chinatown alley once nicknamed Bloody Angle for the tong wars fought there, behind a red awning that still reads "Gold Flower Restaurant." Inside, the former opium den has gone full Victorian apothecary, all candlelight and curios, with a five-ton marble bar where the bartenders play doctor. The cocktails lean medicinal and elaborate, which suits the room perfectly.

An unmarked door across from the Tribeca Grand opens onto a staircase that leads down to a dimly lit basement cocktail bar, all booth seating and bar stools, with smooth jazz doing most of the decorating. The cocktail list is named after jazz standards, which sounds gimmicky until you're two drinks in. Classics are handled with care, and the room has the kind of quiet self-confidence that doesn't need a sign out front.

Leather-bound journals line the shelves of this hushed, clubby cocktail bar near the UN, where wooden monkey sculptures hold the lamps and cigar smoke hangs in the air like a gentleman's agreement. The crescent booths and soft lighting give it the feel of a classic hotel sitting room that decided to serve drinks instead. Jazz plays just loud enough to cover the conversation of the business crowd unwinding after whatever it is they do.

The log-cabin feel is no accident: red wood ceiling, timber-clad walls, and a long solid bar give this neighborhood pub on Magazine Street the warmth of somewhere that's been broken in properly. It draws locals and Tulane students rather than tourists, with around fifty taps pouring everything from Abita Andygator to Belgian ales and American microbrews. A good place to disappear into a beer and feel like a regular by the second round.

A cocktail bar tucked into what used to be a private office inside Grand Central, designed to look like a 13th-century Florentine palace because its original occupant simply wanted the biggest room in New York. The vaulted ceiling and dark wood do most of the heavy lifting, so the drinks don't need to be extraordinary to make the visit feel like one. Come dressed for it; the room sets a standard and most people read the memo.

The California poppy, "copa de oro" in Spanish, cup of gold, lends its name to this Santa Monica cocktail bar a couple of blocks from the beach. Terracotta tile, dark wood, and a resident artist's work on the walls give it a warm Hispanic character that tips, even on a Wednesday, toward a genuine party. The kind of place that starts feeling festive before you've finished your first drink.

A Mid City corner bar in an otherwise residential stretch, Crescent Sausage and Pie is the kind of neighborhood spot that keeps the lights a little too bright and doesn't apologize for it. Fragments of the original building, lost to Katrina, are worked into the walls, which gives the place a quiet history lesson you weren't expecting. The cocktail list is short; come for the atmosphere, not the mixology.

You ride a repurposed service elevator to reach this speakeasy-inspired rooftop cocktail bar perched atop the Rafaello Hotel. Dim lighting, dark wood, bronze fixtures, and mushroom-toned walls set a moody, upscale tone, and a resident DJ keeps the energy pointed firmly toward party. The crowd skews young and loud, so if you're after a quiet drink and a view, the elevator goes both ways.

The mahogany back bar has been here since the Wild West era, and Elixir wears that history without trying too hard. It's a proper neighborhood dive on the Mission-Castro border, the kind where dog walkers fill the stools by late afternoon and nobody opens a cocktail menu. A dartboard in the corner, sports on the TVs, and regulars who clearly consider this their living room, just one with a liquor license.

Cold Amber beer, live jazz, and a room that looks like nothing has been touched since the Nixon administration. Fritzel's is a no-frills jazz pub on Bourbon Street that skips cocktails, skips mood lighting, and skips any pretense of being a bar that cares about its wine list. What it has instead is the music, which is the whole point, and an atmosphere that feels less performed than almost anything else on the block.

Ivy trellises climb the walls of the rooftop bar on the 15th floor, which is the one worth engineering your evening around. Ian Schrager, who gave the world Studio 54 and the Delano, put his stamp on this Gramercy landmark, and the result is three bars across the hotel, each with a crowd dressed like they had somewhere better to be and came here anyway.

A top-floor hotel cocktail lounge perched above Powell Street, the Starlight Room is essentially a finishing school that graduated half the notable bartenders in San Francisco, Tony Abou-Ganim and Jacques Bezuidenhout among them. The room got a significant makeover not long ago, all plush red furniture and gold accents, which makes it feel like old-school glamour with a fresh coat of ambition.

The narrow passage to the left of the bar does not lead to a secret larger room; that's just the toilet. Hazlewood is a tiny cocktail bar in Ballard, once a coffee shop, where the counter is a few strides from the door and the upstairs lounge has the square footage of a treehouse. Come on a quiet weeknight and you'll spend a moment genuinely confused about where everyone is supposed to sit. The answer, apparently, is close together.

The floor tilts so sharply that the table legs have been sawn down just to keep your drink from sliding off. This ancient saloon, built from whaling ship timbers and barely changed since forever, sits in the middle of a modern plaza like it missed the memo. Jack London drank and wrote here, then name-dropped the place seventeen times in "John Barleycorn." Order something simple and let the lean do the work.

Pressed tin walls funnel you into a room that keeps opening up, Tardis-style, past antique mirrors and grandma lampshades, through a long bar, out to a yard. This Williamsburg neighborhood bar shape-shifts through the week: beer and shots early on, wine mid-week, cocktails by the weekend, and DJs after 10pm Thursday through Sunday when the volume climbs and the whole thing quietly becomes a nightclub without ever making a formal announcement.

Tucked below Pike Place Market where the street tilts toward the water, this Italian restaurant bar is easy to miss, which is half the point. The bar area is compact and carefully stocked, with grappa, cognac, and malt whisky sitting alongside cocktails that get proper attention. The bistro setting around it is relaxed enough that nobody is checking how long you've been nursing your drink.