The Best American Food in the United States

Freedom Beat is the casual live-music restaurant inside the Downtown Grand, a few blocks from the Fremont Street canopy, where a Hell's Kitchen winner runs a menu of American greatest hits. The pot roast sandwich, gravy and cheese packed between crisp sourdough, is served until midnight or later, which matters at that hour. Weekend brunch is all-you-can-eat with bottomless mimosas, so plan accordingly.

The medium smash is the whole philosophy here: a juicy center, lacy crisp rim, nothing overthought. This is a smashburger shop in Los Feliz, one of several around the city, all using grass-fed California beef from regenerative farms. Singles and doubles come dressed with shredded lettuce, crinkly pickles, and white onion, with curly or straight fries alongside. Eater named it among Los Angeles's essential restaurants, which tracks for a place with a line of regulars who don't bother with the menu.

This is a relaxed all-day restaurant on North Figueroa where the patio is the main event and the interior is more of a comfortable waiting room for it. The outdoor bar pours frozen daiquiris on weekends, which tells you how the afternoon will go. The dinner menu leans Midwest comfort, with chicken parm and steak au poivre, so nobody has to commit to a theme. Eater has it on its Highland Park list.

Nashville hot chicken shop in Chinatown where the line used to stretch far enough that people brought lawn chairs. The spice levels are genuine, and the brave ones who go scorching tend to provide free entertainment for everyone behind them. Wings, tenders, and sandwiches are the draw, with sides like collard greens and banana pudding worth ordering even if the chicken somehow lets you down. It rarely does.

Blue gingham tablecloths and a line out the door on weekends tell you everything before you sit down. John O'Groats is a daytime diner on West Pico that has been around forever, and its pancakes are the reason people keep coming back, big enough that the kids' plate could embarrass most adults. Gluten-free versions are available on request, which for a place this old-school is a thoughtful touch.

A grab-and-go musubi counter inside the Aqua Pacific Monarch Hotel, with the largest menu of the three Waikīkī locations. Fresh rice gets packed around fried chicken, salmon with roe, or any number of Spam variations, including one loaded with avocado, bacon, and egg that operates as a breakfast sandwich in musubi form. The space is small, the turnover is fast, and the whole operation runs on the principle that rice pressed around a good filling is a complete argument.

A rooftop restaurant perched atop the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, Skywalker Grill pulls its ingredients from George Lucas's own Skywalker Ranch, which is either a charming farm-to-table story or the most elaborate movie tie-in you've ever paid for, depending on your mood. The modern American menu runs from wagyu burgers and lobster corn dogs to chicken tenders served, with a straight face, alongside caviar ranch.

Southern Chicago is a steakhouse-ish dinner spot in the South Loop where the crystal chandeliers and plush velvet seating suggest the Las Vegas Strip got lost on the way to Soldier Field. The kitchen cooks steaks over open flame and stacks seafood towers, and the sides lean decadent, like deviled eggs topped with shrimp and caviar. Plan on dressing a notch up, and on a lot of conventioneers.

The Grill is a sit-down American restaurant at the Wharf, the sort of place you pick when the show at the Anthem starts soon and nobody can agree on dinner. The menu is steaks, salads, mac and cheese, and lobster rolls, a dressed-up cousin of the roadside chain. There's a wine wall with faux wood pillars, and the servers wear formal attire, which feels generous for a burger.

The broad blue doors open onto a jazz-age fantasia: gold-accented walls, live music, and soul food in a Seaport dining room that feels like a speakeasy that upgraded its permits. Restaurateur Nia Grace runs this dinner-and-show spot, where oxtail and grits share the menu with easy cocktails and the band is not background noise. Boston Magazine named it one of the city's top fifty restaurants, and gave it Best Dinner and a Show.

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.

Parker House rolls with cultured butter arrive at the table early, which tells you something about where this New American restaurant's priorities lie. Will Gilson's Inman Square spot reworks New England staples with local ingredients and the occasional global detour, the kind of cooking that makes baked scrod feel like it had a bad publicist. Comfortable and neighborhood-rooted, it draws regulars who treat the bread course with appropriate seriousness.

A Citywide Special and a burger, treated with the focus of a fine-dining kitchen, is Royal Tavern's whole argument. This Bella Vista bar has been doing burgers, cherry BBQ wings, house-made mortadella, and grilled cheese in a narrow, glowing room on Passyunk for as long as anyone can remember. The kind of place where you go in for one drink and linger over two courses you didn't plan on ordering.

A sign above the bathroom explicitly bans cocaine, which tells you most of what you need to know about The Grapevine's charms. This sprawling neighborhood bar and kitchen moved from its beloved pink adobe on Maple Avenue a couple years back, and the regulars followed, along with most of the staff. Strong drinks, plenty of outdoor space, boudin balls from the new kitchen, basketball on screens, and karaoke when the mood strikes.

The pitmaster works the smoker outside and greets the sidewalk with a Polish sausage in his tongs and "We ain't playing, Jack." This small barbecue spot with food-truck roots in northwest Kansas City keeps the turkey leg as its centerpiece, dark meat staying moist under taut, browned skin. The turkey leg stuffed with mac and cheese makes the menu very on-brand. The New York Times put it on their 2025 Restaurant List, which feels about right for a place this committed to one idea.

A Victorian mansion that once housed Nashville's mayor now houses a Southern restaurant with a commitment so strict on local sourcing that the menu can change daily. Wood-burning ovens do heavy work, meaning plenty of smoked, grilled, and barbecued dishes done in the classic style. Tables downstairs look out over the vegetable gardens, which, given how directly those gardens inform your plate, feels less like a view and more like disclosure.

Counter service Hawaiian barbecue tucked into the shipping container courtyard at the Churchill, just off Roosevelt Row. The move is a mixed plate piled with kalbi short ribs, kalua pork, and teriyaki chicken, everything sitting on rice with a scoop of mac salad alongside. It's the kind of meal that's better shared, partly for variety and partly because the portions don't encourage restraint. Phoenix New Times named it the city's top Hawaiian restaurant in 2025.

Glazed, caramelized Spam wrapped in nori is on the menu, and at Onolicious it is a completely reasonable lunch. This casual Hawaiian spot grew from a food hall stall into its own brick-and-mortar, serving shoyu chicken and musubi to a city that has taken the whole thing rather seriously. The team brings a laid-back luau spirit to downtown Cincinnati, which is a sentence that works out better than you'd expect.

The bacon, egg, and cheese on a Kaiser roll has its own following at this Sunnyside daytime spot, a casual counter-service cafe where breakfast and lunch overlap in the best low-maintenance way. Burritos, rotating sandwiches, and a burger that regulars treat as non-negotiable fill out the menu. The kind of place where the line out front is just part of the deal.

The self-proclaimed home of "the fastest egg in the West" is a classic American diner on Colfax that holds the line while Denver's old-school spots keep disappearing. Cinnamon roll French toast and a six-pound breakfast burrito smothered in green chile are the kinds of details that explain why regulars don't bother with the menu. The green chile is gluten-free, which the burrito's sheer scale makes feel almost responsible.

A door off the alley and a staircase down puts you in a basement sports bar that feels like a secret the Wash Park neighborhood has been quietly keeping. Screens everywhere, local taps, and a kitchen that stays focused no matter how loud the room gets. A Westword Best Sports Bar pick, and the kind of place where losing doesn't sting quite as much when the food and drink tabs are this manageable.

A ski-lift chair salvaged from Keystone sits in the front of this sprawling Denver sports bar, which tells you everything about the vibe: proudly, unironically Colorado. Two full bars pour local taps, a stage hosts live music, and somewhere in the back there's a miniature bowling alley that shouldn't exist but does. The Slopper, a Pueblo green chile sandwich situation, is the menu's main argument. Westword named it Denver's best bar for watching games in 2023.

Everything cooks over open white-oak fires behind a tattered ranch house on Johns Island, sailcloth and outdoor chandeliers overhead, the smoke visible from the road. The chef grew up in North Georgia and knows his Lowcountry, so collards and roasted clams show up alongside chimichurri and tamarind. The New York Times put it on their 2024 Restaurant List. Arrive hungry enough for the charred semolina sourdough that lands first, and don't skip the carrots.

Tartan-print details and jade-green paneling set the tone at Kevin Gillespie's prix-fixe restaurant, where Scottish heritage and Southern cooking share a table without either one apologizing. The menu moves between things like mussels with spicy 'nduja and peach-lacquered duck, then lands on peanut butter chess pie as if to remind you where you are. It's a Michelin Selected pick that reads as personal project first and concept second.

The plate-lunch spot that landed on the New York Times Restaurant List sits on Perkins Road, dishing out smothered chicken and meatless vegetable sides that taste like somebody's grandmother meant every bite. The chef learned to cook in Mississippi and has been running this kitchen for decades, splitting the difference, geographically and spiritually, between New Orleans and Lafayette. Go hungry and plan to eat with a spoon.

Nearly 3,000 plants grow out of the walls at this American kitchen and bar in Over-the-Rhine, which is either the most calming dining room in Cincinnati or proof that someone really committed to a concept. The living wall runs over 300 square feet of ferns, monstera, and ficus, maintained by a local specialist. It's the kind of room that makes you feel vaguely healthy regardless of what you order.

Charcoal-grilled hot dogs at a counter where the walls are buried in memorabilia: Ted's is an old-school hot dog shop with roots in upstate New York. The White Hot, dressed with sauerkraut and mustard, is the move, but the real sleeper is the fries with gravy, a combination rare enough in Phoenix that people drive across town for it. The buns come toasted or plain, which feels like a small thing until you're asked.

The ham sandwich here landed on the New York Times list of the 26 best dishes eaten across the U.S. in 2024, which is a lot of glory for a poppy-seed roll packed with thick-cut ham, a slice of cheese, yellow mustard, and pickles. This old-school counter spot on Michigan Avenue has been doing exactly this for decades, and the new owners kept the recipe intact. Some things shouldn't be a project.

A walk-up sandwich counter tucked at the end of a thin alley in Five Points, with old photos of famous Dukes lining the path to the window. The menu runs to four sandwiches, which sounds like a dare until you see the chopped cheese, a New York import of griddle-smashed beef and white cheddar on a soft hoagie with pepperoncini. Naming your place "Good Sandwiches" is either false modesty or excellent bait.

The rotating sausage of the week pulls from global flavor traditions, which is either a bold move or a perfectly normal Tuesday at this RiNo barbecue spot. Brisket and pulled pork anchor the menu, but jackfruit and mushrooms hold their own alongside smoked confit duck, so vegetarians aren't left staring at sides. The D&D-themed name prepares you for the crowd, in the best possible, genuinely unsurprising way.

The dry-rubbed brisket here comes out with a coffee-dark bark and a pink smoke ring earned over post oak and hickory, the way Texas pitmasters do it. Wayne's is a casual BBQ shack in Superior that regulars mourned loudly when a 2021 wildfire took out most of the kitchen. It came back in 2023, candied pork belly and St. Louis ribs and all. Bring your own patience and a decent appetite; the sauces are housemade, but the brisket doesn't need them.

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.