The Best Restaurants in the United States

This is a big, family-friendly Lebanese restaurant in Dearborn, and it's apparently where half of Detroit sends you the moment you land at the airport. The pita comes out of an oven shipped over from Lebanon, which is more dedication than most of us give our commutes. Come for the hummus, the shawarma wraps with a sharp hit of toum, or a slow-roasted lamb on almond rice built for a table of relatives. Order the Lemon Crush.

Colorful fabric drapes the ceiling like a Bedouin tent, and the smell of mesquite smoke hits you before you find a table. Al Bawadi is a sprawling Middle Eastern grill in Niles where the portions arrive on banquet platters, hummus and rice piled high enough to guarantee tomorrow's lunch. Kefta, kebabs, lamb, chicken, seafood, all over hardwood. The New York Times put it on their list of the 25 best restaurants in Chicago right now.

A halal grocery and meat market in Sunnyvale that also happens to run a charcoal grill out back. Order a koobideh or chicken tikka skewer and about fifteen minutes later someone emerges with an aluminum tray lined with lavash, which quietly absorbs all the smoky, spiced drippings. The San Francisco Chronicle named it one of the Bay Area's top Middle Eastern spots. Sides you'll have to source elsewhere, but the skewers alone make the detour easy to justify.

A Cal-Italian restaurant on Nob Hill where all the pasta is made in-house and the Bolognese simmers for half a day before it touches a plate. The kitchen leans on the rich, meaty flavors of central Italy, which means comfort is the whole project, not an afterthought. The room is cozy enough that the cooking and the atmosphere feel like they had a meeting. The San Francisco Chronicle has named it among the best Italian in the Bay Area.

The entrance is styled as a dry cleaner, complete with hanging racks of clothes you push through to reach a gold-leaf, hand-painted dining room with a live jazz trio. This elegant Cuban-Korean-Peruvian sit-down restaurant in a strip mall off the Palmetto is from the family behind Islas Canarias, and the menu runs mojo chicken alongside lomo saltado risotto and katsu-style chicharrones. The New York Times named it one of Miami's 25 best restaurants.

A cozy Richmond District Thai restaurant with a menu long enough to require real commitment. The slow-braised pork-leg stew, a Thai street-vendor staple fragrant with cinnamon, star anise, and soy, is the kind of thing regulars order before they sit down. The crispy chicken wings in sticky chile-garlic sauce pull their weight too. Hard-to-find specialties fill out a menu that goes well beyond the usual neighborhood Thai repertoire.

The yurt out back, snow-dusted and strung with twinkle lights, seats twelve for private dinners and tells you everything about Angelo's ambitions. It's a newish Italian restaurant in the heart of Aspen, already the default for big-table occasions, with a menu that swings from nostalgic tomato-basil fusilli to a white-chocolate dessert shell that cracks open to reveal yuzu ganache inside.

Butterfly tapestries climb the walls and spill onto a mezzanine level, and the bar fixtures look like conch shells, so you know the room has opinions. Augie's is a French bistro that earns its snails with the clamps and forks for the full surgical experience, though you can also order them Buffalo-style, which France will just have to accept. The burger, all pan-crusted patty and comté, has become a reason to drive up from the city.

The bacon burger and Strawberry Sriracha Burger share a menu with shrimp and grits and French toast bites, which tells you something about Avenue Pub's ambitions: a casual American bar and grill that wants to be useful at every hour. Lunch draws a crowd heavy on salads and sandwiches, dinner fills in the comfort-food gaps, and brunch adds its own reasons to show up. The bar area is a solid perch for a beer and whatever game is on.

The pho broth here simmers for a full day on marrow bones, and you can taste the patience in it. Ba Bar is a Vietnamese restaurant and bar where the cocktail menu leans into tamarind and orgeat without taking itself too seriously, which matters when you're also ordering chicken wings. The New York Times named it one of Seattle's 25 best restaurants. The South Lake Union location keeps reasonable hours; the original Capitol Hill spot runs until midnight.

The bún mắm here, a thick-noodled seafood soup built on fermented fish broth and lemongrass, is the dish that defines what this Mission District Vietnamese restaurant is doing differently. The menu draws from Bạc Liêu, a coastal southern province whose mastery of fermented seafood doesn't often make it this far north. The grilled shrimp paste on sugarcane, served with rice noodles and vegetables for DIY wraps, has its own following.

Bahn Thai is a small, casual Thai spot in University Heights, the sort where lunch costs about what you'd hope and the portions suggest the kitchen has never heard of restraint. You choose a dish, a spice level, and a protein, a three-step system so clear it practically has a diagram. The dining room is tiny, so most people grab takeout and eat in the car, on a bench, or with total conviction at their desk.

Bar Gabi is a Romanian-leaning dinner spot in Hazel Park that's built for passing plates and losing track of time. The menu strays happily into Italy and beyond, so a schnitzel the size of a catcher's mitt shares the table with goulash, gnocchetti, and focaccia with whipped feta. The big corner booth fits about six friends, which is roughly the headcount this whole operation assumes you'll arrive with.

Handmade pasta and seasonal Italian cooking from the team behind AltoVino, landing on Valencia Street with enough confidence to unsettle places that have been doing this for decades. The bagna cauda arrives warm over a votive candle, an anchovy-laced olive oil dip that earns the table's full attention before the rest of the menu even starts. Produce gets treated with the same seriousness as the proteins, which is the quiet tell of a kitchen that knows what it's doing.

A cocktail served in a bubbling miniature bathtub is the social media event this French-leaning dinner spot seems designed around, and nobody there is pretending otherwise. The menu runs from hamachi tiradito to bison flank, the sunset views over Aspen are doing real work early in the evening, and by the time a DJ arrives the room has fully pivoted. Dinner here is openly, cheerfully a pregame.

The sauces at this French bistro are apparently the thing, and the chef behind the tasting-menu destination Table Culture Provisions built Bijou to be his looser, à la carte sibling. Looser is relative: the croque monsieur has truffle in it and there's a beef Wellington on the menu. The San Francisco Chronicle named it one of the best French restaurants in the Bay Area, which tracks for a room where the cooking is this fussy in the best possible, no wait, this precise.

Bin 22 is a tapas and wine bar, and getting in means walking through a liquor store to the back, which is either charming or a very elaborate way to hide a restaurant. Locals and tourists share the communal tables and bar, so dining solo tends to end with a new acquaintance. The house-pulled mozzarella gets the most attention, and the rotating rosés keep the glasses full. The Infatuation lists it among Jackson Hole's top restaurants.

Copper pans hang near the open kitchen at this warm Italian bistro that's been woven into the fabric of Napa Valley long enough to count as an institution. The pasta is made in-house with the kind of al dente chew that takes practice, and the fritto misto is crackly and uncluttered. Tourists and wine-country regulars share the room with equal comfort, which is a harder trick than it sounds.

Blue Corn is a casual Mexican spot in the Italian Market where the tortillas and both table salsas are made in-house, which is more effort than most places put into a free bowl of anything. The room is strung with so much festive decor that you'll wonder which holiday you missed, and the margaritas are strong enough to make you stop asking. Expect an easy dinner, jeans welcome, and a spot on The Infatuation's list of Philadelphia's top restaurants.

Lamb and chicken skewers come off the coals heavy with cumin at this Uyghur restaurant tucked into an Arlington strip mall. The skewers are the draw, but the menu around them pulls equal weight: flat noodles in tart red broth, cold noodles sparked with chili oil, and a beef-and-onion stuffed flatbread that regulars tend to order twice. The New York Times named it one of D.C.'s 25 best restaurants.

This Spanish restaurant off Paradise Road gets some of its French cooking from a former Joël Robuchon chef, so the potato purée arrives buttery and the croquetas arrive dressed as croque monsieur. The dining room has crystal chandeliers and high ceilings, dressy enough for a business dinner, though a Domino's downstairs keeps anyone from getting too precious. Chartreuse is on draft, which is how the night usually ends.

The smell of butter hits before you've even read the menu, which is a fine way to start a weekend lunch. Butterjoint is a casual neighborhood spot in Oakland doing sandwiches, pierogi, and baked goods with a serious hand. The rolls with roasted cipollini onion butter and the vinegar pie, a Depression-era custardy thing with a crunchy top, are reason enough to come. Colorful booths in the bar section fill up fast.

A daytime sandwich shop tucked between the office towers of downtown San Francisco, Cafe du Soleil runs a tight lunch rush with a short line and shorter seating. The prosciutto sandwich, layered with brie and roasted bell peppers, is the kind of thing coworkers quietly compare notes on. Yerba Buena Gardens is a short walk when the tables fill up, which is most days.

Calico is a casual Italian restaurant on Moose Wilson Road, tucked between Wilson and Teton Village, with a patio and a big fenced lawn where kids roam while their parents stay seated. A garden out back supplies some of the herbs and produce, which is a nice touch for people who like knowing where their basil spent the summer. It's on The Infatuation's list of top Jackson Hole restaurants, and the jalapeño margaritas draw their own following.

Camp Outpost is a casual counter-service spot in Springdale built around a custom rotisserie, which turns out whole chickens for a camp plate that comes in under $30. The patio is big and the fire pit is communal, so strangers in hiking boots end up roasting s'mores together like a very low-stakes cult. Breakfast burritos and overnight oats cover mornings, and the whole thing sits right beside the Desert Pearl Inn.

Castizo is a tapas bar in Seville, and the name is Sevillano shorthand for exactly that, so the pressure to deliver was built in. The open kitchen runs in plain view behind an L-shaped bar that wouldn't look out of place in a modern French bistro, and the sherry list is deep enough to keep you there past the point of reason. Eater named it among the 20 best restaurants in Seville. Ask about the seafood counter before you order.

A rambling beach shack just north of the Wrightsville Beach drawbridge, Ceviche's leans Panamanian rather than strictly Peruvian, with a long list of ceviches, empanadas, and tapas built for sharing alongside bigger plates like ropa vieja and paella. The whole setup, sandy-casual and loud with cocktails going around, makes the kind of sense that only works two blocks from the water.

The beef on weck here is the reason Buffalo has strong opinions about sandwiches: a massive rib roast, sliced to order, piled onto a kummelweck roll with enough jus to make you look confident or foolish, depending on your shirt choice. This is an old-school deli counter, the kind that locals treat as a civic institution. The corned beef and roast turkey are solid detours, and the snickerdoodles are comically oversized, as advertised.

Fruit cobbler counts as a vegetable here, which tells you everything about City Cafe's approach to the food pyramid. This old-school lunch counter in Northport has been feeding working-class locals and college students forever, turning out cheap, hearty plates to roughly a thousand people a day. The menu rotates by day of the week, giving regulars a reason to come back Tuesday. Crimson Tide posters and a hand-painted mural hold down the walls.

Polished concrete floors and olive-green banquettes replaced the worn carpet when City View moved to its new spot overlooking Portsmouth Square, and the room now reads more gallery than dim sum hall. The classics still show up on the carts, though, and the baked pork buns arrive airy with a crackly top. A sleeker option than the old-school palaces nearby, and the San Francisco Chronicle named it among the best dim sum spots in the Bay Area.

The lasagnette arrives sliced, crisped, and floated over a pool of green fondue, which tells you most of what you need to know about this Italian restaurant on Hyde. The team behind Seven Hills took over their original space and pivoted toward something warmer and a little more relaxed, all monochromatic blue walls and wines by the glass. Snacks, pasta, and surprisingly compelling sides fill out a menu that keeps the room full on a weeknight.

Cơm tấm is broken rice, the humble fragments left after milling, and this East San Jose spot has built its whole identity around it. A casual Vietnamese rice shop, it pairs that base with grilled meats and sides that do the real work, including steamed pork cake and fried tofu skin stuffed with shrimp. Fresh minced bird's eye chiles sit on every table instead of a bottle, which tells you something about the kitchen's standards.

Live jazz and fusion food in Pittsburgh's Penn Avenue corridor, where the kitchen is pulling off za'atar focaccia and kimchi fried rice with pork belly in the same breath. Con Alma is a restaurant that takes the music seriously enough that conversation sometimes has to wait. The lineup shifts, so showing up cold is half the fun, whether you land on a jam session or someone doing a slow, considered take on a standard.