The Best Restaurants in the United States

Hypsi is the Italian restaurant tucked inside Hotel Daphne in the Heights, which means you can start with breakfast and keep going until a roaming mozzarella cart rolls up to your table at dinner. The room is relaxed neighborhood stuff, with a fireplace worth angling for and a negroni on the list. Dress however you'd dress to eat pasta near your own house, only slightly nicer.

Ike's is a counter-service sandwich shop that came out of San Francisco, where the menu runs past 700 combinations and a good number are named after celebrities, so you end up ordering a Paul Reubens or a Steph Curry like you're calling in a favor. You pick the bread, from sourdough to gluten-free, and everything gets a swipe of the secret Dirty Sauce. Expect a line, plastic-wrapped napkins, and no dress code beyond pants.

Immm Rice & Beyond is a casual Thai street food counter on Broadway, where the hot bar up front does the talking and the staff will hand you samples if nothing looks familiar. At lunch you can build a plate of rice or noodles with up to three curries, stews, or wok-tossed things, and a chalkboard behind the counter tracks the day's specials. It's Eater's pick for Chicago's best Thai food, and you order at the counter.

In-On Thai is a casual Uptown Thai spot with a short menu built around Central Thai cooking, the sort of place where the salad section gets more thought than most restaurants give their entrees. The green bean salad arrives with hard-boiled eggs and tender shrimp in a sharp, sour sauce. The fried chicken is the easy first order, and it's wise to say you can handle the heat and mean it. Online ordering is available.

A banana-leaf-wrapped fish fillet steamed with chutney is the kind of dish that tells you this old-school Indian restaurant takes its regional cooking seriously. North Indian classics anchor the menu, from chicken tikka masala to saag paneer, but Goan fish curry and chicken Ceylon give regulars a reason to wander off the familiar path. A daily lunch buffet draws the Richmond Avenue crowd in reliably.

Istmo is a Lakeview Mexican restaurant devoted to the food of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, a corner of Oaxaca most menus treat as a footnote. It serves breakfast too, which is where the green enchiladas come in, built on the chef's mother's sauce, so there's a family stake in them. Dinner gets tlayudas and baked fish, and the drinks have their own point of view. Eater lists it among Chicago's best Mexican restaurants.

Tucked above B.B. King's Blues Club on Beale Street, this upscale Southern restaurant gets its soundtrack free of charge, bass lines thumping up through the floorboards from the club below. The room runs its own live music most nights anyway, so there's rarely a quiet moment. The menu leans coastal Southern, with she-crab soup, shrimp over smoked gouda grits, and a Cajun crab dip that disappears fast.

This is the dressier, sit-down cousin of the Archer Heights spot that made its name on pozole, and it keeps that dish while wandering off into aguachiles, mole, cochinita pibil, and grilled meats. The sirloin comes with pineapple-habanero sauce and avocado mousse, which is a lot of sauce for one cut and somehow works. Weekend brunch, plus a tequila and mezcal list long enough to need a plan, and sotol and raicilla for the brave.

Joong Boo is a Korean grocery, and the cooking happens at Snack Corner, a few tables tucked in the back of the Kimball Avenue store. You can get bibimbap, soondubu-jjigae, or a bowl of rice cake soup, then do your shopping with a full stomach, which every grocery trip should begin with. A dumpling shop up front is there if lunch doesn't feel complete yet. Cheap, casual, and nobody minds the cart.

A taco spot near NRG where the trompo al pastor, shaved from a vertical spit with pineapple, draws the kind of loyalty that has nothing to do with proximity to a stadium. Weekends bring taquitos de canasta, basket tacos steamed soft under onions until they collapse on contact. There's also a dice roll and a buzzer game at the counter: land right and the meal is free, which keeps things lively in ways most taco spots don't bother with.

A strip-mall Indian restaurant near Hanes Mall that earns its keep by covering a lot of ground without cutting corners. The menu runs from chicken tikka masala and lamb rogan josh to gobi Manchurian and a generous spread of breads, including puffy bhatura that make a strong case for skipping the naan. Spice levels adjust to order, and the desserts, kulfi and gulab jamun laced with cardamom and rose, are worth saving room for.

Kfire is a fast-casual Korean American spot on Milwaukee Ave where you build your own bowl, and nearly everything on the menu bends to your will, including swapping the rice for salad. The galbi gets compared favorably to sit-down barbecue places, and the Impossible crumbles come marinated like galbi and pressed into patties, which is a sentence nobody expected to write. Eater lists it among Chicago's best Korean restaurants.

The sweet potato brulée, a potato starch custard torched to a glassy crust, gives you a sense of how this Berkeley izakaya operates: familiar enough to land, unexpected enough to stay with you. The menu shifts constantly around a core of Japanese small plates, with daily specials that swing from nigiri to okonomiyaki depending on the chef's mood. The San Francisco Chronicle named it among the best restaurants in Berkeley.

A katsu shop born from the owners' off-hours obsession with Japanese cutlets, this Redmond spot keeps things focused: pork, chicken, cheese, all fried to a crunch you can hear across the room. The chef pulls from Tokyo tradition and Vancouver's izakaya scene, so the cutlets land in dark chocolate curry, bubbling nabe, or buried under enough grated Parmesan to require a snow shovel. A focused, casual lunch counter doing one thing with real conviction.

This is a neighborhood Iranian wine bar in Bernal Heights where the big round tables were clearly built for spreading out. Parents graze through mazze platters with a glass of something cold while kids tally the decorative pots behind the bar, and nobody needs a sitter or a reservation strategy. The sweet and sour chicken stew is soft enough for the teething set, which is more than most wine bars can say.

Krankies roasts its own coffee in what used to be a fallout shelter, which tells you something about both the building and the clientele. It's a Southern brunch spot with biscuits stacked under fried chicken and a splash of Texas Pete, plus vegan options so nobody has to negotiate. The team closes on the first Monday of each month for a staff mental health day, a detail that tends to make regulars more loyal than any loyalty card ever could.

South Indian cooking is the reason to come to this Westheimer restaurant, even though the menu covers North Indian ground too. Fermented rice batter crepes, peppery tamarind curries, and spiced seafood or goat dishes built on black pepper and sour notes give the kitchen its personality. Finish with an Indian coffee or the sarsaparilla-and-bael-fruit cocktail, which sounds obscure until you try it.

A deep-dish pizzeria wedged into the part of Michigan Avenue otherwise devoted to flagship stores and corporate chains. The focaccia-style dough gets a layer of mozzarella before baking, which builds a crunchy, caramelized crust. There's a skinny deep dish for the dough-averse, and an umbrella-shaded patio where you can nurse a spritz and forget the tourist current rushing past. Eater has named it Chicago's Best Deep-Dish Pizza.

Lankford's is a Houston burger-and-milkshake counter that has been feeding the neighborhood since before anyone thought to call it a scene. The Grim stacks macaroni and cheese, bacon, jalapeño, and a sunny-side-up egg on a beef patty, which is less a sandwich than a dare. Non-beef eaters get real options, from salmon to Impossible, so nobody has to sit there politely watching. Eater put it on its list of the city's best burgers.

A marinated pork spit spinning in the window pulls in foot traffic on MLK Way, which is basically the oldest form of advertising. This Chiapas-style taqueria in Berkeley orders you outside to pick up your al pastor, the ruby meat sweet and charred, with pineapple and a green oil salsa alongside. The chicken mole is a serious plate when you want it. Noah's Ark animals frolic across a mural on the wall, keeping things cheerful.

A wall in the back pulses with colored light synced to the reggaeton, which tells you exactly what kind of restaurant this is. Lita does modern Caribbean in a Walnut Creek setting that leans hard into Miami energy, with a marble bar, gold trim, and ferns hanging over the dining room. Fish fritters, coconut curry chicken empanadas, and spit-roast jerk chicken shaved into tacos carry the menu. The cocktails keep up.

Little India is a casual Indian restaurant on East 6th Avenue that has fed Denver since before anyone worried about Y2K, and it now stays open around the clock for anyone with a lamb vindaloo emergency at four in the morning. Lunch is when the buffet runs, which means saag, dal makhani, korma, and tandoori chicken sit a few steps away and nobody has to choose between the butter chicken and the biryani. The Infatuation listed it among Denver's lunch spots.