The Best Restaurants in the United States

A gallery of cow portraits on the wall sets the tone at this no-frills Park Slope coffee shop, which does not take itself too seriously but does take espresso seriously. Black & White roasts come out of a small, sunny space with tile backsplash, a handful of stools, and Colson pastries for the indecisive. The staff know what they're doing, which in this neighborhood is less common than it should be.

The big tray chicken arrives in a wok the size of a hubcap, bird parts submerged in hot oil with enough Sichuan peppercorns to rearrange your face. This tiny Chinatown noodle cafe runs on Henan hand-stretched wheat noodles, and the brisket topping is the move. The room is small, the tables fill fast, and the bill stays low enough that you can afford to order the garlicky cucumbers without doing any math.

12 Stories is a rooftop cocktail bar on the twelfth floor at the Wharf, with a DJ, a dancehall and R&B soundtrack, and a view of the whole Potomac. The food is slider-and-truffle-fries territory, so eat beforehand and treat the menu as a courtesy. It's a place to debut a new outfit, with a gingery rum-pineapple Story Teller in hand and a dance floor that rewards commitment.

A wall of waving Maneki-neko cats stands guard outside, which is either good luck or a lot of eye contact before dinner. Inside Circa, 8 East is a sit-down Asian restaurant built around small plates, skewers, and family-style dishes, so it rewards showing up with people willing to share. Come hungry, dress casually, and expect the pork belly to have been slow-cooked far longer than your commute.

82 Kimbap is a weekday-only stall in Sterling Food Hall, and it exists so the Loop's office workers have something to eat at noon that isn't a sandwich. The rice rolls come stuffed with spicy pork, bulgogi, or braised tofu, wrapped around egg, vegetables, and purple rice. Add-ons include instant ramyun and giant fishcake skewers, though the line is there for the rolls. Expect to eat at a food-hall table under fluorescent lanyard energy.

Alma is a Balkan dinner spot on Northeast MLK where everything arrives built for sharing, so you'll be passing plates and negotiating over the last bite of octopus. Seafood runs through the menu, alongside an eggplant dish that makes a quiet case for vegetables. Strong black tea starts the meal and cubes of Turkish delight end it, which is more hospitality than most places manage. The cocktails include a lamb fat-washed mezcal, in case that was your next question.

Apna Chat Bhavan is a casual counter-service Indian spot in Beaverton, tucked between a food market and a micro cinema, serving the kind of range most places would split across three restaurants. A "half" order of biryani arrives as a mountain of rice, and the dosa is roughly the length of a small runway. Order at the counter, ignore your better judgment, and save room for the pastry case. Eater included it on its list of Portland's best restaurants and food carts.

This Greek restaurant started in suburban Winnetka and then crept into the city, which is the opposite of how chains usually migrate. The River North room is all plants and pale wood, built to feel like a long lunch on an island with a better ferry schedule than yours. The menu goes past the gyros-and-flaming-saganaki starter pack, though you should still order the saganaki. Eater lists it among the area's best.

The whole fish, selected by the diner and cooked to order, is the move at this airy, high-ceilinged Greek restaurant in the heart of Beverly Hills. The room leans into an easy Aegean elegance without trying too hard, and the crowd obliges by dressing accordingly. Seafood does the heavy lifting, but the Greek salad and roasted peppers with barrel-aged feta hold their own. Bring someone you want to impress, and let the pacing do the work.

Greyhound statues loom over a room that looks like a wealthy socialite grandmother's vacation home, which is exactly the vibe Quality Branded, the group behind Don Angie, was going for. This maximalist Italian restaurant moved into the old Palm Steakhouse space and brought the New York original's cheeky energy with it. Daily-made pastas, a seafood tower, and roasted garlic babka that people apparently talk about unprompted fill out a menu that never takes itself too seriously.

This is the hotel lobby bar at the Pendry on the Wharf, all brass, espresso wood, and dim velvet, the sort of room where a Louis Vuitton-print jacket would blend right in. Hotel guests and the well-funded settle into the lounge with coffee-and-rum cocktails while complimentary nuts and olives arrive unprompted. Entrees exist, but most people stick to truffle fries and a charcuterie board. It's a nightcap spot.

Batch Gastropub is a casual pub in a neighborhood where most bars seem to require a reservation and a point of view. Here the main decor is televisions, plenty of them, which makes game day the natural habitat. The beer list runs deep on craft pours, the whiskey shelf is serious, and the pub fare leans burgers and wings. Happy hour and weekly trivia give the regulars a schedule, and nobody asks you to dress for the occasion.

This is a red-sauce Italian joint a block off the Strip, with celebrity headshots, old records, and a wedding's worth of chianti bottles hanging from the ceiling. The kitsch is not subtle, and it suits big, loud group dinners where nobody checks the menu prices. Entrees come in under $50 and include unlimited house red and white, which is the real plot of the evening. Plan on leftovers and a lively walk back.

Bencotto is a sit-down Italian restaurant in Little Italy, run by a Milanese kitchen with no interest in reinventing lasagna. The showpiece is pasta tossed inside a giant wheel of Parmesan, which is exactly as theatrical as it sounds. Expect housemade noodles, ossobuco, and a pink pancetta sauce, plus a weekday happy hour where the Aperol spritzes are cheap enough to make the early start feel like good judgment.

Bereket is a casual Turkish spot in the Loop that inherited a counter-service space, so the bright yellow room still has drop ceilings and a retired metal cafeteria station. It looks like a place for a ten-minute lunch, but the bread, manti, and döner-topped iskender are all made in-house and ask to be eaten slowly. It's open all day, every day, which removes your last excuse. The Infatuation lists it among the Loop's best.

Dim enough to feel genuinely clandestine, with tall dripping candles and banquettes you sink into and forget to leave, this Iranian restaurant in the Arts District is the LA outpost of a London original. The menu leans into the Iranian diaspora, with kebabs doing the heavy lifting. It sits inside Soho Warehouse, so the corner booth may or may not contain a movie star, which is either a draw or a reason to keep your eyes on the bread.

Bin 702 is a laid-back wine bar in Container Park that treats France as a loose suggestion, mostly because you can ask for Flamin' Hot Cheeto crumbles on top of things. The bottle-and-board deal pairs a cheese board with a bottle of wine at a price that drops further during happy hour. Expect small plates and mini sandwiches meant for sharing, plus beer, cocktails, and aperitivos for anyone not committing to a bottle.

The draw here is a pancake that arrives without syrup and doesn't miss it, a thin, oatmeal-based griddle cake with a slight crunch and maple cinnamon butter doing all the work. This casual breakfast spot has been a neighborhood fixture for a while now, with locations scattered around LA. Breakfast sandwiches and housemade sausages fill out the menu, but the pancakes are the reason regulars show up and the reason Eater calls them among the city's finest.

The kulcha arrives stuffed with brie and gooseberry chutney, which tells you immediately where Brick Lane is coming from. This Arts District modern Indian restaurant takes its name from East London's famous curry mile, though the menu owes as much to California as to the subcontinent. Celeriac chapli kebabs and smoked butter chicken come off live fire, sourdough naan lands alongside tandoori roti, and a jaggery Old Fashioned handles drinks.

Cafe Bionda is a red-sauce Italian American spot on South State, where the menu still runs on rigatoni in Nonna's gravy and a carbonara that knows what it is. The bar got bigger after the 2022 reopening, and happy hour now draws a loud, cheerful crowd for $9 cocktails and $10 fried things. The lasagna is enormous and takes half an hour, so order it early and have a second cocktail.

Lemon ricotta pancakes show up on nearly every table at this airy daytime cafe in East Hollywood, indoors and out, full of laptops and Canyon Coffee. The menu stays deliberately short: pancakes, pastries, a handful of sandwiches, tea. It's the kind of neighborhood spot that gets called a community hub without irony, and somehow earns it.

Cafecito is a casual Cuban counter on East Congress, right next to the Auditorium Theatre, which makes it the default pregame for anyone with curtain time on their mind. Sandwiches on crisp pressed bread are the main event, with platters of rice and beans for people who want a fork. The cortaditos and cafe con leche are there to get you through a long first act, and they cost less than a theater snack.

Cantina Bambina is a two-story bar on the Wharf where the main attraction is the sunset, which turns the whole room gold around 8pm in summer. Drinks run to beer, wine, and a vodka-strawberry lemonade, and the food is beef sticks, Moon Pies, and potato chips, so eat dinner first. It suits the stretch before a show at the Anthem across the street, or any sunny afternoon with nowhere to be.

A Cuban-inspired brunch spot on the second floor in Waikiki where the Cubano and choripan keep locals coming back despite the tourist foot traffic below. The chef leans hard on local sourcing, which is rarer here than you'd think, so the fruit plate runs on farmers market tropicals instead of the usual imported berries flown in from somewhere cold. Sandwiches and braised brisket do the heavy lifting on a menu that reads like it belongs somewhere else entirely.

A food concept from B.J. Novak that treats chain restaurants as source material rather than punchlines, Chain landed its first permanent home inside a mall food court, which feels exactly right. Four chefs each riff on a fast-food classic: a Cantonese fish sandwich, a spicy chicken number, a teriyaki bowl, a mapo wagyu wrap. The nostalgia is the point, and the execution is the twist.

Che Ah Chi is the full-service restaurant inside Enchantment Resort, set up so the red rocks of Boynton Canyon are the main event and the food is the supporting cast. Breakfast leans açai bowl and egg-white scramble, the sort of order that says you plan to hike later, while dinner moves toward mole and lamb with a resort-appropriate bill. Reserve ahead, since anniversaries tend to descend on the room all at once.

Cindy's is a rooftop cocktail bar on top of the Chicago Athletic Association, with a terrace looking over Millennium Park and Lake Michigan. It's a hotel bar, so expect dressed-up visitors, bachelorette sashes, and relatives in town, plus plates meant for three or four people to share. Regional Top 10 for hotel bars at the Spirited Awards, which is one more reason the terrace fills up first.

The team behind Loreto, Bar Seco, and Santa Canela converted a former Arts District spot into a rooftop restaurant and bar with outdoor screens and one of the more dramatic skylines Downtown has to offer. Focaccia sandwiches, panzanella, and fritto misto keep things casual while a game or a film plays overhead. It's the kind of place where the view does half the work, and nobody seems to mind.

Civico 1845 is a small Little Italy trattoria that does Calabrian cooking, with all the pasta made in-house. It has been said to be the first Italian restaurant in the country with a fully vegan menu, which sits alongside plenty of meat, so the table that can't agree on dinner finally has a place to go. The room is homey and the service is warm, at a price that suits a casual dinner out.