The Best Restaurants in the United States

Cocody is a pink French dinner spot in the River Oaks Shopping Center, which is exactly the setting you'd expect for pink. The menu mostly runs to foie gras and duck breast, the kind of order that goes with a reservation and a decent jacket. The signature lollies are the odd ones out, tiny bites on sticks or mini baguettes, which makes the room feel playful for people spending real money on dinner.

White tablecloths and a room that doesn't announce itself as vegan, even a little. Crossroads Kitchen is a refined plant-based Mediterranean restaurant on Melrose where Tal Ronnen's cooking reads as fine dining first and a lifestyle statement never. The French onion soup arrives without beef broth and nobody at the table notices anything missing. A-list regulars treat the bar like a neighborhood spot, which is either aspirational or just Tuesday in Los Angeles.

The open kitchen here sits behind a glass floor with koi swimming beneath it, which sets the tone before the food even arrives. Crustacean is a Vietnamese restaurant that's been a Beverly Hills institution forever, known for garlic noodles and garlic-roasted Dungeness crab that regulars treat as non-negotiable. Chef Helene An works the dining room herself most nights, which is a genuinely rare thing at this price point. Note that the Beverly Hills location closes in late 2026.

Crying Tiger is a big, lavish Southeast Asian restaurant in River North, where the menu roams from Vietnam to Thailand to China, so clay pot lobster pad Thai and prawn toast share a table without apology. The plating is arranged with photography in mind, and the ladies' room has apparently become a selfie destination. It's a Lettuce Entertain You production, so expect dress-up energy and a check to match.

Da Prato is a Tuscan restaurant in a floor-level downtown loft, in a part of Los Angeles where most rooms are concrete and echo. The handwritten menu draws on ancient love poems, so expect mozzarella melted over fig leaves and a dish description that involves nymphs. It changes with the chef's whims, and the pasta stays simple, which is the sensible move when the menu is already doing the flirting.

This is a longtime Mexican restaurant on Las Vegas Boulevard that does tamales the old way, tucked into masa that stays soft, with sweet pineapple-and-raisin ones for anyone who wants dessert to count as breakfast. The menu runs from chilaquiles through mole and tortilla soup, and weekends bring a shrimp caldo that works as a hangover plan. Prices stay modest, and nobody dresses up for it.

Double Dragon is a Division Street lounge where the island-bar mood comes with a short, focused menu of burgers, banh mi, and rice bowls, plus well-made cocktails. Dinner here is bar-priced and nobody is dressed up. The potato salad is the side dish people bring up, creamy and funky with fish sauce and pickled mustard seed, and somehow vegan, which feels like a clerical error in the best way.

El Moose is an all-day Mexican spot in Ballard where floral oilcloths and papel picado do the decorating and café de olla does the reviving. It's casual, priced like a place you'd go twice in a weekend, and the out-late-last-night crowd fills the room by mid-morning. The alambres come with cheese that melts on contact, and a fried egg on top is the sort of move the brunch gods tend to notice. Arrive early.

Extra Wavy is a seafood restaurant on Chouteau Ave where pink and green fishing nets hang from exposed brick and heavy wood beams, as if a New England dockhand had a very good decorator. The cocktails get most of the attention, including a cherry margarita with pistachio foam, and nearly every drink comes in a non-alcoholic version. Dinner runs to scallop crudo and fish and chips, and the bar suits a solo seat.

You walk through a working Italian grocery to reach the dining room, which is the first sign this isn't a place with a lot of interest in minimalism. Red-and-white checkered tablecloths, Chianti bottles overhead, and long family-style tables built for birthdays and rehearsal dinners. It's a red-sauce pizza and pasta joint with a cheap check, and the antipasto salad and garlic bread arrive like they were never optional.

Fine Company is a daytime restaurant in Downtown Summerlin that does breakfast and lunch in a semi-casual room, and it locks up at 5 p.m., so don't show up hungry for dinner. The morning pick is the soft brown butter French toast, and lunch leans toward light salads and grain bowls, with a bone broth borrowed from a steakhouse for the quietly virtuous. The founding chef's banana bread stuck around after he left.

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.

An Italian American restaurant in Midtown that has been a fixture for Midtown media types and political regulars since the nineties, run by the Scotto family with the kind of front-of-house warmth that makes you feel like the reservation mattered. The linguine vongole and a chopped salad are the moves. Arrive late and you may find a DJ has materialized, followed shortly by a conga line, which is not something most pasta dinners promise.

Ginger Mule is a casual plant-based restaurant in the Heights, which in Houston is a bold thing to be, and it has a loyal following to show for it. The menu runs from heart of palm ceviche to a Massaman curry, and brunch brings vegan sausage tacos and French toast with whipped oat cream. Gluten-free and dairy-free folks get to order without interrogating the server, a small luxury that explains the regulars.

Glitter Gulch Tiki is a dim tiki bar a few steps off Fremont Street, which is where you go once the neon and LED screens have worn you down. The booths are straw-thatched, the drinks are strong, and the scorpion bowls arrive swimming in 151-proof rum. The bartender sets the Luau In Vegas on fire with a torch, so keep your eyebrows back. The Infatuation lists it among Downtown's best restaurants.

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 the Gordon Ramsay reality-show restaurant on the Strip, where a hologram of the man himself greets you at the door. Past it, a cavernous dining room puts pitchforks on everything that can hold one, including the ice cubes. Expect a crowd of hungry people at the entrance and a three-course prix fixe that runs well over a hundred dollars a head. Skeptics and superfans tend to end up equally entertained.

This is a sit-down hot pot chain in Katy where the wait is part of the show, with free snacks, a manicure option, and a robot servers rolling past on delivery runs. Once seated, you choose up to four broths for the table and build your own dipping sauce at a bar that gets treated with the seriousness of a chemistry final. Plan on a long, loud, bubbling dinner, plus a face-changing opera performance if the timing cooperates.

This is a Korean BBQ spot where the grilling happens at your table and the staff will politely take over if you're being slow about it. Service moves at a pace that suggests nobody here has ever lingered over a menu. Reservations only open up for parties of six or more, so everyone else joins the waitlist and hopes. There's an all-you-can-eat option, with a $20 penalty for leaving food behind, which is a surprisingly effective motivator.

This is a casual all-day diner on the ground floor of the Plaza, run by a chain with a "twisted farm food" theme, which mostly means everything arrives enormous. The fried chicken and waffles comes stacked with bacon and fried leeks and demands a plan of attack. Hashes land in cast-iron skillets, and the clientele skews toward people who stayed up late downtown and are now being sensible about it.

The bar stools here are swings, which tells you everything about the mood. Heyday is a neighborhood restaurant and bar tucked into the courtyard of a midcentury hotel in Waikiki, leaning hard into the retro-tropical bit with mai tai variations and boozy slushies alongside cheesy toast and a fried mahi sandwich that reads as a Filet-o-Fish with ambitions. After dark, the Green Lady Cocktail Room in room eight opens as a dark lounge spilling into a palm-fringed courtyard.

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.

Il Culaccino is a sit-down Italian American restaurant across from Wintrust Arena, which explains the pre-game crowd and the chicken Vesuvio. The menu runs red-sauce classics, prime steaks, and lighter pastas, all under burgundy leather banquettes that look like they've heard a few secrets. A wine bar spills onto a covered patio for warmer nights, and the owners also run Franco's in Bridgeport.

Ilili is a Lebanese dinner-and-brunch spot at the Wharf, where hanging vines, cages of light-up birds, and a trickling stone fountain make the dining room look like a very well-funded aviary. Hand-painted tiles cover the floor, and graduation parties and promotion dinners show up in their Sunday best. Skip the small plates for the mixed grill, a charred platter built for sharing.

Sit-down wine bar and all-day cafe in the Royal Hawaiian Center, where the menu wanders happily from breakfast plates to burrata to garlic shrimp without apologizing for any of it. The move many regulars make is the fried breadfruit, served with brown sugar and coconut cream in a way that makes you wonder why breakfast potatoes ever went another direction. Steamed clams and acai bowls from the adjacent cafe round out the options nicely.

Japaneiro's is a sushi-and-more restaurant in Sugar Land where Japan and South America share a menu and refuse to pick a side. Rolls arrive wearing chimichurri and caramelized onions, and the salmon tostada stacks itself on wontons like a Tokyo-Lima summit. It's been a suburban fixture for a long while, the kind of place where a birthday dinner and a rolled-up-sleeves sushi night happen at neighboring tables.

Claypot dishes and lacquered roasted meats are the draw at this polished but casual Cantonese spot, where most of the menu stays under $15 and the lunch crowd moves fast. It shares a building with the much larger Diamond Bay, which means dim sum from that sprawling menu is also on offer, a dangerous development for anyone who came in planning to keep it simple. New York restaurant group, Seattle address, Chinatown, International District building with history.

Kar Son is a sit-down Chinese restaurant in Row DTLA, a spot that sounds like a skeptic's punchline until you're inside it. The menu wanders the whole country, from Sichuan to Yunnan, and keeps a straight face doing it. Floor-to-ceiling windows and wide booths suit a solo noodle soup lunch, and at night the candles and 90s Cantopop make it a group-dinner room. Expect real-restaurant prices, not a lunch counter's.

Wine carafes priced the way carafes should be priced, and octopus skewers landing on paper-covered tables beside tzatziki and spanakopita, all of it meant for sharing. Kiki's is a neighborhood Greek taverna on the Lower East Side that got so popular the team opened an identical spot across the street for overflow, which is either very practical or very on-brand for the neighborhood. Usually easy to get a table, which says something.

A giant pink monkey painted on the outside wall tells you what you're getting into, and the stained-glass windows and colorful ceiling fixtures inside keep the theme going. This is a lively, casual Mexican spot in East Fremont serving tacos, flautas, and seafood, plus loaded fries that count as a starter if you're generous. Weekend brunch goes full pink, with rosy cocktails and a mimosa flight.

Lansdowne is a fine-dining room behind an exposed brick facade, where the service is the attentive, old-fashioned kind that notices your glass before you do. The seasonal menu runs to beef tartare and scallops perched on maitakes, plated with care but without the tweezers or the portions that make you stop for a burger afterward. The wine list stays strictly Oregon and Washington, which turns out to be a wider world than it sounds. It's on Eater's list of Portland's best restaurants and food carts.

Las Cazuelas is a family-run Salvadoran restaurant on Figueroa where the recipes come down through the owner's mother, and nobody seems inclined to edit them. Pupusas are the draw, the revuelta with crisped chicharron and a three-cheese stretch in particular. The leather booths are roomy, the prices are easy, and the back lot has parking, a rarity in Highland Park that feels almost like a dare.

Leo's sits next to the River Oaks Theatre and plays a New York supper club, which in Houston means a 28-ounce porterhouse, lobster thermidor, and a side of potatoes dauphinoise nobody ordered for the table but everyone eats. Dinner here is a dressed-up, wallet-forward affair. There are four Old Fashioneds, one of them an Elvis-inspired peanut butter and banana situation, so the bar is clearly not here to be polite.

Little Rey is the casual, all-day Mexican spot from restaurateur Ford Fry, the one where you can order breakfast chalupas at eight and a margarita at noon without anyone blinking. Tacos come in every direction, and the half chicken roasted over coals arrives with tortillas and ranch beans for assembling at the table. Soft-serve in tres leches or salty cajeta is the correct way to close out a meal. Come in whatever you're already wearing.