The Best Places in the United States

A cash-only donut shop in South Phoenix with a name that sets expectations high and a vanilla-glazed old-fashioned that does not blink. The craggy cake ring stays light enough that the glaze is doing structural work, which is either alarming or impressive depending on your engineering background. The butterfly, a folded cinnamon roll under glaze and buttery crumble, gives you something to do while you think about ordering another old-fashioned.

It's a cocktail bar and pizzeria on Montrose with a cosmic theme and a name you're meant to say out loud as "Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice," a joke that never fully leaves the room. The pizzas come out of cast-iron pans with crisp, cheesy edges, and the Space Balls are fried dough that sits somewhere between garlic bread and a beignet. Expect drinks, slices of a very good time, and a dress code of whatever you walked in wearing.

The sign out front reads "pastry well done," which is essentially what Bien Cuit means and also a fair warning about their croissants. This French bakery in Cobble Hill turns out deeply caramelized pastries so symmetrical and architecturally precise they look almost too deliberate to eat. Eater put them on its best croissants in NYC list. Drier than the butter-pools-on-your-fingers school, but the lamination is immaculate. Additional locations in Crown Heights and Grand Central.

Bloom Carneros is the restaurant inside Kivelstadt Cellars' Sonoma winegarten, where the kitchen leans into carnivalesque comfort food designed to make biodynamic Charbono look like an obvious pairing. A vegetarian pot pie fried as a hand pie and a Caesar dressed with smoked Brussels sprouts and pomegranate seeds suggest the chef is having a good time. There's a kids' play area, so the sommelier crowd shares the lawn with actual families. The San Francisco Chronicle named it among the best restaurants in Sonoma County.

Blossom is a Cantonese-leaning dinner room at the Cosmopolitan-adjacent end of the Strip, built around traditional Chinese design principles, which means mirrored leaf walls and chandeliers shaped like dew drops. The lighting is soft enough to forgive anything you do to your chopsticks. Expect a proper sit-down dinner with a tableside Beijing duck carving, so dress like someone who plans to be photographed near crystal.

The ferry to Sausalito leaves from Fisherman's Wharf, which means you start in the loudest possible version of San Francisco before the engine kicks in and the city quietly peels away behind you. Blue & Gold Fleet is the bay's main ferry operator, running routes to Sausalito, Oracle Park, and Chase Center. The crossing itself is the point: Coit Tower shrinking, the water coming up over the bow, the skyline doing its slow goodbye.

The ceiling is scattered with tiny lights, so dinner at this jazz supper club feels like eating under the stars, which makes the Afro-Caribbean small plates feel even more theatrical than they already are. JJ Johnson, a James Beard Award winner, brought the menu to life in 2024, leaning into jerk chicken and salmon croquettes while live jazz fills the room. Reservations come with a ticket, so book ahead.

Bodega is a North Beach wine bar that spends most of the week doing wine bar things and then, on Saturdays at 9am, abruptly becomes a burrito stand. The breakfast burrito comes stuffed with chorizo, eggs, avocado, and potatoes crisp enough to hear across Washington Square, and it sells out, so the alarm clock is part of the order. Sleep through it and their Cow Hollow sister bar, Celeste, serves the same thing on Sundays.

A sweet shop and vegetarian Indian lunch counter on Hillcroft, Bombay Sweets keeps more than a hundred varieties of mithai behind the glass. Jalebi, barfi, gulab jamun soaked in rosy syrup, the kind of selection that turns a quick stop into a longer conversation with whoever's working the counter. Grab a box to go or eat in; either way, the sweets are the reason.

Bottled Blonde is a three-story rooftop bar and kitchen on the Strip, with more than 40 televisions and a view of the Bellagio fountains, so you can watch the game and the water at the same time. Weekend brunch runs 11 to 3, with bottomless mimosas, spicy bloody marys, and fried chicken and waffles for the hours when a salad would be a bold choice. Eater has it on its list of Las Vegas brunches.

A retrofitted house in Madrona with a porch and backyard patio that gets claimed fast once the sun appears. Bottlehouse is a neighborhood wine bar with a range that runs from Bolivian syrah to Walla Walla grenache blanc, plus wine cocktails that pair well with whatever the resident cheesemonger is recommending. It feels more like a very well-stocked friend's place than a formal tasting room, which is exactly the point.

This Mission counter spot is built around the breakfast burrito, a foil-wrapped brick with tater tots folded in alongside the eggs. There are five versions, and the Tia Maria swaps in fried plantains and queso fresco, which is a lot of sweetness for a burrito and somehow gets away with it. Order at the window, eat among the Mexican folk art, or carry it up toward Dolores Park and unwrap it on the grass.

Old-timey bulbs hang over leather booths inside this rock-and-roll burger joint, where the menu leans loud and the vibe leans louder. The Johnny Cash Burger piles on bacon, crisp onions, peppers, and barbecue sauce in a way that manages to feel both retro and inevitable. A lamb burger with goat cheese is there for anyone who wants to go funkier. Most people pair either with a cold beer from the full bar.

Bronze Cafe is a casual northwest Las Vegas sandwich counter in a suite off Buffalo Drive, where the menu splits itself almost evenly between meat and vegetarian. The signature order is a towering stack of bacon, bacon jam, turkey and avocado on toasted ciabatta, and the vegan version is a near-twin with coconut bacon jam and Tofurky. Eater has put it on its list of the best Vegas sandwiches, and the whole thing runs counter-service casual.

Perched at Top of the Rock with a patio that faces the lake just as the sun drops behind the Ozark hills, this casual bar and grill makes it easy to stay for one more round. The kitchen borrows a few dishes from the fancier Osage Restaurant next door, so the food punches above the dive-bar vibe. Go at golden hour, find a seat with water in front of you, and order the bourbon Osage Smash while you still can.

Burma Place is a casual Burmese restaurant in Rancho Bernardo where the salads are the main event, which is a sentence you rarely get to write about a strip-mall dinner. The tea leaf version tosses crisp romaine in a fermented green tea dressing with crunchy fried peas and nuts. The samosa salad is for heavier appetites, and most salads run under $17, so wear whatever you wore to work. Eater counts it among San Diego's best salads.

Anthony Bourdain ate here, which tells you more than a star ever could. Burns Original BBQ is an old-school Houston institution serving smoked ribs, links, chicken, and sides in portions sized for people who skipped lunch and possibly breakfast. The 10-pound baked potato feeds 15, which is either absurd or inspired depending on your group. Multiple locations around the city, and somehow you can also grab it at Kroger.

This barbecue joint grew out of a small operation in Acres Homes and now has several locations, this Katy one included. Anthony Bourdain gave it his approval, and the menu is built for groups, with a baked potato the size of a toddler that feeds fifteen and a rib-and-link special named for the Astros. Chicken is there for anyone dodging red meat, and Kroger sells the stuff too, in case a drive feels like too much commitment.

This Pearland outpost of a Houston barbecue mini-empire started small in Acres Homes and picked up an Anthony Bourdain nod on the way to four locations. It's a casual counter-service joint where the baked potato can weigh ten pounds and feed fifteen, which is less a side dish than a group project. Ribs, links, and chicken round out the plates, and you can also buy the stuff at Kroger, in case a drive feels like too much.

Burt's Place is a deep-dish pizzeria in Morton Grove, and the pie is the whole personality. It comes in a pan with a crust caramelized dark around the edges, the style the late Burt Katz also handed down to Pequod's. Anthony Bourdain once pointed a camera at it and got very reverent. The advice is to order ahead, since a pizza this committed to being slow doesn't care about your schedule.

Butcher & Thief is a steakhouse in a Sunset Road strip-mall suite, where the usual surf-and-turf script gets a few liberties. The chops are cut in-house, and the menu also runs to peanut-butter-crusted bacon, cheesesteak egg rolls, and sour cream and onion bubble bread. It's a steakhouse that remembered dinner is allowed to be fun, so expect a dressy-casual room and a check that behaves like a Vegas steakhouse check.

Byrek are coils of flaky pastry from Albania, and they're the reason to find this small, stylish cafe near Seattle University. The menu covers baguette sandwiches, fries, and salads well enough, but the byrek, stuffed with leeks and feta or beef and onions, arrive with housemade yogurt for dipping and upstage everything else. Save room for baklava or a slice of cake from the counter display.

The patio tables along Mill Street are the most contested real estate in Aspen come summer, which tells you something about how long Cache Cache has held its ground. It's an old-school institution serving traditional French-American fine dining, the kind of room where regulars settle into the bar before you've even found your coat check. The frisée salad with duck egg and bacon has its own fan club, and the escargot in Bourguignon butter is exactly what it should be.

Cafe Isabella is a counter-service Mexican cafe on Taylor Street where the griddled breakfast burrito does most of the talking. Carnitas, eggs, and cheese come tightly wrapped, and adding avocado and sour cream is the polite way to make it heavier. A few sidewalk tables exist for the impatient, though the thing travels fine, which suits the Nob Hill locals who climb down from their Victorians still recovering from the night before.

Crawfish cooked wok-style, the way you'd handle crab or lobster in Chinese cuisine, so every crevice gets a proper coating of spice and oil. This Cajun-Asian boil spot in southwest Houston does mudbugs in flavors like Thai Basil or a butter-garlic-citrus house special, and the heat scale runs up to something called Cray Cray, which should tell you all you need to know about who's ordering it.

Renzo Piano gave this natural history museum and aquarium a living roof planted entirely in native California greenery, which feels appropriate for a place that houses a rainforest, a planetarium, and a penguin colony under one roof. Kids can sleep over beneath the stars and wake up next to the fish tanks. Adults get Thursday NightLife events with DJ sets and full run of the exhibits, which is a more interesting Thursday than most.

A chef's counter anchors the dining room at this modern American restaurant on Camperdown Plaza, where the team trained at places like the French Laundry runs an animated small-plates operation and still finds time to stop by every table. When the weather cooperates, the room spills outside onto one of Greenville's prettier public squares. The lamb loin is the kind of dish that makes you rethink ordering small plates only.

This Hyde Park counter-service spot does meatless versions of the comfort food you'd normally eat in a parked car, burgers first among them. The Big Mik takes obvious cues from a certain drive-thru classic, double patties and special sauce included, with the choice of dairy or vegan cheese. It's casual and inexpensive, the kind of place where ordering ahead online is the smart move. Eater has it on its Chicago burger list.