The Best Places in the United States

Tableau is the Wynn's daytime restaurant, a sunlit atrium with a patio of oddly sculpted hedges, so breakfast comes with a garden party you didn't RSVP to. Expect resort prices and brunch groups dressed for photos, some of whom were clearly up all night at the club. The pancakes are lemon ricotta, and the coffee list goes well past black into mushroom territory.

Mesquite coals keep the asada lightly charred and the chorizo properly crisp at this Oakland taco truck, and the tortillas are pressed by hand, which changes the math on everything else. The Villa family runs it Tijuana-style, so each taco arrives wrapped in a paper cone with a thick scoop of guacamole. The grilled meats draw the crowd, but the fatty cabeza with salsa verde is what the regulars know to order.

A plant-based Hong Kong-style bakery open just one day a week, Tai Zhan draws on the baking culture of old-style cha chaan tengs to turn out pineapple buns, coconut cream buns, and laminated pastries made with avocado and coconut oils rather than butter. The croissants and kouign amann hold their crackle the way the real thing should. Pre-orders open mid-week; walk-ins are welcome on Saturdays, assuming you arrive before the serious shoppers do.

Tall Trees is a tiny Ferndale counter spot for breakfast and lunch, where the sandwiches arrive on focaccia or sesame-crusted semolina batards and stand tall enough to need a plan of attack. It's a forest-green, wood-toned room, so even grabbing takeout feels faintly like a spa visit. Show up at peak lunch and you'll wait with everyone else who saw the photos. It's on The Infatuation's list of Detroit's best restaurants.

Tomato nigiri, marinated and roasted until it snaps like fish, is probably the argument you'd make to a skeptic. Tane is a vegan izakaya and sushi spot in Berkeley, a sibling to San Francisco's Shizen, where the rice is taken seriously and the plant-based fills lean toward smoked beets and pickled fruit rather than an avocado-forward shrug. The crowd skews Berkeley in all the ways you'd expect, but the food is doing something more interesting than the neighborhood cliché suggests.

Filipino breakfast plates are the whole point at this Campbell bistro, where every order arrives as a tapsilog: garlic rice, over-easy eggs, and a protein on top. The fried pork hock is the one to order, a full crunchy hock that needs its soy-vinegar-chile dipping sauce to keep things honest. Mimosas come in calamansi, guava, or mango, which feels very right. The San Francisco Chronicle named it among the Bay Area's top brunch spots.

Handwritten testimonials cover the walls at this Pittsburgh smokehouse, and "a vegan was converted here" is among the more persuasive ones. The line moves slowly enough to read them all, which gives you time to decide between smoked brisket by the pound, tucked into a cheesesteak, or riding on a smashburger. The banana pudding sells out, so order it early and pretend you planned ahead.

Three stories of industrial space with a rooftop view of downtown Houston make Tejas Brewery hard to miss along Summer Street. It's a full-service beer bar where the house lagers, a Clara and a Negra, anchor the taps alongside a coffee porter. Cocktails and half-bottle wines round things out for whoever showed up not really wanting beer. Pretzel bites and street tacos keep everyone from getting ahead of themselves.

An 11-seat sushi bar in the Inner Richmond where the nigiri run thick enough to make you reconsider everything you thought you knew about portion sizes. There's no menu to study; you sit down and eat what the kitchen sends out. The hand-written notes covering the walls suggest regulars have feelings about this. A line forms well before the 6 p.m. seating, so arriving early is less a tip than a requirement.

The biang-biang noodles here get their name from the sound of dough hitting the counter, which tells you something about the kitchen's priorities. This Outer Sunset restaurant serves Shaanxi cooking, wheat-forward and spiced from the Silk Road, with lamb playing a starring role across the menu. The owner, a former photographer from Xi'an, hung the mauve walls with art and a large shot of the terracotta army, giving the room more personality than the neighborhood expects.

The triangular, window-lined room on Capitol Hill was Tamara Murphy's project from the start, built around a devotion to Pacific Northwest ingredients before that was a given on every Seattle menu. The restaurant organizes its global, seasonal cooking into Land, Earth, and Sea, and the roast pig, stewed with Manila clams and chorizo in a smoked paprika broth, has become a fixture worth planning around. The New York Times named it among Seattle's 25 best.

The Authentique is a French wine bar on Gallatin Avenue that went all in on art nouveau: Mucha paintings, embossed wallpaper, and a bar lined with bottles, like a Parisian apartment someone's romantic cousin decorated. The list leans Burgundy, picpoul, and Châteauneuf-du-Pape, with flights for the indecisive. The savory crepes are the draw, especially the raclette one, which makes a strong case for never ordering wine alone again.

The spicy fried chicken sandwich here comes dressed with apple slaw and pickles, hot enough to make you notice but not so hot you regret your choices. This casual counter-service chicken shack on Hayes Street keeps a line at lunch, though two self-serve kiosks move things along. Wings come with drum, flat, and tip still attached, which purists appreciate. Outdoor tables handle the overflow when the compact room fills up.

The Bixby is a cocktail bar tucked inside Long Point Social Club in Spring Branch, with its own entrance and not a single TV, so nobody will be asking you who's winning. The menu runs to fermentation, clarification, and house-made cordials, with a gin drink involving strawberry and kombu. Eater named it one of Houston's best new cocktail bars. Burgers, wings, and Nashville chicken nuggets keep the science project grounded.

The Back Bar's sunsets over Currituck Sound are their own argument for showing up early. This is fine dining with a Southern drawl, the kind of place where shrimp and grits comes with bay scallops and red-eye gravy, and the wine list was built by an actual sommelier. Fancy enough to mean it, relaxed enough that Duck feels like the right setting. An old-school Outer Banks institution that the locals treat accordingly.

The Boardroom is a North Beach sports bar that seems to have more screens than anywhere else in the neighborhood, yet the walls hold surfboards and skateboards instead of signed jerseys, with slushy machines standing in for a trophy case. It feels closer to a casual meet-up than a game-day shrine, so you can show up without a team allegiance. On Monday Night Football the wings drop to 50 cents each, and the honey garlic is the move.

Chimaek, the Korean pairing of fried chicken and cold beer, is the whole point at this Castro Valley spot. Wings come out of the fryer already tossed in sauce, which means the glaze sets into a proper crunch rather than going soggy. Soy garlic and gochujang are the crowd favorites, and the pickled radish on the side does real work against the sweetness. The San Francisco Chronicle named it among the Bay Area's best fried chicken spots.

A pistachio cream latte spiked with crushed spices and a hint of white chocolate is the kind of thing that turns a coffee run into a small event. This coffee shop inside the Conservatory food hall near the Galleria keeps the menu creative alongside the classics, with an ube cold foam so purple it looks like a prop. Non-caffeine options like charcoal lemonade and a hibiscus-pineapple-cinnamon tea mean no one gets left out of the fun.

Tomato aspic on the menu, and they're not sorry about it. The Colonnade is an old-school Southern supper club on Cheshire Bridge where servers have your order memorized before you sit down and the regulars fill the room like furniture. Fried gizzards share a menu with Gulf shrimp, the yeast rolls demand a second order, and the coconut icebox pie is not optional. The New York Times named it one of Atlanta's 25 best restaurants.

The Commons is an Eastside coffee shop that came with a laundromat attached, a result of the owners asking the neighborhood what it needed and taking the answer literally. You can order a matcha latte or a barbecue turkey BLT while your towels spin, and there's ice cream if the dryer runs long. Expect low prices, flip-flops, and the rare café where "I'll be here a while" is an actual plan.

Siouxsie and the Banshees memorabilia shares wall space with He-Man tiki mugs at this 1980s-themed cocktail bar on South Broadway. Lava lamps, vintage arcade games, and old music videos running on mounted TVs make it the kind of place where you stop checking the time entirely, which is probably the point. Pizza rolls show up on the snack menu, as they should. The crowd dresses accordingly, or wishes they had.

The Druid is an Irish pub in Inman Square, the kind where the bartender's accent comes standard and the Guinness gets poured with the patience of someone who has seen impatient people. Live music turns up often, and it sometimes becomes an impromptu session of fiddles and bodhrán drums in which several generations of strangers simply know the same songs. Expect pub prices, wool sweaters, and a table you will not want to leave.

A La Jolla coffee shop that looks like a Friends set that adopted a garden, with saggy wingback chairs, a shelf of tattered paperbacks, and tables that have never met each other before. You can leave your ID at the counter to borrow chess pieces or board games. There's a big patio with hummingbirds working the plants, and the turkey club travels well if you'd rather eat it at the beach.

The Fresh Pot is a Hawthorne coffee shop attached to a Powell's Books branch, which means half the room is holding a paperback they haven't bought yet. The walls double as a gallery of local paintings, the sconces have curlicues, and regulars with actual newspapers claim the good tables. It's been outlasting trendier cafés since forever, and The Infatuation lists it among Portland's best coffee shops.

You get in through Crust Pizzeria next door or a utility door out back, which is exactly the kind of entrance a plush Scottsdale speakeasy deserves. Inside, the cocktail list runs from an 1870s Martinez and the hard-to-find Clover Club to moody modern signatures built around bourbon, amaro, and pistachio orgeat. It's part of a small family of animal-named bars, and the Goose is the one that makes you forget you're in a strip mall.

The open-air food court inside Ala Moana Center does a better job representing Honolulu's eating habits than most sit-down restaurants. Musubi Cafe Iyasume turns out around 20 varieties of Spam musubi, Ahi & Vegetable draws lines for its poke bowls and cheap nigiri, and the Hokkaido-based Brug Bakery sells pillowy breads including a curry-filled doughnut that sounds wrong and tastes right. Tables spill outside, and Palme D'Or Patisserie is steps away for Japanese cakes by the slice.

This is a small neighborhood bakery and coffee shop on Georgia Ave in Summerhill, the quiet one of the three locations. Big windows pour light onto a sitting area of locals and GSU students typing away, and the room is calm enough to make you forget you live in Atlanta. The glass case is hard to resist, but the fruit tarts and savory quiches are the safe moves. Cash-light, low-stakes, and nobody's in a hurry.

A tiny neighborhood bakery in Camden where the croissant dough, made with local flour and butter, shows up in everything: cinnamon buns, kouign-amanns, loaves, and savory Danishes when the season allows. The menu rotates with what's available, so summer brings heirloom tomato Danishes and wild blueberry hand pies, while ham and cheese croissants and coriander-lemon morning buns keep things interesting the rest of the year. The New York Times named it among the top bakeries in the country.

The building is hard to miss, which helps, since The Potter's House is the kind of coffee shop that earns its following on more than convenience. Close to the Missouri State campus, it runs on a community-minded mission and a menu that goes beyond the standard order. The King, an iced latte with chocolate, peanut butter, and banana, reads like a smoothie that decided to grow up.

This is the West Village outpost of a small local coffee shop mini-chain, the cozy one, with a rotating pastry case that includes scones, cookies, and homemade Pop-Tarts. There's a little nook by the front door with a chair and a few plants, which is where you'll want to claim a seat with a book. It's more of a stay-awhile room than a grab-and-go counter, so bring something to read and nowhere to be.

You reach this tiki bar through a freezer door inside another tiki bar, which is a lot of commitment to the bit before anyone has ordered. The room is small and moody, with a vintage hi-fi spinning vinyl and a sugarcane-focused rum menu that includes a cocktail served in a pink elephant. Eater put it on its list of Houston's best new cocktail bars. Dress for a date, or at least a nice shirt.

The Royce is a wine bar and bottle shop near Grand Circus Park, where walnut shelving, globe lights, and library ladders make buying a bottle feel faintly like checking out a book. A 12-seat bar anchors the first floor, with cured meats and cheeses to keep the pours company. Over 300 bottles are for sale, plenty by the glass, and classes are on offer for anyone who'd rather understand the list than guess at it.