The Best Places in the United States

Candlelight, tchotchkes everywhere, and a cocktail menu that rotates quarterly and takes no obvious shortcuts, The Sitting Room is a cocktail bar in Queen Anne that commits fully to the bit. The drinks lean elaborate, banana-infused tequila or coconut-washed calvados kind of elaborate, and the low- and no-ABV options get the same treatment. The staff keep things chatty rather than precious, which helps when you're genuinely unsure what horchata foam is doing in your glass.

The Skip is a cocktail bar in the Belt alleyway, where the walls open up in summer and the frozen drinks come out to meet the breeze. Winter closes the patio and swaps in tiki-style cocktails and holiday specials built on nostalgia. Matty Matheson designed the menu, though anyone wanting a proper sit-down meal gets pointed to the bigger sibling, Standby, a few feet away. Expect downtown energy and a festival mood in any season.

Rapid City has a croissant problem, and this downtown sourdough bakery in a historic brick building is largely responsible. The self-taught baker behind it started as a cottage operation before demand forced the move to a proper storefront. The pull is sourdough loaves and sourdough croissants, made by someone who openly credits YouTube as his culinary school, which is either refreshing or unsettling depending on how you feel about credentials.

A counter-service taqueria in Summerlin where the tacos run about four bucks and the line forms before anyone's decided what they want. Takeout is the realistic plan, though the tables have little cupholders that swing out from the corners, which feels like a lot of engineering for a michelada. The al pastor comes off the spit with pineapple, and the mushroom taco is for anyone who came with a skeptical friend.

A small wine bar in Lawrenceville with a simple bistro feel, The Vandal runs a rotating menu built around Pennsylvania ingredients, so what's on the plate depends on when you show up. The natural wine list skews interesting, and the cocktails hold their own alongside it. It handles the full range of occasions, date night through solo Tuesday dinner, without seeming to try particularly hard at any of them.

A casual soup-and-salad counter on Water Street that hides an unexpectedly pan-Asian menu behind a straightforward downtown cafe face. The ramen comes with jalapeño heat and a choice of vegan or bone broth, rice bowls run with house teriyaki and toppings like unagi or kimchi, and fresh smoothies offer a gentle reprieve from the chile-everything intensity of the surrounding city.

Unlimited Variety Coffee for a few dollars is the detail that tells you everything you need to know about Three Decker Diner, a Greenpoint all-day diner that's been around forever and recently got a quiet upgrade in both kitchen and ownership. Pancakes, waffles, and breakfast burritos run around ten dollars at any hour, which in New York feels slightly miraculous.

Wood paneling, a shuffleboard table, and a slogan that reads "Cold Drinks, Warm Friends" tell you everything upfront: Tina's is a 21-plus dive bar designed for lingering. The menu is short enough to read in one breath, and the smashburger has a way of making everything else on it seem beside the point. Tuesdays bring a special menu for guests 60 and older, which is either very charming or a gentle reminder that no one outgrows a good bar.

Two Latino chefs who spent careers in Mediterranean kitchens run this casual East Bay restaurant, which wanders freely across Persian, Iraqi, and Afghani cooking without planting a flag in any one of them. The menu splits into grilled and sautéed plates, both arriving with vivid yellow basmati rice. The San Francisco Chronicle named it among the Bay Area's top Middle Eastern spots, which tracks for a room this unpretentious doing food this specific.

Rick Bayless runs a small empire in Chicago, and somehow his airport torta counter at O'Hare landed on the New York Times list of the city's 25 best restaurants. It's a quick-service spot, so expect a counter and a tray, but the choriqueso, a griddled sandwich of molten Jack cheese, chorizo, and avocado, audibly crunches when you bite it. The tortilla soup is the same recipe they pour at Frontera Grill. Boarding group 7 has never been so bearable.

Trina's is a pinup-flavored Somerville dive where the corners are dark, the beer runs from local IPAs to buckets of High Life Ponies, and the staff has been pouring so long they're basically load-bearing. Bartenders from other bars turn up for the Monday industry brunch, which is the closest thing to a seal of approval a bar can get. There's mac and cheese with a buttery Ritz crust and a mango margarita with a BBQ-spiced rim.

The hot dog shop that's been feeding sand-dusted beachgoers at Wrightsville for decades, Trolly Stop runs a tight menu: pick your dog (beef-pork Southern, all-beef Northern, smoked turkey, veggie, smoked pork sausage) then pick your toppings. The Carolina dog, dressed with deli mustard, chili, and coleslaw, is the low-key litmus test for first-timers. The Surfer and the Mexican dogs are there for anyone who wants cheese and bacon doing most of the heavy lifting.

Disco balls overhead and frozen tiki drinks on the menu: Navy Yard's 40-seat cocktail bar came out of a wine bar conversion and has been making noise ever since. The team behind it includes alumni of Silver Lyan, and the house Sazerac riffs on an everything bagel with sesame aquavit and chive gomme, which sounds like a dare and sells out anyway. A neighborhood crowd fills the small room fast on weeknights.

The coyota is a Sonoran pastry that looks roughly like a flying saucer, which is a good start. Tutuli bakes them in fillings like cajeta, hibiscus, and guava, and the flavors open up properly once you toast one. They're somewhere between a cookie and an empanada, and they turn up at coffee shops around the Bay. The San Francisco Chronicle named Tutuli among the best bakeries in the Bay Area.

The chef spent years learning to speak, read, and write Japanese before opening this fine dining restaurant on South Lamar, and that rigor still shapes every plate. Uchi's thing is raw or lightly cooked seafood paired with unexpected partners, citrus, fruit, even goat cheese, and it helped build Austin into a serious destination for Japanese-influenced cooking. The New York Times named it among Austin's best restaurants.

South Indian vegetarian cooking is thin on the ground in Pittsburgh, which makes this casual strip-mall cafe in Monroeville worth the drive from downtown. The dosa menu runs to over twenty varieties, and the curries pair with bread that arrives at the table looking genuinely inflated. Red leather booths, big plates, and a crowd that tends to arrive in groups and order as many things as the table can hold.

The aquarium smoker in the window tells you what kind of place this is before you get through the door. Uncle John's is a South Side Chicago BBQ shop running one of the city's rarest traditions: pork hot links and rib tips cooked in a plexiglass box, fire controlled by hose, a technique tracing back to Delta pitmasters who came north during the Great Migration. The New York Times named it among Chicago's 25 best restaurants.

Underdogs Tres is a casual Mexican spot in the Inner Sunset that moonlights as a sports bar, which explains why the margaritas keep arriving for people hoarse from yelling at a television. The menu sticks to tacos, burritos, and quesadillas, with one standout: a crispy tortilla tucked inside a soft one, buried in guacamole. Come in whatever you wore to work, and maybe bring a throat lozenge.

Uptown Sporting Club is a sports bar with a giant LED wall and a cocktail list that never got the memo about sports bars. The Caprese Martini runs on tomato-infused vodka, and the brûléed pineapple in the Out of Office suggests someone in the back owns a blowtorch for reasons beyond the game. Wagyu smashburgers and Korean fried chicken cover the food, and DJs take over once the final whistle blows.

Valley Tavern is a neighborhood sports bar in Noe Valley with a back patio split into tiers, each with its own picnic table and TV, so every group gets the feel of a private box. When San Francisco fog ends the outdoor plan, the freshly updated interior has U-shaped booths angled toward big screens, which makes watching a game feel a bit like sitting in a very casual theater. It's on the Infatuation's list of sports bars.

A coffee shop with a rotating seasonal menu and a strong espresso program, Valor leans into drinks that split the difference, literally and figuratively. The Middle Child straddles espresso and drip coffee in a way that sounds like a therapy session but drinks better than it has any right to. Regulars track the seasonal drops the way others follow drops of a different kind, cycling back each fall and winter for whatever the team has conjured next.

The windows project a fake thunderstorm over the Eiffel Tower, which tells you everything about the vibe here. This French-ish cocktail lounge at Paris Las Vegas leans hard into gothic Baroque camp, all purple booths and tiered birdcages of figs and cheese, with lychee martinis keeping the Housewives faithful cheerful through the manufactured lightning. It's Lisa Vanderpump's name on the door, and no one inside is pretending otherwise.

Turkish coffee prepared in a cezve sits alongside shaken espresso and whatever baklava-flavored latte the team dreamed up this week. It's a small, cozy coffee shop in the King William area, with proper work tables and living-room chairs depending on your agenda. They rotate through local and national bakers for pastries, and tea drinkers have a London Fog waiting for them. The kind of neighborhood spot that pulls you in for twenty minutes and keeps you for two hours.

A square pizza shop in a far-west Miami strip where the pies split the difference between Detroit, Sicilian, and grandma-style. The chef came up in fine dining before the pandemic sent him home, and Miami flavors crept into the toppings: Cuban mojo pork, Colombian hot dog vibes, summer peaches. The New York Times put it on their short list of Miami restaurants right now, which, for a slice shop this far from South Beach, is the kind of attention that fills a parking lot.

Duck is the whole point here, a Little Saigon restaurant in San Jose where the menu circles around one bird and doesn't apologize for it. The duck salad is the thing to order: a towering pile of poached slices, shredded cabbage, banana blossom, fried shallots, and rau răm, all pulled together with a ginger-spiked fish sauce vinaigrette. Most people take it to go, which tells you something about the vibe. The San Francisco Chronicle named it among the top Vietnamese spots in the Bay Area.

Voi Cà Phê is a takeout counter in Georgetown that treats Vietnamese coffee like a serious subject, sourcing single-origin beans from Vietnam and brewing them through a phin or an espresso machine. The cà phê sữa đá is the classic, but the pho spice latte, with star anise and coriander seed, is what a pumpkin spice latte would be if it had a passport. There are banh mi too, so one stop covers breakfast and lunch.

An old poi factory turned roadside Hawaiian food spot on the Windward Coast, run by native Hawaiians who have been feeding people here for a while. The kanaka nui plate arrives loaded with pretty much everything the kitchen makes, and the warm kulolo with haupia ice cream is the kind of dessert that ends the conversation. Pull off Kamehameha Highway and eat outside; the atmosphere does a lot of the heavy lifting.

The red and green sign is easy to miss from San Pablo Ave, but regulars know to look. This Lebanese diner has a U-shaped counter and an endearing no-fuss quality that suits heavily spiced shawarma and kafta, served on combo plates with rice, garlic sauce, tzatziki, and brothy lentil soup. The baba ghanoush is flame-roasted and worth the detour. Picnic tables out front if you prefer sky to ceiling.

Washed Up is a small coffee shop on Kercheval, and the pastry case is the plot twist: Wednesday through Friday it's stocked with scones, cookies, and muffins from Sister Pie, a few doors down. The drinks run to espresso tonics, matcha, chai, and hojicha, with beans from a rotating cast of roasters. Eater put it on its list of Detroit's best coffee shops, and the neighborhood seems to have taken the hint.

Illustrated cartoon versions of the kitchen's own ingredients cover the walls at this Isaan Thai spot in Oakland's Dimond District, which sets the tone nicely. The khao soi has a creamy, spicy broth that earns its keep, and the nam khao, fried rice with fermented pork and sharp slivers of ginger, has a crunch you can hear across the table. Grilled salmon wrapped in coconut leaves arrives with a sauce that manages sour, sweet, and spicy all at once without negotiating.

A crimson-and-white house wedged between Druid City and West Tuscaloosa, this breakfast spot greets you at the door with a cardboard Nick Saban and doesn't let up from there. Bear Bryant's usual corner table still has his bust, houndstooth fedora and all. The biscuits are soft and buttery, and the meat-and-three combos keep regulars coming back past the decor. Alabama football isn't a theme here so much as the whole atmosphere.

The smoke smell hits before you open the door, which is a good sign. This Petaluma counter-service spot turns out flame-roasted pollo asado marinated in adobo, with a cold salsa bar that does a lot of work, especially a black salsa built from scorched chiles. The San Francisco Chronicle named it one of the Bay Area's best Mexican restaurants. Bring cash for a four-piece plate and leave room for the handmade corn tortillas.