The Best Places in the United States

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.

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.