The Best Places in the United States

A three-story spa inside the famous chocolate-themed resort, where the treatment menu leans hard into the theme: whipped cocoa baths, chocolate bean polishes, and presumably staff who've made peace with the irony. Beyond the cocoa conceit, the 30,000-square-foot facility covers the full range, with soaking tubs, steam rooms, saunas, an inhalation room, hydrotherapy showers, and a pool. It holds a Forbes Four Star rating.

A spa where the treatments are essentially a love letter to the cliffs outside: coastal sage scrubs, pine exfoliation, and seawater hydrotherapy baths that borrow directly from the landscape. The champagne facial, using yeast extracts, sounds like a premise from a sketch show but draws a loyal following. A Forbes Four Star property, and the kind of afternoon that makes driving back to reality feel genuinely inconvenient.

A kaiseki counter in the East Village built around a single idea: moonlight. The name translates to "moon viewing," and the room takes that literally, with illuminated ceramic shelves and mirrored panels catching every gleam. The seasonal tasting menu moves with the kind of quiet confidence that doesn't need to announce itself, and the sake list, ordered à la carte, is the right move. Tsukimi holds a Michelin star.

Uberto is a tasting-menu dining room on a resort's rolling green hills, about an hour from Atlanta, open for dinner on Fridays and Saturdays only. It holds a Michelin star. The kitchen leans on farm-grown ingredients, with plenty of fermenting and preserving going on behind the scenes. Expect a special-occasion budget, a drive that doubles as a minor expedition, and a reservation you'll want to secure well ahead.

A kaiseki tasting counter in a San Mateo strip mall, which is either a great joke or a great lesson in not reading the room by its cover. Chef Katsuhiro Yamasaki runs the kitchen solo, his wife runs the dining room, and together they turn out a monthly changing menu that marries classical Japanese technique with California produce. The place holds a Michelin star, and the food makes that feel like a matter of fact.

A mosaic-tiled lap pool and changing rooms lined with white stone set the Greek-inspired tone at this hotel spa on the fourth floor of the Waldorf Astoria. Massages and facials are the bread and butter, but the signature two-hour treatment layers a coffee-and-lemon scrub, a clay wrap, and a full-body massage into something that reads less like a spa menu and more like a Roman senator's afternoon. Forbes Four Star.

Verzênay is a Lincoln Park patisserie where the French classics arrive in textbook form: chocolate eclairs, crackly kouign-amann, a sourdough baguette that's often still warm. It also keeps an apple pie and a mango passionfruit cheesecake in the case, which the French would presumably allow. The Chicago macaron, filled with caramel, popcorn, and cheddar, is a Garrett Popcorn tribute in cookie form. Saturday mornings call for an early alarm.

The open kitchen glows at the center of the room like the whole thing was staged, which it sort of was, by Daniel Rose. This is a proper French fine dining restaurant, unapologetically so, with a Michelin star and a menu that runs to quenelles and sweetbreads without a trace of irony. The crowd is worth watching but so is the food, which is classical enough to feel like a lesson and personal enough to feel alive.

Dan Barber's Greenwich Village dining room runs a single fixed menu, served family-style, that arrives at the table with almost no interference from the kitchen. Vegetables from Blue Hill at Stone Barns upstate carry most of the meal, with grains and proteins woven in to support rather than star. It holds a Michelin star, and the room has the kind of quiet confidence that comes from a team that has stopped needing to prove anything.

The menu changes entirely with each new theme, so you might land on ancient Rome or a meticulous recreation of Escoffier's Paris. It's a tasting-menu restaurant in Fulton Market where the conceit is the whole point, and the kitchen takes it seriously enough that it works. A Michelin star lives here. Come curious, leave wondering what the next theme could possibly be.

A glass-walled wine cellar you can see right through the dining room sets the tone at this elegant Saratoga fine dining destination, which holds a Michelin star. The kitchen runs on California's seasons, offered as a tasting menu or a multicourse prix fixe, and the chef navigates meat, seafood, and vegetables with the same easy confidence. The room is quiet and unhurried, the kind where the sommelier actually knows the cellar cold.

The Parker House rolls come out warm before anything else, which sets the tone for what this is: a proper Michelin-starred New American restaurant that quietly ignores its roadside-tavern name. The prix fixe menu leans on impeccable sourcing, and the wine list runs deep into Burgundy and Bordeaux. The room is polished, the service graceful, and the crowd tends to arrive having already made a reservation months in advance.

Berlu is a Vietnamese bakery on SE Belmont where everything is gluten- and dairy-free, and the star is a springy green pandan sponge cake so beloved that its portrait decorates the bathroom walls. You can also buy socks printed with its face. The chef won a James Beard Award for Best Chef: Northwest and Pacific, which tells you he can cook, though the line is mostly there for the cake with the merch.

Two large trees grow inside the restaurant, peacock sconces line the walls, and a black lacquered cabinet of curiosities anchors the lobby, so you get the idea immediately. This hotel near the Flatiron pairs a historic mansion with a 24-story tower, both dressed in Martin Brudnizki's maximalist interiors. The World's 50 Best Hotels list ranks it, and Michelin awarded it 2 Keys. Bring a high tolerance for splendor.

A private corridor connects the hotel directly to the Prudential Center, which in a Boston February is less a perk and more a lifeline. The Mandarin Oriental is a luxury hotel in Back Bay, its lobby built around local granite, feng shui principles, and a long gas fireplace that earns its keep most of the year. It holds a Forbes Five Star and a Michelin Key, and the staff seem to know the difference between attentive and hovering.

Travis Lett, who put Gjelina on the map, runs this izakaya on Abbot Kinney with a partner. The room reads warm despite the cool-kid address, and the kitchen leans hard into vegetables, with that section of the menu running longer than most places' entire offerings. The drinks pull as much weight as the food. Named a James Beard Best New Restaurant Semifinalist and on the New York Times Restaurant List, it's the kind of spot where even the clam ramen feels like a considered argument.

A blown-glass chandelier hangs over the bar at this contemporary French fine dining room tucked into one of Midtown's newer towers, and the soaring ceilings and warm tones make the room feel less corporate than the address suggests. Daniel Boulud and his team steer the menu toward seafood and vegetables with global touches throughout. The whole thing holds a Michelin star, which fits the quietly serious crowd that fills it on a weeknight.

Rootstalk is a contemporary restaurant in a refurbished Victorian on Breckenridge's Main Street, the sort of house where you half expect to be asked to wipe your boots, though the plates inside are far more composed than the exterior suggests. The chef holds a James Beard Award for Best Chef: Mountain, and there's a chef's counter tasting menu for anyone who'd rather be narrated to than order.

One of NoMad's tallest towers, designed by Rafael Viñoly, gives every room a view that slides from the Empire State Building down to the Statue of Liberty. This Ritz-Carlton plays it contemporary rather than fusty, and the interiors manage to please both the old-guard luxury crowd and guests who know their architects. José Andrés runs the culinary side, with a mezze restaurant and a Spanish-Japanese hybrid on the floors below. A Michelin Key and Forbes Four Star.

The gilded dining room inside the Wynn was designed to stop conversation mid-sentence, and the food takes the same approach. Wing Lei is a fine dining room built around Cantonese, Sichuan, and Shanghainese cooking, and it holds a Forbes Five Star, a distinction no other Chinese restaurant in North America can claim. The Peking duck arrives on a custom cart and gets carved tableside, which is exactly as theatrical as it sounds.

A red mirrored hallway leads you down into this speakeasy-style cocktail lounge beneath a north Scottsdale restaurant, which is exactly the kind of entrance that makes people feel they've earned their drink. Inside, gold ceilings, red velvet drapes, and live music set a mood that commits fully to the bit. The cocktails lean sweet-and-savory strange, and small bites keep the evening going. Phoenix New Times named it Best Bar in 2025.

Twelve acres of canyon gardens in the middle of Los Angeles, with a swan lake at the entrance that no one can resist photographing. This is a hotel that runs on discretion, the opposite of see-and-be-seen, where the saltwater pool still has a genuine deep end and the rooms have outdoor fireplaces. The bar has been a quiet local haunt for years, and The Restaurant has drawn fresh attention since a French Laundry alum took the kitchen. It holds a spot on the World's 50 Best Hotels.

A muffuletta reimagined as a rice-noodle dish tells you pretty much everything about what Kevin Tien is doing at this modern Vietnamese restaurant in Penn Quarter. His Louisiana upbringing and Vietnamese heritage push and pull at each other in ways that somehow feel inevitable rather than forced. Pastry chef Susan Bae won North America's Best Pastry Chef Award, and her desserts make seaweed and green curry sound like obvious choices. It landed at #24 on North America's 50 Best Restaurants.

A cocktail bar that calls itself a nerdy cocktail bar, a natural wine bar, and your favorite dive bar, and then has the audacity to be all three. The Old Bay Martini landed it on Esquire's radar and the Spirited Awards named it the top U.S. cocktail bar, but the room itself is the tell: hot dogs share menu space with wine you've never heard of, and nobody in here seems to think that's unusual.

A polished Art Deco dining room on a prime Upper East Side corner sets the register at Café Boulud: linen-and-crystal fine dining, the kind where the service anticipates rather than intrudes. The kitchen, which holds a Michelin star, works from classical French foundations and bends toward seasonal and global ideas without losing the thread. The wine list leans French and the tarte Tatin arrives as though it had something to prove.

Herbs & Rye is an off-Strip cocktail bar dressed as a steakhouse, all brick walls and red velvet wallpaper, with bartenders in black tie who seem unaware the buffet era ended. The menu is sorted by period, so a pisco sour comes from the Golden Age and a martinez from the Gothic one. It keeps pouring until 3am, which helps, since dinner reservations book up weeks out.

The fried chicken sandwich at a cocktail bar is either a cry for help or a statement of intent, and at Service Bar it's the latter. This relaxed U Street neighborhood bar keeps the classics balanced and the housemade drinks genuinely inventive, pulling from ingredients most menus wouldn't dare touch. The Spirited Awards named it U.S. Bartender of the Year in 2025, and North America's 50 Best Bars has it at number 39.

Polished wood, tattooed bartenders, and leather aprons as far as the eye can see. Bar Leather Apron is a serious cocktail bar tucked into Fort Street Mall, and it won the James Beard Award for Outstanding Bar in 2023, which is the kind of thing that makes sense once you sit down. The menu leans on local, seasonal ingredients, so the drinks read like a farmers market with a liquor license. Go slow; this isn't a round-of-shots situation.

Ana Castro grew up eating mariscos in Mexico City and now makes them with Gulf Coast shrimp, crab, and fish in a Bywater dining room tiled in pastel pink with terracotta lattice walls. The seafood-driven Mexican menu comes with a glossary on the back, which tells you this is not a Tex-Mex situation. It landed on North America's 50 Best Restaurants list and holds a Michelin Bib Gourmand, and Castro is a James Beard nominee.

Stone crab claws and bone marrow vinaigrette on a classic steakhouse menu is a pretty good summary of what Little River is doing right now. Sunny's leans into the old-meets-new Florida aesthetic hard, and the room hums with a crowd that dressed for it. The steaks come in shareable or individual cuts, the sides include russet potatoes fried in chicken schmaltz, and the martini program landed on Esquire's national list. The New York Times put it on their Restaurant List for 2025.

Twin curved staircases and chandelier-lit rooms that read more like a private club greet you at this Forbes Five Star hotel in Buckhead. Macassar ebony beds, white marble bathrooms, and Juliette balconies are standard; the Empire Suite runs to 3,000 square feet with its own kitchen and gym. The resident restaurant displays original Picassos. Butler service handles the unpacking, because apparently that's a thing you can outsource.

The line forms before the counter opens, and it moves through a small, no-frills East Austin wine bar and restaurant where the monthly menu rotates by European region, France and Italy doing the heavy lifting. Homemade pasta anchors most visits, soft serve closes them. The team took home a James Beard Award for Outstanding Beverage, and Food & Wine named it Restaurant of the Year. Order at the counter, then fight for patio shade.

Lipstick-red banquettes, dark wood, and linen-draped tables so close together that you'll know your neighbor's business by dessert. This old-school Upper East Side bistro ran for decades, went dark, and came roaring back under the chefs behind Balthazar, this time with a prix-fixe menu of reverent French classics. It landed on North America's 50 Best Restaurants and took a James Beard Award for Outstanding Restaurateur in 2025. The frogs' legs got a shout from the Times.

The long wooden bar came out of a Pennsylvania mining-town dance hall and has been anchoring this Smith Street cocktail bar ever since. Victorian paneling, a tin ceiling, and a curtained parlor with a fireplace in the back make the whole room feel like someone's very well-stocked study. The cocktails are precise and the eponymous Clover Club is on the menu, naturally. The kind of place that makes Brooklyn feel older than it is.

Phila Lorn calls it a noodle house, which undersells the ambition considerably. The menu moves through Cambodian cooking, bright sour salads, curries, and cold noodles without much concern for borders, which is the whole point. It's a BYO, so walk in with a bottle under your arm and the cozy dining room feels less like a restaurant than someone's very talented friend's house. Lorn won the 2025 James Beard Emerging Chef award, and the room fills up accordingly.

A chain-link curtain separates the Salamander hotel lobby from Kwame Onwuachi's Afro-Caribbean restaurant, which pulls from his Nigerian, Jamaican, Trinidadian, and Creole roots. The menu is built for sharing, with hoe crab served in the shell alongside plantain cakes, and a crispy lamb bowl that nods to Ben's Chili Bowl. It landed on North America's 50 Best Restaurants list, and the room fills like it knows.

The rooftop draws Adams Morgan brunch-seekers, but the real reason to come is Masako Morishita's Japanese comfort food, which won her a 2024 James Beard Award for Emerging Chef. This neighborhood restaurant has long been a sushi standby, though the menu has drifted into more interesting territory: edamame dumplings with Parmesan, fried mochi in dashi, a shrimp-katsu burger that commits fully to its own premise. The rotating specials and occasional Saturday prix fixe breakfasts keep regulars checking back.

Pink open-air cars shuttle guests around the 16 acres here, which tells you something about the register: this is a Forbes Five Star, Michelin two-key oceanfront resort that takes relaxation seriously and has the budget to prove it. Art Deco touches, a Sense spa, two pools, and private bungalows set among English-garden landscaping, all facing a south-coast beach the property calls the American Riviera. A Goop shop is on site, naturally.

A metal beaded curtain on the fourth floor of a downtown Marriott is not where you expect to find one of the country's better cocktail bars, and yet here we are. The menu arrives illustrated like a small field guide, one drawing per drink. The cocktails run from riffed classics to things you won't find elsewhere, with bar snacks serious enough to anchor a full evening. It won the Spirited Award for Best U.S. Hotel Bar in 2025, and a James Beard semifinalist nod followed.

There's no menu at Bryant's, just a bartender who asks what you're in the mood for and then makes something better than you imagined. This Milwaukee cocktail lounge has been around forever, all dark wood, velvet booths, and Rat Pack lighting that flatters everyone equally. A 2025 James Beard semifinalist for Outstanding Bar, though the room feels too cool to acknowledge it. Come dressed like you mean it.

Every evening, a butler sabres a bottle of Champagne to mark sunset, which tells you exactly what kind of resort the St. Regis Bal Harbour is. Yabu Pushelberg designed the suites, the beach is right out front, and the zigzag layout means ocean views from every room. A Forbes Five Star property, it's the sort of place where turndown service arrives with macarons and a handwritten note, and the concierges argue passionately about stone crabs.

I.M. Pei's only complete project in the Western hemisphere sits on 57th Street looking nothing like any other Four Seasons on earth, its limestone facade quarried from the same Burgundy source as the Louvre. This is a hotel that does not do understatement: standard rooms run 600 square feet, the lobby ceiling clears 33 feet, and the bathtubs fill in under a minute. Caramel Deco interiors, panoramic Midtown views, and a staff database that remembers your room-service habits from three years ago.

The 24-karat gold-plated faucets in every bathroom are either the most New York thing imaginable or the most New York thing imaginable. This grand luxury hotel sits at the southeast corner of Central Park in French Renaissance splendor, with Beaux-Arts interiors that have hosted everyone from the Beatles to Eloise. The Forbes Four Star Palm Court still serves afternoon tea, and the Champagne Bar exists, which says everything.

Named for the Thai refugee camp where chef Yia Vang was born, Vinai is a Hmong restaurant that brings a cuisine most Minneapolis diners have never properly encountered. The menu runs from Hill Tribe chicken to grilled lamb heart, and the hot sauces come from family recipes. The New York Times put it on their Restaurant List, and Bon Appétit named it among America's best new restaurants. Every dish has a story, and Vang is usually around to tell it.

Pink roses and ginger flower greet you at the door, a signature touch that signals how seriously The Langham takes the small stuff. This Forbes Four Star hotel sits on Fifth Avenue within easy reach of Midtown's big landmarks, drawing business travelers and visitors alike. "Service stylists" gather your preferences before you even arrive, handling show tickets, dinner reservations, and checkout times, so the city feels a little less like a logistics problem.

The hand-washing station at the entrance stocks Loewe soap, which tells you most of what you need to know about this Korean fried chicken restaurant. Club music bounces off vaulted ceilings while you work through a bucket of gluten-free fried chicken with consommé, banchan, and frozen yogurt soft serve to finish. Champagne is the obvious pairing, and caviar-topped nuggets are available for anyone who finds the baseline insufficiently absurd. It holds a Michelin Bib Gourmand.

The menu cites lumberjacks as inspiration, which sounds like a joke until the food arrives smelling of juniper and pickled elderberries. This is a French American neighborhood restaurant on Nicollet, where the chef works a distinctly Upper Midwestern palate, finding fall vegetables worthy of a special occasion without making the room feel like one. It won the James Beard Award for Best New Restaurant and landed on the New York Times Restaurant List. The pommes dauphine are, regulars will tell you, really just very good Tater Tots.

Bottles line every wall and stack to the ceiling on Doyers Street, which tells you what you're in for at this tiny Chinatown wine bar before you've even sat down. The team pairs a well-chosen, offbeat list with smart modern Chinese food, and the room fills fast enough that tables spill into the alley. It won the James Beard Award for Best New Restaurant in 2026, which the elbow-to-elbow crowd seems to have already known for a while.

A neighborhood restaurant on SE Belmont where French technique quietly does the heavy lifting behind food that reads as pure Pacific Northwest. The chef has cooked in Michelin-starred kitchens, and you can feel it in the restraint, the seasoning is always doing something interesting without announcing itself. A 2025 James Beard nominee for Outstanding Restaurant, and a semifinalist for its wine and beverages program. Bring time; this is a sit-and-linger kind of room.

The bronze double doors open onto something that feels more like a quietly loaded private club than a hotel lobby. Occupying the lower floors of the One57 skyscraper on Billionaires' Row, with Carnegie Hall across the street, this luxury hotel dresses its common areas as a "Study" and a "Living Room," which is either charming or a bit on the nose, depending on your mood. A Forbes Four Star property.

The adults-only serenity pool, where you float with a spicy hibiscus margarita while staring at Lanai, is the one that matters most. This Forbes Five Star resort on Maui's sunny Wailea coast is where the first season of White Lotus was filmed, so yes, you will recognize the lobby. Multiple pools, oceanview restaurants, and an outdoor gym that at least lets you feel the trade winds while you suffer. A Michelin Key holder.

No two rooms share the same design at this 88-room Tribeca luxury hotel, where hand-laid Moroccan tiles might give way to Japanese lacquerware or Italian linens depending on which door you open. Belgian designer Axel Vervoordt pulled it together into something that reads less like a hotel than a well-traveled collector's apartment. It holds a spot on the World's 50 Best Hotels and a Michelin Key, and sits a block from the Hudson with good restaurants right outside.

A rippled-wave glass exterior by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill makes this luxury hotel one of the more convincing arguments for Midtown's new Manhattan West development. Inside, Gachot Studios kept things calm and contemporary, which helps when the neighborhood outside is doing its usual impression of controlled chaos. Zou Zou's handles Eastern Mediterranean, Bar Pendry handles cocktails by firelight, and the Forbes Four Star and two Michelin Keys handle the expectations.

A chandelier made from over 15,000 Czech crystals sets the tone in the lobby, and the hotel only escalates from there. This independent luxury hotel in Uptown Houston holds a Forbes Five Star and a Michelin Key, with rooms starting at 500 square feet, marble bathrooms stocked with Acqua di Parma, Frank Stella originals on the walls, and a spa, pool, two restaurants, a cocktail bar, and a patisserie on the grounds.

Pacific-leaning flavors, from calamansi and shiso to li-hing mui, anchor the cocktail menu at this Union Square-adjacent bar that rebuilt itself after a fire and came back more focused. The drinks draw on Asian and island influences without feeling like a theme park about it. A 2026 James Beard Award winner for Outstanding Professional in Cocktail Service, and ranked on North America's 50 Best Bars list, PCH draws a crowd that takes its glass seriously but doesn't dress like it.

A curved bronze tower rising over the Mystic River, Encore Boston Harbor is a Forbes Five Star casino resort that imports the Las Vegas playbook wholesale, flowers and all. The hotel holds 16 dining and lounge venues, several tied to Boston restaurateurs, and a casino floor loaded with every slot and table game you'd expect. It's Vegas-grade spectacle without the flight, for anyone who considers that a selling point.

Art deco modernism anchors this twelve-story luxury hotel at the corner of Santa Monica and Wilshire, where Pierre-Yves Rochon's interiors move from a crystal chandelier in the lobby down to geometric gold tile on the bathroom floor. Jean-Georges Vongerichten runs the rooftop restaurant, the La Prairie Spa is the only one in Los Angeles, and a house Rolls Royce will take you wherever you need to go. It holds a Forbes Five Star.

Burnt orange banquettes and handsome tile floors set the tone at this West University Texan-Mexican restaurant, where tortillas are nixtamalized and pressed in-house and the masa program is taken seriously. The menu runs from roasted oysters with green garlic butter to a smoked pork chop buried under spicy peanut macha. The chef holds a James Beard Emerging Chef award and a Michelin Bib Gourmand, which feels about right for a neighborhood spot this quietly confident.

Thai Taco Tuesdays draw lines around the block at this family-run Sherman Oaks restaurant, where a second-generation chef holds a James Beard Award and runs a monthly omakase that books out before most people know it's open. The rest of the week it's classic Thai with a wine list that gets written about on its own terms. Warm, buzzy, and very Los Angeles in the best sense, which is to say it's completely unpretentious about being excellent.

A neighborhood restaurant in Logan Square that won a James Beard Award for Outstanding Hospitality, which tells you something before you've even sat down. The menu rotates with the seasons, so regulars show up trusting the kitchen rather than ordering from memory. The room fills fast from morning through dinner, and the bar in the adjacent space is a solid solo option. The Michelin Guide lists it as a Bib Gourmand.

The New York Public Library sits directly across the street, which sets the tone nicely for a hotel that takes its Midtown address seriously. Rooms run loft-style with modernist touches, the bar downstairs shifts from local-sourced comfort food into a low-lit speakeasy after dark, and Grand Central is a two-block walk. A Forbes Four Star property on Fifth Avenue, it handles the neighborhood's ambitions without making you feel like you wandered into a showroom.

A hillside olive grove in Rutherford that started as a Provençal restaurant and kept going until it became a Forbes Five Star resort. The 33 acres feel genuinely removed from the valley floor, and the rooms lean into the California light without apology. There's a spa, a pool, and the kind of staff-to-guest ratio that makes hot-air ballooning seem like a reasonable thing to schedule before breakfast.