The Best Places in the United States

The menu at this resort seafood restaurant runs long enough that the staff are trained to talk you off the ledge, and they do it graciously. Octopus and venison share billing with the catch, which tells you the kitchen isn't playing a strict concept. The room has the warm, unhurried feel of a place where no one is in a hurry to turn the table, and the wine list matches the menu's ambition.

Twenty-two rooms tucked into a hillside above the Pacific, with a garden courtyard quiet enough to make you forget Laguna Beach has been discovered. Casa Laguna reads more like a large, well-curated bed and breakfast than a proper hotel, which is part of the appeal. The breakfast has its admirers well beyond the coast, and the spa keeps things unhurried. A Michelin Selected Hotel for travelers who'd rather feel like a houseguest than a check-in number.

Original marble fireplaces, Ford family archives, and a signed note from Walt Disney in the lobby set the tone at this historic hotel on the edge of Dearborn. Rooms are stately and well-kept, and the bar named for Ford's road-trip companions, Edison and Firestone among them, is a genuinely good excuse to stay for one more drink. It's the kind of hotel that takes its own story seriously, which turns out to be more interesting than most.

The name promises more opulence than the place delivers, which turns out to be the point. This Newport boutique hotel leans into Gilded Age references with enough ironic distance that the trompe l'oeil textures and Baroque nods feel playful rather than pompous, and designer Rachel Reider's colorful signature keeps it from tipping into costume drama. Lark Hotels, the Massachusetts group behind it, has a knack for that trick.

Hammetts sits right on Newport's waterfront, a contemporary hotel built in a maritime-industrial style that somehow avoids every anchor motif and rope-coil you'd expect. Oversized windows look out over the marina, the palette runs crisp blue and white, and an outdoor lounge spills onto the harbor. The restaurant, Giusto, does seafood and housemade pasta with a lively bar outside. The Michelin Guide has it among its selected hotels.

A block from one of Southern Maine's most beloved sandy beaches, this Colonial Revival inn in Scarborough's small waterfront district sits twenty minutes shy of Portland. Guest rooms lean hard into seaside style, with vibrant colors and vintage postcard illustrations, while the details stay modern boutique. The on-site restaurant, Shade, serves oysters and fresh seafood on a covered porch with wine on draft.

The tape decks in the rooms come loaded with mix tapes, which tells you everything about how seriously this mid-century motor lodge on Route 66 takes its restoration. Swanky beds, good bathrooms, and a Nordic spa with a sauna and hot tub round out a motel stay that has shed all the original era's mass-produced feel. The on-site General Store doubles as a restaurant, turning out breakfast and Roman-style pizza.

A reservation here is the kind of thing West Village regulars treat as a competitive sport, so walk-ins at odd hours are the move. Rita Sodi's cozy Italian neighborhood restaurant on Bleecker changes its daily specials with the seasons while holding certain signatures hostage in the best way. The bar handles a Negroni with conviction, and the room hums all night with the particular energy of a place where nobody looks like they're having a bad time.

A single-story motel given a modern-rustic overhaul, LOGE Breckenridge is the kind of ski-town stay where nobody's pretending the mountain views need a chandelier to go with them. The setup is deliberately unfussy: a renovated motel block, a café and reception next door, and a bus stop close enough that the lifts are minutes away. Keystone and Copper Mountain are a short drive if you want options. Selected by the Michelin Guide.

The parking lot is gone, replaced by outdoor lounge space, which tells you everything about how Valencia Hotel Group rethought the classic mid-century courtyard motel. This boutique hotel in the Dallas suburb of Irving keeps the bones and swaps the rest for contemporary rooms with high-end details. Two Mules Cantina handles Tex-Mex, a beer garden runs live music on weekends, and the Salt Tequila Bar is exactly what it sounds like.

Newport is a town where "summer" is a verb and the air smells of ocean breezes and someone else's money, which makes the Attwater a quietly subversive little B&B. The rooms run to bold, contemporary color in a way that reads more Brooklyn than Colonial, though the teals and navy blues threading through the decor remind you that the Atlantic is genuinely close. A tasteful antidote to the usual grand-mansion aesthetic of the neighborhood.

The steakhouse came first, with live lobsters and a piano player, and it's still downstairs in something close to its original form. The hotel wrapping around it is a different story entirely: a genuinely modern boutique property that would raise eyebrows in a hipper city and raises them even higher in Ann Arbor. Family-owned since forever, but clearly not coasting on it.

Named for a mountain village in northern Italy where the owner's family is from, this American Italian bistro on North Davidson pulls off the old-country trattoria feel without any of the kitsch. The room is warm and unhurried, the wine list is exclusively Italian and organized by region, and the menu leans rustic, with pasta and daily specials doing most of the heavy lifting. The kind of neighborhood spot that feels like it has always been there.

The carts find you before you find your seat, which is how it works at this Flushing dim sum hall. Oversized round tables, ornate chandeliers, bamboo plants, and enough shumai to reconsider your weekend plans. No menu required; most regulars never open one. Weekends get loud and frenetic in a very satisfying way, so an early arrival is less a suggestion than a survival strategy. The Michelin Guide has it listed among their selected restaurants.

The name nods to NoDa's old textile-mill past, and the denim-covered banquettes keep the joke going without overdoing it. This is a Southern comfort restaurant with exposed beams, a lively counter, and a menu that leans into fried chicken, deviled eggs, and banana pudding served in a Mason jar. Weekend brunch draws a crowd, the draft beer list is long, and the tater tots are not something to wave away.

Two outdoor terraces hang over Lake Norman, which means half the dining room has a view that does most of the menu's heavy lifting. Hello Sailor is a laid-back lakeside seafood spot where PEI mussels and oysters with a glass of wine feel like the obvious move, though the wood-burning stove inside makes winter less of a sacrifice than it sounds. A Michelin Selected pick, it's the kind of neighborhood place that works for basically every occasion without trying too hard.

Spaghett serves a prix fixe of Italian-leaning plates inside a 19th-century house, one of those places where the olive-green walls and marble tables make you sit up straighter than your order warrants. It's a sit-down dinner, so dress like someone with a reservation. The little bar room runs its own show, and the menu follows regional farms, which is why the gnocchi changes its mind with the weather.

Rotating TV screens overhead walk you through the menu before you've even sat down, which sets the tone for this welcoming Indian restaurant on the east side of Phoenix. The family behind it grew up in the restaurant business back in India and brought that instinct for hospitality with them. Dosa arrives shattering crisp, the malai kofta is deeply comforting, and the staff nudges you toward something unfamiliar if you let them.

Dale Talde's Hong Kong-style restaurant sits inside a carriage house on a sprawling Hudson Valley estate, where the dining rooms look like someone inherited very good furniture and actually kept it. The menu runs kung pao wings alongside bao stuffed with crispy shrimp and daikon, the kind of cooking that's both nostalgic and quietly restless. Dressy-casual crowd, unhurried pace, and a setting that makes Tarrytown feel like a reasonable destination.

The carved wooden panels and semi-private booths signal that this is not your average strip-mall Chinese restaurant, even if the exterior gives nothing away. A full-service Chinese dining room in Hartsdale drawing multigenerational families on weekend nights, it runs classics like garlic-pepper shrimp and slow-cooked Beijing duck with real kitchen discipline. The chef earned a James Beard semifinalist nod, and the Michelin Guide has taken notice too.

The coffered wood ceiling and vintage frames make this downtown Pasadena bistro feel like someone airlifted a Parisian side street into Southern California. The chef has no interest in deconstructing the classics, which means Burgundy snails arrive glossy with herbed butter and duck à l'orange stays duck à l'orange. Order the soufflé for dessert; it takes time and it's supposed to. The Michelin Guide has it listed.

Purple walls, tatami tables on one side, and a menu that has no interest in what everyone else is doing right now. Roxanne is a small creative restaurant in South Philly where the chef named the place after her mother and mostly just wants to cook. The dishes are few and the seasoning is confident, duck arriving with a wedge of Stilton as if that were always the plan. It probably was.

The shucker behind the raw bar is working through a daily haul from North Carolina and beyond, which tells you everything about where the priorities lie. St. Roch is an oyster bar and bistro in a converted downtown clothing store, with Louisiana roots informing the menu: barbecue shrimp and grits on weekends, beignets to close. A Michelin Selected restaurant, and a James Beard semifinalist.

The Penrose Room is the top-floor fine dining room of The Broadmoor's south tower, and it operates on old-school opulence: Caesar salad and baked Alaska arrive tableside, and a Manhattan comes by on a trolley. Jackets are required for gentlemen in the main room, so pack accordingly. The chef was a James Beard semifinalist for Best Chef: Mountain, and the sushi section is a small nod to the present century.

La Vecindad means "the neighborhood," and the room commits to it, with a painted sky on the ceiling, string lights, and papel picado hanging over a casual, sit-down taqueria in the Historic Commercial Center. The menu is built for groups, so expect a platter of 50 street tacos and a torta stacked with so many meats that it reads less like a sandwich than a roll call. Come hungry and bring friends.

Rollin Smoke is a casual barbecue counter where hickory-smoked meats share the plate with hush puppies, fried okra, and dirty rice. The outlaw burger comes stacked so high with brisket, onion strings, and slaw that eating it politely is a rumor, and a sauce bar lets you add a Carolina vinegar squirt anyway. Picnic tables and a mural of a pastoral landscape do the decorating, which seems about right.

The outdoor bar lives inside a repurposed shipping container, which tells you something about this brewpub's sensibility. Arizona Wilderness pours a rotating slate of seasonal ales alongside house classics, and the kitchen keeps pace with oversized burgers, an Arizonan hot fried chicken sandwich, and duck fat fries that have developed their own following. The vegan options are less afterthought than actual draw. Bench seating, a beer garden, and desert weather do the rest.

A converted university laundry building in a sleepy Tennessee college town is a perfectly odd home for one of the more talked-about New American restaurants in the country right now. The warehouse bones stay visible, but the room is warm and stylish, not industrial-chic as a pose. The menu leans into crowd-pleasing without apology, and the New York Times singled out the whole trout. Named for Sewanee's first female student, and the spirit carries.

Kirwan's is an Irish pub on the Wharf, all dark wood that wouldn't look out of place on a 17th-century naval vessel. Downstairs is for sports fans and conference lanyards pouring Guinness, while an upstairs mezzanine has a closed-off snug and a whiskey room tucked below for anyone who'd like their stout with fewer opinions shouted at it. Shepherd's pie and a spice bag are the order, entry-level pub prices apply.

Roman trattoria cooking in a room that manages to feel elegant without making you feel underdressed. Antica Pesa is the Brooklyn outpost of a Rome institution, and it takes the classics seriously enough to go well past the obvious ones. The wine list is long, the hospitality is warm in that old-country way, and a spot on the 50 Top Italy list for the world's best Italian restaurants suggests the room is doing something right across the river.

A few whole pies rotate under the heat lamps and slices go fast at this East Village slice shop on St. Marks, which lands at number 14 on the 50 Top Pizza Slice USA list. The model is straightforward: New York-style by the slice, cold beer, and no lingering decisions required. The dough is thin and foldable, and the topping hand is generous. More room than you'd expect for the neighborhood.

A Neapolitan-style pizza spot in central Tampa where the dough goes into a screaming-hot oven and comes out fast, blistered, and surprisingly light. The menu is short on purpose: a handful of starters, a tight selection of pies, and some desserts. Beer and wine on tap keep things casual and the bill manageable. It has landed on the 50 Top Pizza USA list, which is the sort of thing regulars probably mention while waiting for a table.

A pizzeria in San Luis Obispo where you can order your pie by the half meter or the full meter, which is a sentence that doesn't get old. Flour House does both Neapolitan and "a metro" style, the latter a tradition from the Sorrento Peninsula that arrives on a long wooden board and invites a crowd. Pasta and appetizers round out the menu, and a patio out front makes the whole thing feel like it landed here from somewhere warmer.

Neapolitan pizza in the Financial District, which sounds like a setup to a joke but works out fine. Kesté is a cozy pizza shop with a rustic dining room and outdoor tables that catch the downtown foot traffic on good days. The crust is the point: light, properly blistered, and topped without chaos. The wine and beer list is short enough that you won't agonize. Ranked 21st on 50 Top Pizza USA.

Neapolitan-style pizza on the Pacific Coast Highway, where the crust stays soft and just barely charred at the rim, the way it should. This southern Italian restaurant keeps things unfussy: good product, warm service, a room that feels festive without trying too hard. It landed at number 25 on 50 Top Pizza USA, which tracks for a place where the pizza tastes like the owner is proving a point about where they're from.

Sourdough Neapolitan pizza in a cozy Bushwick spot where the lighting is dim enough to feel intentional and the wine list is longer than the beer list, which tells you something about the room. The crust is light and genuinely digestible, as opposed to the kind that sits with you on the subway home. Ranked in the 50 Top Pizza USA, if that's the sort thing you track. The veranda is lovely until it isn't.

A seafood osteria on Sixth Avenue that also happens to be a caffè, bakery, pasta lab, and gelateria, which could easily be a mess but somehow feels like a well-run corner of northern Italy. The kitchen leans on pristine fish and vegetables, with a nod toward Japanese technique that earns its place rather than announcing itself. Raw preparations are a reason to linger, and the wine list keeps markups reasonable. Ranked 34th on 50 Top Italy's list of Italian restaurants worldwide.

Detroit-style pizza comes out of the oven as a thick, airy square with a crispy, caramelized undercarriage, and Palazzo di Pizza has quietly become one of the better places in the country to eat one. It ranked tenth on 50 Top Pizza's national slice list, which for a suburban Royal Oak shop is a notable thing. The pepperoni option, layered under the cheese and sauce in true Detroit fashion, is the move.

Roberta's slice shop in the Penn District finishes each slice after the oven, adding basil, chili oil, or honey depending on what you ordered, which sounds fussy until you see how well it works. The long communal table inside spills out to Penn Plaza and connects up to a rooftop, so the format is grab-and-go but the footprint is not. The Bee Sting, with soppressata and honey, is the one regulars seem to circle back to.

A seafood buffet at the Palms, where locals drive off the Strip and the real event is Wednesday and Thursday lobster nights. Stations stack up with bright red tails, and you work through them with melted butter and a bucket for the wreckage. Dinner runs a bit north of forty dollars, so wear something that forgives butter, and plan the rest of your day around it like a sensible person.

This is a small, family-run Northeast Chinese spot in a Chandler strip mall, where one wall is so thickly framed with press clippings that the decor doubles as a reading list. The dumplings are handmade in assorted shapes and sizes, and the soup dumplings arrive with chewy skins and scalding broth, so patience is a skill here. Order at a casual counter pace, wear whatever, and bring someone who'll split the cumin lamb.

Garden Buffet sits inside South Point, a good half hour south of the Strip, so the clientele skews toward locals who know where the prime rib is pink. It feels more like a neighborhood diner than a casino cafeteria, with servers who bring your drinks so you can stay put between shrimp runs. Six live stations cover everything from Mongolian bowls to wings tossed to order, and Eater and The Infatuation both list it among the city's best buffets.

This is a resort buffet out in Summerlin, priced in the low thirties and organized around rotating theme nights. Aloha night brings oxtail stew and a whole roasted suckling pig, while fiesta night lets you build a nacho situation that Taco Bell would recognize as kin. Because it's mostly locals, the Strip's plate-piling stampede never shows up, and you can finish with warm churros dunked in chocolate sauce.

This is a casual, family-friendly Neapolitan pizzeria in Summerlin, with timber tables and a wood-fired oven that blisters each pie in just over a minute. The dough is thin and chewy and folds a little under its toppings, so you eat it with your hands and don't apologize. There's also a pear and jalapeño pie with no tomato sauce, which Naples would find alarming. Wear whatever you like, nobody is dressing up for pizza.

The two-pound super burrito here is less a meal than a diplomatic incident, and in a neighborhood where everyone has a strong opinion about where to get one, Taqueria Cancún has been holding its ground forever. This is a taqueria on Mission Street: counter service, line out the door on weekend nights, foil-wrapped torpedoes that have put more than a few people to sleep on the bus home. The breakfast burrito with chorizo and eggs is the move if you catch it early.

This is a classic Vegas buffet, the kind with marble counters, smoked salmon spirals, and enough seating for 600 hungry people who have pre-paid for their ambition. Expect a carving station, pizza with dough from a nearby Spago, and sushi, all at a price that makes a mid-priced casino steakhouse look reasonable. It's a morning-to-mid-afternoon affair, so dress for comfort and plan to skip dinner.

This is the buffet at The Cosmopolitan, and its whole personality is built around the morning after. Waffles, crunchy fried chicken, and crab legs juicy enough to turn the plate into a splash zone all appear, along with a salad bar that holds its own. Plenty of dishes come pre-portioned in little bowls, which spares shaky hands the humiliation of a slippery serving spoon. Come hungry, come dehydrated, and don't dress up.

The cerulean counter is handmade, the seafood is sustainably sourced, and the menu wanders freely from hand-roll culture to XO grits without apology. Rosella is a sushi shop on Avenue A that treats local, responsibly harvested fish with restraint and a little mischief. The wine list leans domestic, pulling from the North Fork and the West Coast. The Michelin Guide has it selected, and Esquire put it on their best new restaurants list.

A tea bar up front handles quick orders while the real action unfolds at the long communal tables in back, which tells you everything about how Cha Kee operates. It's a Hong Kong bistro in the thick of Chinatown, with a menu that runs from wonton soup to beef chow fun to a dim sum list that could keep a table debating for twenty minutes. Portions are built for sharing, and the groups who pack those banquettes seem to know it.

Antique telephone behind the bar, weathered wood beams, tufted red leather booths, a neon sign, and a back garden that softens the whole thing into something you didn't expect from East Village Thai. The menu runs long and regional, so bring enough people to order past the khao soi and into the pork blood soup. The cocktail program earns table time too. Reservations go fast, which the packed room will confirm before you even sit down.

The rooms have soaring dark cherry beams against white-and-sand walls, private terraces, and marble bathrooms with rainforest showers, giving the whole place the feel of a chic treehouse that happens to border the Caribbean. This Four Seasons resort sits deliberately far from anything, with a cascading pool facing the ocean, a golf course, tennis, a spa, and a spread of restaurants. The Michelin Guide has it among its selected hotels.

Tropical wallpaper and a hidden door set the tone for this European-leaning restaurant tucked inside Hotel Vela. The menu moves from French onion soup to beef Wellington with handmade pasta in between, and the bar holds its own with craft cocktails that match the kitchen's ambition. Esquire named it one of America's best new restaurants in 2025, which feels about right for a Mississippi Gulf Coast town that wasn't exactly asking for a vodka-sauce ravioli moment.

Every room faces the water at this all-suite hotel perched on a bluff above the Half Moon Bay fishing harbor. The Santa Cruz Mountains rise behind you, the Pacific stretches out in front, and the agenda writes itself: morning coffee while the boats go out, afternoon on the beach, the faint pulse of a lighthouse at night. Half Moon Bay has a way of making ambition feel faintly embarrassing, and the Beach House leans into that completely.

Perched on ten acres of Narragansett Bay waterfront on Goat Island, this full-scale resort has over 200 rooms, all facing the water, and enough going on that you could skip Newport proper entirely. The marina means some guests arrive by boat, which sets the tone. Scarpetta handles Italian dinner, the Regent Lounge takes over from there, and the Seawater Spa is on hand for whoever overdid it the night before.

The red brick and white columns are a deliberate architectural echo of Jefferson's Academical Village up the road, which is either charming or a little on the nose depending on your mood. This Kimpton hotel trades grand gestures for something warmer inside, with a lobby that actually invites sitting down, a farm-to-table restaurant, and a craft beer bar. Five acres of botanical gardens out back connect to a trail system, with a Japanese garden and a pond along the way.

A former pocketbook factory, all red brick and industrial bones, converted into a luxury boutique hotel that arrives with more swagger than your average Hudson Valley farmhouse inn. The design firm Charlap Hyman & Herrero handled the overhaul, which explains why the whole thing feels considered rather than decorated. Selected by the Michelin Guide, it sits just off Hudson's main strip, close enough to the antique shops to be convenient, far enough to feel like an escape.

A Queen Anne house on a quiet residential street a short walk from Warren Street, this boutique hotel has been renovated with enough care that the original bones still read clearly. Modern furniture and contemporary art sit alongside Matouk linens and Frette towels without any of it feeling like a mood board. Hudson has no shortage of weekend visitors with opinions, and the Amelia Hudson gives them somewhere to stay that matches the town's aesthetic without making a performance of it.

The neon sign out front dates to 1963, and the bones of this mid-century motor lodge are still intact, even after a thoughtful renovation brought it into the present. It sits on Santa Rosa Ave, which means you get the urban, workaday side of wine country rather than the manicured version, with the Sonoma Valley wineries and restaurants still close enough to make the whole trip work. Michelin's Selected Hotels lists it.

A boutique hotel in Alpharetta, the small city that quietly decided it didn't need Atlanta anymore. The classical exterior plays it safe with the neighbors, but the interiors go more eclectic, mixing contemporary pieces with nods to tradition. Public spaces do real work here: CC's patio bar, a pub, and a Parisian-style conservatory give it the feel of a proper local gathering spot rather than a lobby you sprint through.

A handsome brick building a block from the train station, The Wick is a Marriott Tribute Portfolio hotel that arrived just as Hudson started pulling New Yorkers back upstate in earnest. The renovated interior runs minimalist and clean, the restaurant leans on regional farms, and the Lobby Bar is doing nothing to lower the town's rising opinion of itself. Convenient, comfortable, and quietly confident about the neighborhood.

New Mexico cooking is the rare regional cuisine that Boulder almost never sees, and chef Hosea Rosenberg, a Taos native, fills that gap with rustic Southwestern fare across all three meals. Grab-and-go breakfast burritos anchor the mornings, counter service runs at lunch, and full table service with margaritas takes over at dinner. Blue-corn enchiladas and green chile stew built on oven-roasted Hatch chiles are the reasons regulars come back.

A tonkotsu-miso hybrid broth is the anchor at this no-frills ramen shop tucked into a Clairemont strip mall. The menu is short by design: a rich, porky house ramen and a spiced tantanmen are about the size of it, with springy noodles and a soft-boiled egg as the main decisions to make. Lines form fast, service moves faster, and the Michelin Guide has taken note of both.

Pizzas come out of a 900-degree wood-fired oven with properly blistered crusts, which tells you something about how seriously this Southern Italian restaurant takes the basics. Colorful fabrics and wood fixtures give the room a warm, lived-in feel, and the cooking leans rustic, with house-made pasta as the spine of the menu. It sits just off Liberty Public Market, which means the neighborhood does half the work of setting the mood before you even sit down.

Botanical prints on pale walls, a red brick patio out back, and an Italian Mediterranean restaurant that treats a seasonal wine list as seriously as the kitchen treats pasta. The bucatini and the clams suggest the Mediterranean mindset is more than decorative. Queen Village locals who know their way around a wine list fill the bar up front while the dining room stays unhurried.

An upscale steakhouse on the seventh floor of a hotel that bills itself as Swiss hospitality in Texas, which tells you something about the room before you even sit down. The draw is the house Akaushi beef, raised by the team's own breeding program just north of the Red River, and it shows up across a menu built around the classics. White-jacketed service, a clubby feel, and a cocktail list you'll need before deciding.