The Best Places to Eat and Drink in the United States

Golden Pony is a cocktail bar in East Nashville's Highland Yards, done up in midcentury modern with a bohemian streak and a queer-centric bent. The drinks are bespoke, the snacks are there to keep you upright, and the room is cozy enough for a first date or a long overdue catch-up with an old friend. Nashville Scene named it Best New Bar in 2023, and the bathroom mirrors keep getting mentioned, so budget a minute for them.

Slice shop meets cocktail bar on a busy North Denver corner, loud enough that whatever conversation you're having will stay between you and the ceiling. Happy Camper runs casual and crowded, the kind of place where the noise does you a favor. The menu leans big, sloppy pizza and stiff drinks, and the room fills fast most nights, which suits the regulars just fine.

The self-proclaimed home of "the fastest egg in the West" is a classic American diner on Colfax that holds the line while Denver's old-school spots keep disappearing. Cinnamon roll French toast and a six-pound breakfast burrito smothered in green chile are the kinds of details that explain why regulars don't bother with the menu. The green chile is gluten-free, which the burrito's sheer scale makes feel almost responsible.

A door off the alley and a staircase down puts you in a basement sports bar that feels like a secret the Wash Park neighborhood has been quietly keeping. Screens everywhere, local taps, and a kitchen that stays focused no matter how loud the room gets. A Westword Best Sports Bar pick, and the kind of place where losing doesn't sting quite as much when the food and drink tabs are this manageable.

The gleaming neon martini sign outside has been pulling people off East Colfax since the bar was basically a secret, back when "mixed" was code for something. Now it's out and proud, a classic dive bar with cheap drinks, a pleasantly deteriorating interior, and the kind of regulars who keep it honest. If you're looking for polish, Colfax has other options.

A pirate-themed dive bar in Sunnyslope that opens at 6 a.m., which should tell you most of what you need to know. Drink specials are listed on the wall under "Grogs," free pool and shuffleboard tournaments fill the back, and biscuits and gravy come with your first drink if you show up early enough to need them. Burgers and corn dogs handle the rest. The merch, featuring a peg-legged mascot, is genuinely good.

A ski-lift chair salvaged from Keystone sits in the front of this sprawling Denver sports bar, which tells you everything about the vibe: proudly, unironically Colorado. Two full bars pour local taps, a stage hosts live music, and somewhere in the back there's a miniature bowling alley that shouldn't exist but does. The Slopper, a Pueblo green chile sandwich situation, is the menu's main argument. Westword named it Denver's best bar for watching games in 2023.

The Cafe at Thistle Farms is a daytime counter-service cafe on Charlotte Pike, run by a nonprofit that employs women survivors of trafficking, addiction, and prostitution, so the sandwich arrives with a mission statement attached. A teacup chandelier hangs overhead, and the menu leans toward BLTs, breakfast bowls, and a case of cakes. Nashville Scene named it Best Cafe in its 2023 Best of Nashville, if that helps you decide on lunch.

A bar that closes at ten, and that's the whole point. The Joy Lush Club is a low-key neighborhood wine and beer bar with 16 taps, a serious wine list, live music, and food trucks rotating through. You can even take a bottle home on your way out. It draws the kind of crowd that wants a proper drink without the performance of a late night. Think comfortable chairs, zero pretension, and somewhere to be by morning.

Sticky floors, cheap drinks, and a back patio where beer pong and giant Jenga coexist peacefully: Monkey Bar is a no-frills dive that has held its ground in Denver's Santa Fe art district as everything around it got progressively fancier. Darts, pool, ping-pong, foosball, N64, and four-person Pac-Man are all free to play, first-come basis. Dogs are welcome, and the house move when someone loses is apparently a round of pickle shots.

A 9,000-square-foot taproom with a basketball court tends to set expectations, and Wonderland Brewing's beer menu swings just as wide, running from Belgian-style and barrel-aged English ales to high-IBU IPAs and wild sours. The Broomfield brewery keeps a permanent food truck on-site, so there's no rush to leave, which is convenient given that there's also ping-pong. A good place to spend a longer afternoon than you planned.

Arcade games and sticker vending machines frame the room at this slice joint in the Beacon Hill area, where the team behind Fremont's Lupo traded sourdough pies for New York-style foldable slices. The crust is the work of serious dough people, and the housemade ice cream could survive a white-tablecloth setting but seems happier alongside paper plates and plastic tumblers. Salads, too, punch above the room's decor.

Arcade games and sticker vending machines line the walls of this East Coast-style slice joint in Olde Burien, which is exactly the vibe the team behind Fremont's Lupo was going for. The crust is the work of dough obsessives, foldable and crisp in the New York tradition. Side salads and housemade ice cream are better than the paper plates and plastic tumblers would suggest, but nobody seems to mind.

Pork belly sisig arrives still sizzling on a cast-iron plate, which tells you most of what you need to know about the room. This Filipino restaurant near the Beacon Hill light rail grew out of a food truck the family started after redevelopment shuttered their first spot, and the new stationary digs feel more like a return than a debut. The menu runs to lumpia, bistec, and adobo, with flavors on the gentler, pull-you-in end of the spectrum.

An Italian cafe tucked inside a streetwear and sneaker shop, which is either a strange choice or the most Pioneer Square thing imaginable. Counter-service focaccia sandwiches and housemade pasta land in that comfortable zone between careful and fussy, and happy hour swings toward spritzes and antipasti without much ceremony. The kind of spot that handles a pre-game and a leisurely lunch date with equal ease.

The patio hangs so close to Lake Washington you could lose a chip in it. El Encanto is an upscale Mexican restaurant where the room is very white, the crowd is very photogenic, and the chef quietly runs circles around the decor. The chile en nogada, made daily with help from his mom, is the kind of detail that earns its reputation. The cocktail list takes the tequila selection seriously, which helps when the selfie-to-taco ratio tips the wrong way.

Charcoal grills and skewers of chicken thighs, beef tongue, and mochi wrapped in bacon define this Wallingford yakitori bar. Empty skewers go into containers shaped like Super Mario pipes, which tells you everything about the room's energy. Pressed sushi and small plates keep the highballs coming. On the way out, the Indigo Cow soft-serve window near the entrance turns milk from Hokkaido cows into a rich, swirly send-off.

The alleyway entrance in Madison Park sets the tone: this is an omakase counter that knows it doesn't need to try too hard. Yasutaka Suzuki, a former partner at the beloved Sushi Kashiba, adjusts rice temperatures fish by fish and rotates the menu with microseasons. He runs a precise, focused kitchen, but in front of diners he's warm and prone to laughing. The presidential-themed bathroom is its own subplot.

A tasting counter in Brooklyn where the kitchen uses yuzu as sauerkraut draped over clams instead of a tidy squeeze of acid. Chef Victoria Blamey's avant-garde tasting menu runs about three hours and tends to fill your head with strong flavors that most restaurants at this price point seem too nervous to attempt. The Dungeness crab empanada, built on a Chilean abalone dish with Chartreuse and fermented black beans, is the kind of thing that makes you question your senses.

The back deck hangs over the San Juan River, which does exactly what the name promises. This is a relaxed New American restaurant in Pagosa Springs, the kind of place where the chef traded white tablecloths for something more interesting: an eclectic menu that hops freely between ideas but lands on quality produce and sure hands. The New York Times put it on their 2024 Restaurant List, which is not nothing for a mountain-town spot this far off the usual circuit.

Tartan-print details and jade-green paneling set the tone at Kevin Gillespie's prix-fixe restaurant, where Scottish heritage and Southern cooking share a table without either one apologizing. The menu moves between things like mussels with spicy 'nduja and peach-lacquered duck, then lands on peanut butter chess pie as if to remind you where you are. It's a Michelin Selected pick that reads as personal project first and concept second.

The tortillas here come from heirloom corn nixtamalized in-house, and they're the point, not the packaging. Oro by Nixta is a Mexican restaurant that grew from a tortilleria, and the menu still thinks that way: braised meats, seasonal produce, and a deep roster of moles and salsas all orbit the corn. It landed on The New York Times Restaurant List in 2024, which tracks for a place this quietly serious about a grain most kitchens treat as an afterthought.

A French-American restaurant in downtown Lancaster that landed on the New York Times Restaurant List in 2024, Passerine treats the surrounding farmland as a pantry and smuggles in global technique without announcing it. The room is quiet enough that the food does most of the talking, which suits a kitchen this confident. Lancaster's Amish-country reputation does nothing to prepare you for what's actually on the plate.

A paper bowl at a picnic table outside a rural Virginia brewery is where this tasting trailer does its finest work. Sumac is exactly what it sounds like: a fire-cooked, hyper-local tasting menu served from a trailer parked in a field, with ingredients sourced within 150 miles. The menu shifts with whatever the land offers, and the New York Times put it on their 2024 Restaurant List, which seems about right for somewhere this quietly serious about a paper bowl.

The plate-lunch spot that landed on the New York Times Restaurant List sits on Perkins Road, dishing out smothered chicken and meatless vegetable sides that taste like somebody's grandmother meant every bite. The chef learned to cook in Mississippi and has been running this kitchen for decades, splitting the difference, geographically and spiritually, between New Orleans and Lafayette. Go hungry and plan to eat with a spoon.