The Best Places to Eat and Drink in the United States

Jeremy Ford runs this modern tasting menu restaurant inside the Venetian, and the kitchen leans hard into vegetables without pretending it isn't also very interested in wagyu and foie gras. Two tasting menu lengths give you a choice of how long to commit, but the bar menu with its cacio e pepe puffs and charred jerk carrots is a genuinely good argument for just pulling up a stool instead.

A Creole barbecue trailer parked behind a kolache shop is either a strange detour or exactly the point, and at Parish it's the point. Cajun spice rubs and Tabasco glazes nudge central Texas classics sideways, and the menu runs past brisket into pulled duck and boudin. Sides like pimento mac topped with Zapp's chips and crawfish cornbread stuffing do their own convincing. The Michelin Guide awarded it a Bib Gourmand.

Spruce sits in one of San Francisco's quieter money neighborhoods, Sacramento Street, where the locals dress well and never seem to be in a hurry. It's a fine dining room doing Modern American with a California lean, the kind of place where lunch runs to composed salads and sandwiches and dinner quietly shifts registers. The cooking is precise and seasonal without announcing itself, and the California wine list gives you plenty of reasons to linger.

An oxblood lacquered ceiling and a menu displayed on a glowing marquee running the length of the room set the scene at this French wine bar across from the Transamerica Pyramid. The kitchen leans on peak produce and serious seafood, with the wine list thick with under-the-radar Gallic producers. The New York Times named it to their Restaurant List in 2025. Walk-ins compete for counter seats; reservations go fast either way.

The underground RiNo dining room glows with neon, and the menu swings just as freely, pairing global flavors across courses in combinations that shouldn't work as well as they do. This is a casual but serious dinner spot where the cocktails lean on dates and balsamic vinegar and the kitchen hosts pop-ups for emerging local chefs. Westword named it among Denver's top fifty restaurants, and Eater puts it on their city essentials list.

On the 17th floor of the Four Seasons Orlando, Capa is a Spanish-leaning steakhouse where the view over the resort competes hard with the menu. Michelin one-starred, it spans gambas, sherry-braised mushrooms, and substantial bone-in ribeye, with a pastry program that turns gazpacho into dessert. The setting pushes it toward celebration territory, and the crowd dresses accordingly.

Wolfgang Puck's steakhouse inside the Four Seasons on Wilshire is the kind of room where the banquette seating and the beef grades arrive with equal seriousness. Cuts run from American prime to Australian Wagyu to Japanese A5, and the price of your entrée will make this feel like a consequential evening regardless of what's being celebrated. The crowd tends to be well-dressed and on somebody's expense account.

Tavel Bristol-Joseph built his Austin reputation on pastry, so opening a modern Caribbean restaurant rooted in his Guyanese childhood was a genuine pivot. The cooking runs tangy, smoky, and coconutty, with fermented jerk seasoning and a roti that disappears faster than you'd expect. He earned a James Beard semifinalist nod, and the New York Times put Canje on its national restaurant list the year it opened.

A roaring fireplace anchors the dining room at this modern Mexican tasting menu restaurant inside Oceanside's Mission Pacific Hotel, where the pier view competes with what's on the plate. Chef Roberto Alcocer named the place after Baja's Valle de Guadalupe wine country, and the list leans into it. A Michelin star landed here for cooking that manages to be inventive without feeling like a dare.

The wood-fired octopus and French-Italian Riviera menu signal the ambitions clearly: this is fine dining, downtown Milwaukee, with tablecloths to match. Adam Siegel, who holds a James Beard Best Chef Midwest award for earlier work, shapes a kitchen that leans toward the sun-drenched coast without ever feeling like a theme. A James Beard nominee for Best New Restaurant, it draws the kind of crowd that books ahead and doesn't check the prices twice.

A Michelin-starred French fine dining room on the third floor of South Coast Plaza, which sounds like a punchline until you're actually sitting at the chef's counter watching a pristine kitchen run through a prix fixe that manages to feel personal rather than ceremonial. Tony Esnault's cooking leans classic French with a roaming curiosity. The patio is a quiet bonus, and the whole place moves at a pace that makes a mall feel very far away.

The sign is so discreet you'll walk past the townhouse twice before finding it, which is, in its way, a promise about how the evening goes. Vetri Cucina is an intimate Italian tasting room on Spruce Street, been around forever, with the kind of unhurried service that feels like it has nowhere else to be. A 1950s espresso machine holds court at the end of the meal, a fitting final argument from a kitchen that takes its classics seriously.

A former boat repair shop on the canal, now doing the Lord's work with cardamom croissants and Japanese melonpan. Saint Bread is a bakery with a full menu organized, with some nerve, by how many slices of bread your order contains. The "No Bread" section includes okonomiyaki, which tells you the kitchen has opinions. A James Beard Semifinalist for Outstanding Bakery, and the New York Times put it on their short list of top U.S. bakeries.

Old movies flicker on the back wall while a dozen taps keep the noise level honest in this sprawling Mission dive bar. The high-ceilinged room is hung with oversized art and loud enough that conversation is more of a suggestion. Duck through to The Hideout in back and the whole register shifts: a quieter, more considered cocktail bar hiding inside the chaos. Esquire put it on their Best Bars in America list, and the two rooms together explain why.

The dirty pasta water martini has its own Esquire listing, which tells you something about how Fiorella operates. This South Philly pasta spot, a Michelin Bib Gourmand, runs a short, handmade menu out of what used to be a three-generation butcher shop. Marc Vetri's name is on it, the room is small, and the cacio e pepe is the kind that makes you stop talking mid-sentence.

The patio at this Culver City contemporary French restaurant seats as many as the dining room, which tells you something about how the place pictures itself. Dinner is when the kitchen finds its stride, moving through chicken liver mousse in a delicate tart, clean fish preparations, and proper desserts. The wine list leans hard into by-the-glass options, which the room seems to appreciate.

Pisco is doing serious work here, with Esquire naming the pisco martini among the best in the country. La Royal is a handsome Peruvian restaurant and bar in Cambridge where the menu wanders across the full breadth of Peruvian cooking, including Chifa, the country's Cantonese-inflected tradition. Ceviches are sharp and citrus-forward, and the room has a genuine going-out energy. A James Beard semifinalist for Best New Restaurant.

Sapphire velvet banquettes and jacketed servers signal exactly what this is: a fine dining room where Angie Mar fuses classic French technique with her Chinese heritage in a Greenwich Village townhouse that glitters like a jewel box. The cooking leans rich and saucy, the way haute French is supposed to, and a tasting menu is available for those who want the full ceremony. James Beard semifinalist, 2026.

The name comes from South Korea's first carrier rocket, which tells you something about the ambitions in the room. Naro is a fine dining Korean restaurant in Rockefeller Center from the team behind Atomix, and where that room chases reinvention, this one returns to classics. The New York Times gave it three stars. Order the Dongji Martini, which made Esquire's list of the best martinis in the country, and let the evening unfold slowly.

Charleston's Lowcountry pantry filtered through a Mediterranean lens, The Grocery is a neighborhood restaurant where seasonal produce and local seafood share the menu in ways that feel natural rather than calculated. Fried oysters with deviled egg sauce have been here since day one, which tells you something about the kitchen's instincts. The room runs warm and unhurried, the kind of place locals treat like a standing reservation they never made.

A short, ever-changing menu of Spanish and Portuguese cooking in a cozy downtown dining room, where piri piri chicken gets finished with Wisconsin cheese without anyone apologizing for it. The chef is a James Beard Outstanding Chef semifinalist, and the kitchen takes dessert as seriously as the savory courses, which not every serious restaurant bothers to do. The kind of place where you eat things you won't find anywhere else in the city.

Ecuadorian and Peruvian cooking meet in a North Miami restaurant where the room feels genuinely celebratory without trying too hard. Chef Alejandra Espinoza runs a menu that moves from coastal ceviches through braised stews and into cassava fritters, all of it vivid and warm in a way that matches the decor. A Michelin Selected restaurant that doesn't feel like it's holding its breath about it.

The bottle gourd for their signature lau chingri comes from the parking lot out back, which tells you most of what you need to know about this small Bangladeshi-Indian neighborhood eatery in Jersey City. The chef and her daughter run the room, the cooking is homestyle but precise, and the dish landed on a New York Times list of the year's best across the country. A James Beard semifinalist, and NJ.com's top-ranked restaurant in the state.

Floor-to-ceiling windows look out onto Lockerbie Square's old brick row houses while tasting menu courses arrive one by one to steal your attention back. Vida is fine dining, the kind where you're choosing between four and seven courses and the chef is assembling each plate like an argument. The team behind it has drawn two James Beard semifinalist nominations, and the room makes it easy to believe them.

Old wooden beams from the original building were milled into the chef's counter, which is where you want to sit at this New England French restaurant if you can get it. The menu runs refined and a little lusty at once, French technique laid over serious local sourcing. The New York Times and Esquire both noticed when it opened, and the room has been full ever since.

Caesar salad made tableside, prime rib carved from a rolling trolley: Daniel Boulud's French steakhouse in the Flatiron plays its classic moves with full confidence. Leather-paneled bar, walnut floors, soaring ceilings, and servers who materialize exactly when needed. The dry-aged beef comes off an oak wood grill, sauces are French, the Bordeaux list is long, and the expense accounts are ready. Ranked 34th on the World's Best Steak Restaurants list.

The red velvet booths are arranged in a circle so that everyone in this fine dining room can watch everyone else, which feels about right for Vegas. Carbone is the New York Italian-American institution transplanted to Aria, where tuxedoed captains serve dishes tableside with a theatricality that matches the decor. The menu leans into the classics hard, and putting yourself in the captain's hands is an option if the bill isn't a concern.

The Elysian Bar is a cocktail bar in the Marigny, tucked inside a converted church-turned-hotel, where the atrium bar is so relentlessly yellow it feels like a secret study belonging to a pipe-smoking baron. Cajun and Creole small plates, like focaccia with honey butter, keep company with a Hibiscus 75. It's elegant without being stiff, and it made Food & Wine's list of top hotel bars in the country.

Heirloom grains milled in-house show up across the menu at this new American restaurant on Rainey Street, which is exactly the kind of detail that sounds pretentious until you taste the cacio e pepe. The kitchen runs its own fermentation program and leans hard on Texas farms, so the menu stays tight and shifts with what's around. The patio fills fast and the dining room isn't far behind. It holds a Michelin Bib Gourmand.

Persimmon is an intimate American restaurant on Hope Street where the menu changes daily, so the website's answer to "what's for dinner?" is a shrug. The room is bright but cozy, and it fills with a cross-section of Providence, parents included, none of them there for the photos. It holds AAA Four Diamonds and was a James Beard semifinalist for Outstanding Hospitality. Dress like you're trying to impress someone.

The rib-eye comes with a lemongrass chimichurri, which tells you most of what you need to know about this Asian-inflected steakhouse in Wallingford. Rachel Yang, a James Beard nominee, and her partner built a menu where Pacific Northwest ingredients meet continental technique and a full sweep of Asian flavors. The room is big and buzzy without feeling generic. Scallion pancakes, black rice, grass-fed beef: the menu swings wide and lands consistently.

A mushroom breakfast taco that Melissa Clark put on the New York Times list of best dishes eaten across the country in 2024 will tell you what kind of neighborhood restaurant this is. Ocotillo does scratch Tex-Mex in a city not especially known for it, and the housemade salsa macha alone justifies the detour. Brunch draws the loyal crowd, but the cooking has the kind of quiet confidence that makes you wonder what else you've been missing.

Sharply dressed guests line up outside a Beaux-Arts building in Southside before the doors even open, which tells you something about how this place operates. Bottega is an upscale Italian-Mediterranean restaurant where dark wood walls and high ceilings set a polished tone, and the servers are warm enough to soften the formality. A Michelin Selected pick and a James Beard Nominee for Outstanding Hospitality, it's been the city's grown-up dining room for longer than anyone's counting.

The Indonesian rosewood dining room looks out at Central Park South like it was born to, which sets the tone for an upscale Italian seafood restaurant where the power-lunch crowd arrives knowing exactly what it costs to sit here. Crudo and handmade pasta anchor the menu, the kind of cooking that earns its address without making a fuss about it. Dress up; this is not a jeans situation.

A steakhouse a short walk from the State House, which tells you a lot about who's having lunch here. Mooo.... keeps a classic chophouse feel but updates it with a menu that ranges from standard prime cuts to Japanese A5 Wagyu, depending on how the negotiations went. The room is warm and polished, the service professional without being stiff, and the beef does most of the talking it needs to.

L'Ostrica is a Montford dinner spot with an open kitchen, polished concrete floors, and the sort of wood furniture that suggests someone had a plan. The menu is Mediterranean at heart, with Asian accents sneaking in, and Fridays and Saturdays bring a tasting menu. The wine list leans on grower Champagnes, so expect a room of people who have opinions about bubbles and a check to match.

This is a Jean-Georges steakhouse at the Bellagio, and it looks more like a jeweler's showroom than a place to eat a cow, with velvet, crystal chandeliers, and a jewel-tone palette. Tables face the fountains, so the water show has a better seat than most people you know. The menu pairs Japanese and American beef with steakhouse classics, and the room fills with expense accounts and decanters of big red.

A bungalow tucked behind banana trees and bougainvillea on a residential street, Baby Bistro runs a menu so short that ordering the whole thing is the obvious move. Miles Thompson's modern American cooking shifts constantly, so whatever's on the night you go may be gone the next. The wine list stays under $100 a bottle, the room is small and lively, and the whole thing feels more like a dinner party than a restaurant.

Chicken and dumplings unveiled tableside is the move at this East Nashville restaurant built around Appalachian and Southern cooking. The share-plate menu leans seasonal but keeps a few old-school anchors no matter what, leaning into ingredients like benne seeds and paw paws in ways your grandmother probably didn't but might wish she had. The vibe is rustic and cozy, the kind of room that makes you want to become a regular on your first visit.

Floor-to-ceiling windows look out over a pond, which sets the mood before the tasting menu even begins. This is polished fine dining in Falls Church, the kind where the monthly French-inflected menu chases both the season and chef Bertrand Chemel's restless imagination. Five courses, and you choose at each one, with vegetarian and meat paths running in parallel. A James Beard Outstanding Restaurant semifinalist in 2024.

You will walk past it. That's by design. Apothecary is a dark, hushed cocktail lounge on Greenville where the seasonal menu gets a full thematic overhaul each year and bartenders can narrate the origin story of every pour from memory. The team spends months developing each recipe, and it shows. A James Beard Outstanding Bar Semifinalist, it draws the kind of crowd that actually reads the menu before ordering.

Jason Vincent's Logan Square neighborhood restaurant holds a Michelin Bib Gourmand and earned a James Beard nomination, which is a lot of hardware for a place that puts onion rings on the menu without irony. The room is modern-rustic and small, with a chef's counter in the back for anyone who wants to watch the kitchen work. The food is familiar American but tilted just enough to keep you guessing what you ordered.