The Best Places to Eat and Drink in the United States

A faded pink building off Seventh Avenue, formerly a tax office, which tracks: there's something a little bureaucratic about a jukebox this good. Inside, the bar is cheap, loose, and happy to stay that way, with Scrabble at the booths and beers that don't require a budget meeting. The patio shifts into DJ territory after dark, and the rotating calendar of themed nights keeps regulars checking Instagram like it's homework.

Tucked into a corner of the Fontainebleau that most guests walk right past, Chyna Club is a fine dining room serving modernist Cantonese and regional Chinese, helmed by the chef who once earned the only Michelin star for a Chinese restaurant in Las Vegas. The tableside Beijing duck, all paper-thin wrappers and julienned scallions, sets the tone: this is banquet-grade precision in a room that doesn't announce itself.

A glass-enclosed pasta room visible from the dining floor sets the tone at this Italian wine bar in Wedgewood-Houston, where the look is sleek and industrial and the menu stays concise enough to actually read. House-made pastas anchor the middle of the card, soft serve sundaes close it out, and the kitchen treats both with equal seriousness. The New York Times put it on their Nashville list, and the Michelin Guide has selected it too.

This is a casual taco and breakfast spot in a South Durango strip-mall unit where the kitchen nixtamalizes its own heirloom corn, so the tortillas arrive with a pedigree most tortillas would find embarrassing. Chilaquiles, squash-filled tetelas, and fish tacos fill the minimalist room, along with aguas frescas and a horchata matcha. The chef was a 2025 James Beard Best Chef: Southwest semifinalist, and the Strip tourists are mostly elsewhere.

Pork sisig made with pig's head, sizzling on a cast-iron at brunch, gives you a sense of how seriously Ed Kenney takes not taking things too seriously. This Kaimuki wine bar and restaurant runs on a modern Hawaiian sensibility, where lūʻau leaves show up in the fresh fish and mapo gravy lands on a biscuit. Kenney was a James Beard semifinalist, and the room fills with locals who already know the menu but still take a minute to choose.

The line forms before the doors open at this Texas-style BBQ shop, and a strip of tape slapped over a sold-out item on the menu board is a genuine source of anxiety by the time you reach the counter. The team came up out of competitive barbecue, and the Hill Country influences show in the smoke. A James Beard semifinalist in 2026, the place draws a crowd happy to stand outside in the Phoenix heat for brisket and jalapeño cheddar grits.

The order at this old-school Italian beef counter is "beef, hot, dipped," and you say it fast because there's a line and nobody here has time for your uncertainty. Johnnie's has been slinging thin-shaved, garlicked beef soaked in its own jus, piled into a roll with spicy giardiniera, since before most of its regulars were born. You eat over the hood of your car in the parking lot, which is not a quirk but the entire point.

The wood-fired oven does the talking here, blistering crusts until they're charred and chewy in all the right spots. Bar Del Corso is a pizza shop on Beacon Avenue that keeps quietly outrunning that label, with fried risotto balls, grilled octopus, and aperitivo-forward cocktails filling out a short menu. The back patio is easy to miss, the waits are not. The New York Times has put it on their Seattle list, and the James Beard Foundation named it a hospitality semifinalist.

The bar is packed before most tables are seated, which tells you something about how this place operates. Cucina Morini is a Sicilian-leaning Italian restaurant where the menu sprawls in the best way, pastas are made in house and offered in half portions so ordering more feels principled rather than excessive. The chef's James Beard semifinalist nod tracks; the food is careful without announcing itself.

Piero's is an old-school Italian dining room just off the Strip, with oversized leather booths, candlelight, and the lingering suggestion that someone at the next table is discussing something other than linguine. The bar is moody enough that the FBI reportedly once staked it out, which tells you how long the martinis have been this good. Expect a jacket-and-dinner-plans crowd, and a Garbage Caesar that sounds like an insult and isn't.

This West Loop steakhouse cooks Argentinian-style asado over an open hearth in a dining room built so you can watch your dinner get the full campfire treatment. It's a dressed-up night out with a check to match, and the menu has fun with itself: the bone marrow doubles as a shot glass for mezcal, and the "Party Steak" arrives with a trio of sauces, presumably so no one has to share a favorite.

Upstairs on Main Street, this downtown Italian restaurant fills up fast enough that the full-service bar exists partly as a pressure valve for the reservationless. The menu runs a clean Italian line from handmade pasta through to secondi, with the wine list holding its own alongside both. A James Beard semifinalist nod for beverage service in 2026 says something about where the priorities land.

A few steps below street level on MacArthur Boulevard, this intimate counter seats you facing the sunken kitchen where the team runs an eight-course Wagyu omakase. The style is Kappo, meaning the chef works in full view and the pacing feels personal rather than performative. Wagyu anchors almost every course, with seafood woven through, and the meal closes with Wagyu miso soup and rice that lands like the best part of coming home.

Art deco bones and a sparkling wine list longer than most bars have wines: Marietta Proper is a wine bar on the historic square that also does cocktails, whiskeys, coffee, and a short food menu of sandwiches and pastries. The team behind it includes a sommelier, which shows. A James Beard semifinalist for Best New Bar in 2025, it draws the kind of crowd that knows the difference between pét-nat and Champagne and orders both.

Rum on tap and ropa vieja on the menu: Otto's High Dive is a neighborhood rum bar in a whitewashed brick room that feels like Old Florida never really left. The kitchen runs a short Cuban-Floridian menu with tropical leanings, and the daiquiris come by the pitcher if you've committed to the evening. A Michelin Bib Gourmand, which tracks for a place this unfussy and this easy to love.

Syrian home cooking, not the takeout shorthand version, is the whole point at this elegant sit-down restaurant tucked into a condo complex on Key Highway. The chef grew up in Syria and cooks accordingly, which means dishes built on layers of sweet, sour, warm spice, and brightness that most menus flatten into one note. The New York Times put it on their Restaurant List in 2024, and the room earns the attention.

Blowfish sculptures and boats hanging from the ceiling set the tone before you've ordered a thing. Adrift is a full-commitment tiki bar on South Broadway, with bamboo walls, fishing-net lights, and totem carvings doing their best to convince you Denver isn't landlocked. Cocktails arrive in coconuts, flaming punchbowls, or funky mugs, running from Zombies and Singapore Slings to seasonal originals leaning on cachaca, sherry, and cacao. Spam musubi keeps things honest.

Lou's is a cheap, cozy Las Vegas diner done in full small-town cosplay, right down to the porcelain chickens and sheet metal signs reminding you that coffee helps. Your table gets a free sampler of housemade jams on butter crackers before you've ordered anything. The Belgian waffle shows up under hot strawberry sauce and a mountain of whipped cream. Weekday breakfast is calm, while weekends belong to the regulars.

A wine bar in RiNo that keeps fried chicken and tinned fish on the menu alongside Khikhvi, Nerello Mascalese, and a Mencía from Oregon that has no business being that good. The list leans hard into natural, biodynamic, and small-production bottles, and the staff can talk you through all of it without making you feel like a student. Grape nerds and people who just want a glass with snacks coexist peacefully here.

Milton's is an Italian-American restaurant up a flight of stairs from Local Foods in Rice Village, which means you earn your lasagna a little. That lasagna is built from 100 layers, then sliced and seared so the edges crisp, a lot of engineering for something your grandmother did with a casserole dish. The tiramisu arrives tall enough to need a plan, and the chef is a James Beard semifinalist for Best Chef: Texas.

Two wood-burning ovens run the show at this Glassell Park Southern restaurant, and nearly everything on the menu passes through them at some point. Oysters, cornbread, pork chops, braised greens that bubble by the coals all night. Long communal tables and wax candles fill the main room; counter seats face the kitchen. A quieter wine bar in the back serves a shorter menu for anyone who wants the vibe at half the volume.

Wood-paneled walls and brass fixtures in Las Vegas's Chinatown, well off the Strip's theatrical gravitational pull. Partage is a modern French tasting restaurant where the chef's intentions are on the plate and the room quietly asks you to pay attention. The menu has loosened from pure tasting format to include à la carte, which locals have taken as an invitation to become regulars. A 2026 James Beard semifinalist for Best Chef Southwest.

The crudos come dressed with things like dill yogurt and salsa verde, which tells you this isn't a standard Italian-American red-sauce room. Costiera is a Mediterranean-leaning dinner spot in Baltimore drawing from mid-Atlantic seafood and pasta in about equal measure. The menu moves between bright and heavy depending on your mood, and the kitchen seems genuinely interested in the combinations rather than just the credentials.

A converted factory with a French potager garden out back sets the stage for a tasting-menu restaurant where the kitchen ferments, pickles, and ages its way through the seasons. The team runs both a traditional and a vegetarian multi-course menu, with bread serious enough to anchor its own wholesale bakery. The chef earned a James Beard semifinalist nod in 2025, which tracks for a place this quietly self-sufficient.

The line wrapping around the Fort Greene corner is not a glitch; it's just how things work at April Bloomfield's neighborhood seafood bistro, where eggs with celery salt and a roast chicken somehow outshine the obvious Instagram moment. The skylit room is bright and unhurried, the menu turns with the seasons, and lunch earns its own following with a burger that regulars treat as a state secret.

The oysters on the menu come from the owner's family farm down in St. Mary's County, which gives this Whitehall Mill seafood restaurant a kind of built-in honesty you can taste. The kitchen leans Chesapeake, running roasted oysters, crab dip mac and cheese, and miso-glazed snakehead alongside the classics. Happy hour draws a crowd for good reason, with roasted oysters finished in butter, Parm, and Old Bay going for next to nothing.

You get in by pressing a paw-shaped doorbell, which sets the tone. Doberman Drawing Room is a cocktail lounge and social club in the Arts District, dressed in antiques, taxidermy, and surreal art, with a central bar dividing the room into separate moody dens. Non-members are welcome; members get the private loft with a juliet balcony. No phones, no photos, charcuterie served inside a hollowed book, and cocktails that are genuinely the point.

The stone hearth oven sits open to the dining room, so you can watch the pies come together while you wait. This is a casual pizza and pasta spot with a very Tucson idea of Italian-American cooking, blending Sonoran flavors into the repertoire with a straight face. Birria on a pizza, red chile folded into an Alfredo, a cannoli served as a taco. The room runs warm and woody, the vibe is neighborhood, and nothing on the menu takes itself too seriously.

The bookstore on the corner of Tejon is not a bookstore. Push the right shelf and you're inside one of Denver's favorite cocktail bars, a speakeasy that takes both halves of the conceit seriously: a library of over 500 spirits backs a menu of originals alongside some 60 classics. No standing room means the wait is part of the deal, so arrive with patience and someone to talk to while you queue.

The quiche arrives as though it's never heard of the stodgy version you've had before, light and trembling where quiche has no business being either. MÅURICE is a French-leaning pastry luncheonette from chef Kristen Murray, drawing from French and Norwegian traditions for a small menu of smørbrød, soups, and sweets. The black pepper cheesecake has its own local mythology. A cold bottle of white at midday in downtown Portland, and nowhere else quite like it.

The French cheeseburger blanketed in raclette has its own reputation in this city, which tells you something about the mood at this Heights neighborhood restaurant. European-inspired comfort food anchors the menu, which shifts with the seasons, running from chicken liver pate and crudo through to roast chicken and pasta. The chef landed a James Beard semifinalist nod in 2024, and the Houston Chronicle put Squable at number two on its top 100 list.

Hakkasan is a five-story Cantonese restaurant and nightclub in the MGM Grand, so dinner and the dance floor share a building and a dress code. A set menu keeps the bill friendlier than most Strip showpieces, and the dim sum arrives in colors that photograph better than they have any right to. The peking duck comes with caviar, which tells you how the evening is meant to end: upstairs, with a DJ and a bottle.

The honey onyx bar is the same one New York regulars know, transplanted to Beverly Hills and looking very much at home on Camden Drive. This is fine dining, coastal Italian, and the room is styled like a billionaire's yacht without any apparent irony. Homemade pasta is the reason to linger, particularly the fusilli with the red wine-braised octopus that made the Manhattan original famous. The crowd skips dessert at their own peril.

Mirrored walls and moody recessed lighting give this Chelsea restaurant a stage-set quality, and the kitchen leans into it. The menu is short and personal, pulling Caribbean roots through a European frame: salt cod fritters with habanero aioli, braised oxtail under cheddar polenta. A strawberry cheesecake arrives as a Swiss roll, which is either surprising or obvious once you've had it. The cocktail bar runs all night.

Black walls, scarlet booths, polished chrome, and a limestone fireplace that anchors the whole room: the Lambs Club is a Midtown steakhouse that knows exactly what it is and leans into it without apology. Dry-aged steaks with a full spread of sauces are the main event, and the pre-theater prix-fixe keeps the curtain-time crowd moving. Inside the Chatwal Hotel, steps from Broadway, it draws the kind of clientele that orders a second cocktail on purpose.

A worker-owned cooperative in Mt. Vernon where refugees cook from their own culinary traditions, Mera Kitchen Collective serves Middle Eastern, African, and Latin food in a bright, casual room with plenty of vegan and vegetarian options. It started as pop-ups before finding a permanent home, and the menu still has that improvisational spirit. A local mural covers the outdoor dining wall, which is either charming or on the nose, depending on your tolerance for intentional cheerfulness.

A neighborhood house on the Eastside that seats you like a dinner guest, not a diner. Bintü Atelier serves West African cooking with a Gullah Geechee thread running through it, okra and local fish sharing the menu with shito crab rice and groundnut stew. The menu is short enough that tables tend to order most of it and share. It's BYOB for anything alcoholic, but fresh soursop and passionfruit juice soften the blow. Named a James Beard semifinalist for Best Chef: Southeast.

This is a Strip steakhouse run by the Food Network's "bam" guy, and the wine list tops 2,700 bottles, which is a lot of reading before a baked potato. The Caesar is tossed tableside, as the form requires, and the lobster bisque comes loaded with actual chunks of lobster. The banana cream pie is a wall, and a glazed pork chop makes a case against the beef. Expect expense accounts and a jacket or two.

A chicken rice shop on Airport Boulevard where the whole birds go through a poaching-to-ice-bath-to-hang-dry process that makes the skin pull taut and the meat collapse at the knife. The cooking traces back to Chinese immigrants who brought their techniques to Thailand and rewired them with bolder flavors. The chef landed on the 2025 New York Times Restaurant List and is a 2026 James Beard semifinalist. Seven house sauces come with; order all of them.

The wood-fired Neapolitan pizzas come out gently charred, topped with whatever the Pacific Northwest is doing well that week. Cafe Olli is a pizza and brunch spot on MLK that also runs a serious bread and pastry program out of the adjoining bakery. The New York Times put it on their restaurant list and the chef landed a James Beard semifinalist nod, which tracks for a neighborhood place that treats zucchini and peaches like they have something to prove.

Handmade tajarin, dressed with nothing but butter and sage, has made this Capitol Hill trattoria a quiet institution. The kitchen pulls from Italy's Piedmont region, so the menu runs rich and restrained in equal measure. The room is candlelit and close, the kind of place where a weeknight dinner somehow turns into a long one. The sibling bar next door, Artusi, handles digestifs and desserts if you're not ready to leave, which you won't be.

The squid ink spaghetti is black enough to make you self-conscious about your teeth, which tells you something about the vibe here. BoccaLupo is a casual, bustling neighborhood Italian-American spot in Edgewood where the chef takes the food seriously but the room doesn't take itself seriously at all. Southern fried chicken parm, focaccia brushed with honey, quirky cocktails: the menu reads like someone cooked exactly what they wanted and it all happened to work.

Carversteak is a Strip steakhouse where a martini cart makes laps during dinner service, which tells you how seriously the room takes the word "steakhouse." Expect a dressy, expense-account sort of evening, with investment bankers at the next table who may adopt you for drinks. The chilled seafood platters, stacked with shrimp, lobster tails, and oysters, are as much the draw as the beef.

Holsteins is a casual burger-and-milkshake joint in the Arts District, relocated from its long run inside a Strip casino to a spot where nobody has to walk through a slot floor for a patty. The burgers are stacked high enough to require a strategy, and the boozy shakes arrive buried in doughnuts and marshmallows. Come hungry, wear something you can afford to get sauce on, and plan on being full for a while.

The pita here gets rolled and hearth-baked to order, and it arrives so pillowy and toasty that whatever else you planned to eat almost feels beside the point. This is a lively Mediterranean restaurant in the Presidio, drawing from the Istanbul playbook, with a menu built for sharing, from flaky borek to short rib kebabs. The room fills with people who came for a quiet neighborhood dinner and stayed for another round of spreads.

This is a second-story steakhouse under a glass dome inside the Plaza, where the Casino dinner scene was filmed, so expect at least one table of suits murmuring "they filmed Casino here." The room was named for a former mayor who also worked as a mob attorney, which explains the menu. A zipline now blocks the Fremont views, but the burger with its pile of fried onions still outpaces the steaks.

Tightly packed tables and a menu that shifts with the seasons set the tone at this creative American restaurant in Park City. The mood runs loud and convivial, the kind of place that works equally well for a group après-ski and a date night, which probably explains why it's almost always full. Comfort food gets a thoughtful rework here, and the chef landed a James Beard semifinalist nod. The Michelin Guide has it listed too.