The Best Places in the United States

Chole bhature is the main event at this strip-mall street food spot in Franklin Park, where golden rounds of fried bread the size of cantaloupes arrive alongside bowls of dark, heavily spiced chana masala. The New Jersey Indian community found this place fast, and tables are rarely empty. The kitchen also runs a long roster of Delhi chaat and a Mumbai sideline that includes a samosa served on a bun, which is exactly what it sounds like. The New York Times put it on its 2025 Restaurant List.

Cortney Burns, who made her name at Bar Tartine in San Francisco, runs this restaurant and tavern on Deer Isle by rotating a different chef-in-residence through the kitchen each month. The result shifts constantly, though the tavern menu holds steadier. It landed on the New York Times Restaurant List for 2025. The crowd driving up from the mainland for whatever's on that week tends to take the whole thing very seriously, as they should.

Ketchup cans serve as wine buckets, which tells you most of what you need to know about this no-frills seasonal New England restaurant on Midcoast Maine. The chef came up through Jean-Georges and the Fat Duck, then traded all that for foraging his own mushrooms and smoking his own haddock. The New York Times put it on their 2025 Restaurant List, which is an odd fate for somewhere this deliberately unshowy, but here we are.

The pitmaster works the smoker outside and greets the sidewalk with a Polish sausage in his tongs and "We ain't playing, Jack." This small barbecue spot with food-truck roots in northwest Kansas City keeps the turkey leg as its centerpiece, dark meat staying moist under taut, browned skin. The turkey leg stuffed with mac and cheese makes the menu very on-brand. The New York Times put it on their 2025 Restaurant List, which feels about right for a place this committed to one idea.

Pendant lights salvaged from a European monastery hang over the bar, which tells you everything about how seriously this place takes atmosphere. An old-school beer bar and pub on Henderson Avenue, The Old Monk pours drafts from around the world alongside a rotating cast of locals, with fish and chips that regulars treat as a birthright. Weekday happy hour runs until seven and has a reputation for extending the evening considerably past anyone's original plan.

Some of the cocktails here took days to develop, which you can either find charming or slightly alarming depending on your relationship with drinks. Bar Colette is a reservation-only cocktail bar in Uptown Dallas where reinterpreted classics share the menu with exotic spirits, global wines, and sashimi. A James Beard nominee for Best New Bar, it draws the kind of crowd that dresses like they Googled the place first, which, honestly, they probably did.

The acoustically treated walls mean the sound hits you right no matter where you sit, which matters when the names on stage have included Esperanza Spalding and Bill Frisell. Dazzle is Denver's long-running jazz club, the kind that draws serious talent week after week and keeps the bar busy with martinis and a four-cheese mac that regulars order without looking up. DownBeat placed it among the top 100 jazz clubs in the world.

The draw at this Thai bar and mookata spot is the tabletop grill sunk into a pot of bubbling broth, where you cook your own meal at the table. It lives on the patio behind Lom Wong, small and casual, with craft cocktails doing serious work alongside the smoke. The New York Times put it on their Restaurant List, which is a lot of attention for a patio bar where dinner is technically a DIY project.

A sign above the bathroom explicitly bans cocaine, which tells you most of what you need to know about The Grapevine's charms. This sprawling neighborhood bar and kitchen moved from its beloved pink adobe on Maple Avenue a couple years back, and the regulars followed, along with most of the staff. Strong drinks, plenty of outdoor space, boudin balls from the new kitchen, basketball on screens, and karaoke when the mood strikes.

A sprawling patio bar right off the Katy Trail, the kind of place cyclists arrive at with good intentions and leave an hour later than planned. Nearly thirty Texas beers on draft and a solid lineup of Texas whiskeys keep things local, while the kitchen handles dark-beer venison chili for anyone who needs ballast. The patio is large and loud in the best communal way. Exactly what Dallas was missing before it existed.

Fufu made from scratch and shito, the shrimp pepper sauce that shows up on nearly every table, are the signals that this is something Seattle doesn't have much of: a proper West African restaurant serving Ghanaian and Liberian cooking. The minimalist First Hill room fills fast with regulars who already know the goat peanut soup and newcomers working their way through peri peri wings and fried plantains for the first time.

The house margarita comes classic or customized with a rotating cast of infusions, watermelon and mezcal being a popular pairing. This Jalisco Mexican restaurant on Main Street splits its attention evenly between the kitchen and the bar, with a cocktail program run by a veteran Valley bartender. The food leans into both traditional plates and the occasional fusion detour, and the whole thing has a chic, polished room that feels a little more considered than your average neighborhood spot.

The building was a brothel, a flophouse, and a peep-show parlor before it became this. Now it's a bar and live-music venue dressed in 70s swank, vintage soft-core art, and low-slung lounges surrounding a sunken stage. The team calls it a "gastro-brothel," which is not a word you forget. Small plates and cocktails run alongside whatever's on stage, and the whole thing is loud, garish, and extremely committed to the bit.

Frosted mugs pulled straight from a freezer behind a bar draped in kitschy tchotchkes: this Grand Avenue tiki dive bar has been an institution since truckers were rolling through on Route 60. Wood paneling, tiki-style tables, a pool table, and a patio where the smoking happens. On Tuesdays a DJ spins vinyl, playing what the regulars call "funky mutant dance music," and somehow the night outlasts your intentions. Cash only, so plan accordingly.

The weathered wood and dim light on Gaston Avenue look exactly right for a place where the blues actually shows up. The Goat is a bar and music venue where talented blues acts take the stage most nights and weekends, with karaoke folded in when the mood shifts. D Magazine gave it Best Place to Get a Beer Before 8 AM, which tells you something about the hours and the regulars.

Tiger Bar is a gin-leaning cocktail bar on Gallatin Pike dressed as a 1930s carnival sideshow, and it commits without tipping into costume party. There's a mystery cocktail wheel you can spin to let fate pick your drink, which saves you from the menu and also from yourself. The Flamin' Hot Mozz Sticks have a Nashville Scene award, and Esquire put the place on its list of America's bars.

A small Tempe shop packed floor to ceiling with single issues, trade paperbacks, manga, graphic novels, and enough indie and small-press titles to make a distributor nervous. Staff carry the kind of encyclopedic knowledge that can match a superfan or gently redirect someone who just wandered in. The wall of collectibles, including some genuinely odd merch, rewards browsing. Recent shelf finds included "Sir Charles Barkley and the Referee Murders," so the range is real.

A geodesic dome built to look like a beehive sits inside this late-night dance bar and immersive art venue in RiNo. The team behind it took Tulum and Burning Man as their starting points, then handed the space to a crew of local artists, so you get vine-covered bars and a garden courtyard that somehow make sense together. It draws the kind of crowd that dresses for the art as much as the dancing.

The shelves at this beloved Phoenix used bookstore run from paperback thrillers to vintage board games to vinyl, and somewhere in between you'll find a ukulele someone gave up on. Bookmans is a used-everything exchange, the kind of place where you drop off a box of stuff you're done with and walk out with an armful of things you absolutely didn't need. Plan for an afternoon; nobody browses Bookmans quickly.

An antique mall so large that people routinely miscalculate how long they'll be inside. Individual booths mean each seller curates their own little world, so a stretch of vintage film cameras can give way to a wall of Arizona kitsch or a case of rare Pokémon cards without any warning. Cowboy boots, obscure collectibles, mid-century furniture, and things you didn't know you needed are all here, somewhere. Clear the afternoon.

You sign a waiver, pull on safety gear, and then someone hands you a crate of breakable things and walks away. Breakthrough is a smash room, which means the activity is exactly what it sounds like: hurling bottles and retired appliances at walls until your arms give out. A splatter room handles the paint-throwing crowd. It's a surprisingly efficient way to reset, and considerably cheaper than the destruction of property charge waiting just outside.

Bruce Springsteen swung by on his last Phoenix tour, which tells you roughly what kind of store Cave & Post Trading Co. is. It's a men's clothing shop in central Phoenix that leans into classic American workwear with a Western edge, carrying selvedge denim, pearl-snap shirts, and the sort of sunglasses that feel like they belong in a different decade. The owners are music people, so touring bands stop in regularly, though most regulars are just well-dressed guys who know what they like.

Duke Ellington played this Five Points room when it was still the Casino Cabaret, which tells you something about the bones. It's a live music venue now running a wide-open booking policy: dubstep, hip-hop, bluegrass, and jam bands share the calendar without obvious contradiction. The main floor was rebuilt and the stage expanded, so the sound holds up. Crowds skew toward people who track setlists, but the room pulls in anyone chasing a late night.

The taco truck parked out front sets the tone before you even get inside. Charlie's is an old-school gay bar and dance hall on Camelback with a big outdoor patio, bleacher seating, two bars, and a dance floor that earns its own reputation after midnight on weekends. The calendar runs from drag nights and karaoke to Latin and country two-stepping, so the crowd varies wildly depending on when you show up, which is most of the fun.

Tucked below Larimer Square, this standup club has the kind of acoustics that make a room feel like it's laughing with one throat. Dave Attell recorded a live album here, and Dave Chappelle has a habit of showing up unannounced. New Talent Nights have been launching local comics toward television for years, which keeps the room feeling like something might actually happen on any given night.

The name came from an old boot shop whose sign was too expensive to replace, which tells you everything about how Cowtown operates. It's a skate shop with a lived-in feel, stocking boards, trucks, and apparel for everyone from serious park rats to people whose knees have filed a formal complaint. Staff who actually skate work the counter, and the shop runs a nonprofit keeping younger riders in the scene.

A cactus-shaped shot glass and a roadrunner onesie in the same basket is a good sign that a shop resists easy categorization. Frances is a gift and lifestyle boutique tucked into a Camelback Road shopping center, stocking menswear, kids' clothes, home goods, jewelry, and Arizona-made finds alongside greeting cards and complimentary gift wrap, so you can walk in scrambling and walk out sorted.

The art-deco interior survived a near-demolition, and it still sets the tone: ornate details, good acoustics, and a room that makes mid-sized shows feel like an occasion. The Gothic is a standing concert venue in Englewood that books the kind of acts you'll wish you'd caught before they got bigger, alongside local projects that wouldn't otherwise find a stage this good. Take the light rail; parking on Broadway is its own opening act.

Each location of this local adult shop chain gets its own decor scheme, so the Arcadia spot leans street art while the West Valley one goes full Alice in Wonderland. Groove stocks lingerie, dancewear, toys, and bachelorette supplies, and the staff are the kind of helpful that doesn't make anyone squirm. There's a rewards program for regulars, which the store describes, with admirable restraint, as benefiting frequent customers.

The low-slung stage here puts you close enough to the band that you'll question whether you're supposed to be back there. Larimer Lounge is a dive-ish live music venue in RiNo that has hosted acts like Arcade Fire and Bat for Lashes before they stopped fitting in rooms this size. The bar up front runs on beer, shots, and what appears to be structural duct tape. Westword named it Denver's top venue for both rock bands and DJs in 2024.

A boutique bodega stocked with natural wines, Arizona-made snacks, and objects no reasonable person needs but everyone leaves carrying. The purple psychedelic oven mitt, the artichoke candle, the butterfly dice: the inventory reads like a fever dream curated by someone with genuinely good taste. Cold drinks, eclectic merch, Baggu bags, and a hot sauce section round it out. It also hosts yoga sometimes, which tracks completely.

More than 400 Indigenous-owned small businesses share a permanent indoor market in Old Town Scottsdale, selling handmade goods that range from beaded jewelry and hand-carved pottery to soaps and sand art. The nonprofit vending program requires all participants to be of Native American descent, so purchases go straight to the makers. A seasonal outdoor market runs on weekends in cooler months for anyone who prefers browsing under the sky.

The wraparound balcony alone explains why national touring acts keep coming back to this mid-size concert venue on Colfax. The Ogden has been around forever, vaudeville and all, and a recent overhaul brought new floors and a proper sound system without scrubbing the old bones. It holds a sweet spot between arena anonymity and club intimacy, which makes the sightlines good pretty much wherever you end up.

An old movie house in the Berkeley neighborhood that survived decades of disrepair to become one of Denver's more reliably eclectic live venues. Music, comedy, circus, and things harder to categorize all share the same stage, which makes checking the calendar a worthwhile habit. The room still carries the bones of its original life, and the scale keeps it intimate enough that there isn't really a bad spot in the house.

A festival-wear shop on Mill Avenue stocked with shiny bodysuits, fuzzy sets, wild sunglasses, flow toys, and everything else you need to look properly unhinged under a light rig. Most of the merchandise comes from Arizona makers, so the sequins carry some local pride. The store has a posted zero-tolerance policy for bigotry, which shouldn't be a selling point but somehow still is. Go when your next event is two weeks out and you've convinced yourself you have something to wear.

Two 300-foot sandstone fins frame the stage at Red Rocks, an outdoor amphitheater carved by geology rather than any architect. U2 filmed "Under a Blood Red Sky" here, and the recording captures why: the acoustics are a geological accident that nobody has managed to replicate. The venue sits open most of the year for hiking and visiting even when nobody's performing, so you don't need a ticket to feel like you've stumbled onto something.

A 360-degree ocean tunnel sits at the center of this mall aquarium, and yes, it's inside Arizona Mills, which somehow makes the sharks feel more surreal. Over 5,000 species move through 161,000 gallons, including reef sharks, stingrays, jellyfish, and a tank where kids can locate both Nemo and Dory without a map. The tide pool lets you touch baby sharks, and a paid add-on gets you up close with rescued sea turtles. Cheaper than its Scottsdale rival by a wide margin.

Part antique mall, part haunted house, Terror Trader is a horror-themed marketplace where local vendors fill coffin-shaped cases with slasher memorabilia, VHS tapes, and ceramic human organs. A museum room of real skulls anchors the space, and life-size slasher villains lurk around corners for good measure. Phoenix New Times named it the best place for horror buffs two years running. The crowd, predictably, does not shop in beige.

A vast stage and a sound system loud enough to rattle the fillings out of your skull make The 44 in Glendale the go-to metal venue in the Valley, which feels cosmically correct given that Alice Cooper grew up nearby. National touring acts share the bill with tribute bands and local talent, and the bar food is cheap enough that you can eat and still afford a band tee. Bring earplugs unless you enjoy tinnitus as a souvenir.

Chandeliers and exposed rafters inside a 1930s building that now hosts 1,800 people for live music on a good night. The Van Buren is a midsize concert venue in downtown Phoenix where general admission keeps things relatively democratic and the sightlines are genuinely hard to complain about. Live Nation books the calendar, which means a steady rotation of artists big enough to matter but not yet filling arenas.

Tens of thousands of used books spread across the fairgrounds floor once a year, priced so low it feels like a clerical error. The VNSA Used Book Sale is Phoenix's annual bibliophile free-for-all, run by volunteers and drawing serious collectors alongside people who just need something for the pool. Bring a tote, bring cash, and arrive with a loose plan, because the sheer square footage has a way of dissolving any sense of time or restraint.

A vintage shop tucked into a North Phoenix strip mall, Wang's moves the kind of T-shirts that make strangers stop you on the street: old Suns gear, beat-up band tees, the Marilyn Manson shirt your mom vetoed. Stock turns over constantly, so regulars follow their Instagram like a dispatch line. Prices run fair to real money depending on the piece, though the Saturday sale bins reliably yield something good for ten dollars.

All Or Nothing is a bagel shop built around a wood-fired oven and a pun: "All" for everything, "Nothing" for plain, both sourdough. It began as a folding table and a pizza oven outside a drum shop and has since graduated to an Airstream. Order at the window, expect schmears made in-house, and watch a summer series hand the griddle to local food trucks. It has won Best New Bagel Spot and Best Chef Series from the Nashville Scene.