The Best Places in the United States

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.

A lobby full of playful, colorful sculpture and paintings keeps the black marble and dark wood from taking themselves too seriously at this luxury boutique hotel in Birmingham, the upscale suburb just outside Detroit. The Michelin Guide awarded it a Key. It's the kind of boldly designed, art-forward property that once belonged only to bigger cities, now quietly doing its thing in a leafy Michigan suburb.

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.

A French-Japanese bistro in an Arts District warehouse, where the croque-madame arrives on house-made shokupan with ham katsu standing in for the ham. The team behind sake-focused Japanese spots has gone full Paris here, or almost full Paris, because the ponzu jelly scattered over the burrata keeps reminding you exactly where you are. Come for an aperitif and stay until the kitchen stops feeding you.

A Davis Love III golf course, a hot-air balloon that lifts off from the property, and a bedside touchscreen that orders dinner to your room: Boar's Head sets a high bar for the Virginia resort weekend. Six hundred acres outside Charlottesville back up to the Blue Ridge, with two pools (one adults-only), an adventure tour company, and a spa leaning on local ingredients. The kind of place that makes weekday life feel like a personal failing.

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.

The pink stucco facade has been Palm Beach's most recognizable silhouette for generations, and the current owners kept it that way, restoring the scalloped headboards, patterned wallpapers, and retro-tropical palette rather than neutralizing them into something safer. Swifty's restaurant and the pool bar draw a lively local crowd year-round, so it never feels like a museum. Worth Avenue is minutes away, and the beach is closer still.

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.

Nite Yun's counter-service spot in the Ferry Building pulls Cambodian cooking toward its quieter, more restorative registers, a different pitch than the bold flavors she built her reputation on in Oakland. The menu moves between soothing and electric without announcing which is which. A James Beard semifinalist and named to the New York Times' 25 best in the city, it's a small room doing serious work on a short menu.

The salt-baked celery root arrives looking like a small geological event, which sets the tone for this French-influenced New American restaurant where technique is the point but the vibe stays loose. Chef Shawn Gawle, a James Beard semifinalist, built the menu around sharing, with tarte flambée, heirloom tomato pie, and carrot cavatelli doing the heavy lifting. Dressy enough to feel like an occasion, relaxed enough that nobody's whispering.

A long counter, an open kitchen, and a pizzaiolo working the back of the room like the whole thing is a performance: this Chinatown strip-mall pizza shop has no interest in blending into its surroundings. The neo-Neapolitan dough is light with a properly blistered edge, and the menu stays tight enough that everything on it seems to mean something. Named among 50 Top Pizza USA's excellent pizzerias.

The wine list leans natural, the cocktails are craft, and the menu changes often enough that regulars rarely order the same thing twice. Copper Common is a wine bar and restaurant in downtown Salt Lake City, from the team behind the Copper Onion next door, and the kitchen ranges widely, pairing sharply drawn flavors without making a fuss about it. Salt Lake Magazine named it one of the city's top restaurants.

Bagels hang in metal racks draped with white sheets, a nod to the coin-operated laundry this place used to be. Now it's an all-day pizza and bagel shop on Balboa, mornings given over to coffee from Grand Coffee and a solid bagel lineup that runs from egg to rye, with schmears folded through green onion or spiked with Calabrian chiles. The San Francisco Chronicle named it among the top bagels in the Bay Area, and a Top 100 restaurant pick followed.

A low-lit cottage in the old Clarksville neighborhood, Jeffrey's is a fine-dining steakhouse where the beef is USDA Prime or American Wagyu, dry-aged and finished over an oak-fired grill. The room is close and quietly elegant, the wine list ranges from Napa to Burgundy with confidence, and the service moves like it has nowhere more important to be. The Michelin Guide has selected it, and it appears on the World's Best Steak Restaurants list.

This is the Caesars Palace Nobu, the biggest of the three on the Strip, a dim, stylish Nikkei dining room where lychee martinis and miso black cod are the opening move. Sequins and big watches fill the tables before a show at the Colosseum across the casino floor. Walk-ins sometimes score a bar seat, but plan on reserving a couple of weeks ahead.

Bird's-eye chiles, not hatch, set the tone at this Southeast Asian restaurant inside a former furniture workshop. Zak Pelaccio, who made his name with Malaysian cooking at Fatty Crab in New York, opened the place with a young chef running the kitchen who handles spice with confidence. The pork belly steak draped in prik phao paste and Thai basil keeps people coming back, and the crab steamed custard sells out most nights. On the New York Times Restaurant List for 2026.

The Chinoiserie wallpaper alone could anchor a design magazine spread, but this is a Chinese American restaurant where the food keeps pace with the room. The chef started with pop-ups exploring identity and landed somewhere more interesting than a thesis: Korean corn cheese egg rolls, dan dan noodles with wagyu guisada. A James Beard semifinalist, and the Victorian veranda fills up fast on sunny afternoons.

By day, a bagel shop where the hand-rolled, kettle-boiled rings get topped with things like hamachi, fresh wasabi, and shiso. By night, the Counter flips to a hyperseasonal kaiseki tasting menu, the kind of multicourse journey that shifts entirely with what's good that week. The chef trained in Japan under serious mentors, and it shows. A James Beard semifinalist in 2026, it's also landed on Eater's best Denver restaurants list.

Two brothers run this Texas BBQ shop near the stadium, open only Thursday through Saturday, which keeps the line long and the brisket moving fast. The setup is classic smoke-and-queue, but house-made flour tortillas stand in for white bread, and the sides swing toward poblano mac and cheese and okra-laced beans. Texas Monthly named it one of the state's 50 best BBQ joints, which the regulars already knew.

Pink and orange neon casts a moody glow over the Camelback Road location of this coffee shop, which leans into creative, photogenic drinks alongside the usual caffeine agenda. The menu runs from lattes built around burnt cream or cookie flavors to matcha, ube, and Lotus energy drinks for the non-coffee contingent. A second, sunlit outpost sits inside the Melrose District's Royale collective, better suited to a quick grab-and-go.

Izakaya Go is a small Japanese izakaya in a Spring Mountain Road plaza, and its late-night happy hour from 10pm to 2am is the real draw. Sushi, tuna belly steak, and yaki udon all get marked down, which suits anyone who spent the day losing money and wants to feel like they won something. It's tight on space, so expect a wait when the deals kick in, and get your oyster order in before 1:45.

Twenty-eight seats in Jamaica Plain, a neighborhood that has somehow gotten by without Italian restaurants until now. Tonino is a pasta-and-pizza spot where the chef's whole philosophy seems to be finding a handful of good ingredients and then leaving them mostly alone. The tiramisù has built a devoted following. A James Beard semifinalist and on the New York Times' 25 best in Boston, it reads like someone's favorite neighborhood secret that stopped being secret.

The move at this old-school Phoenix chophouse is to come in through the kitchen, which is less a quirk than a statement of intent. Red leather banquettes, scarlet wallpaper, dim lighting, and the kind of martinis that explain why the power brokers still fill the room. The relish tray arrives gratis over ice, which somehow feels exactly right. They've been doing the 48-ounce porterhouse and prime rib forever, and they're not taking notes from anyone.

Jicama ribs that read as meat are the talking point at this Vietnamese sit-down in Saint Paul, where chef Eric Pham opened his first restaurant as a tribute to his mother, a longtime figure at the family's Minneapolis institution Quang. Most plates land at $21 or under, and the menu runs from bún chay to a crispy chicken sandwich without any of it feeling like a compromise. The New York Times put it on their Restaurant List in 2026.

Tucked into a cobblestone Georgetown alley, this Turkish and Mediterranean dining room draws from homestyle cooking, particularly the "From Mom's Kitchen" section of the menu. The sesame-and-nigella-seeded bread goes with everything, and the rice-stuffed artichoke, a recreation of an Aegean dish the chef grew up eating, earned a Washingtonian dish of the year. The chef was a 2026 James Beard semifinalist for Best Chef: Mid-Atlantic.

The pitas come out of the wood oven almost too hot to handle, still puffed from the heat, and they anchor a menu built around big Mediterranean flavors in a neighborhood restaurant that also runs a soft-serve window because why not. The chef knows the local dogs by name, which tells you something about the room. Lamb ribs and meatballs fill out the regular order for anyone who can't decide, which is most people.

Menus written entirely in Spanish set the tone at this all-white coffee shop in downtown Phoenix, where the minimalism stops at the decor. The drinks lean on flavors from the chef's Mexican childhood: sweetened condensed milk and piloncillo folded into espresso, cafe de olla fragrant with cinnamon and anise, horchata made with wild rice and almond milk. It's a quiet, unhurried room that draws people who plan to stay a while.

A Hilton luxury-boutique hotel tucked a block off East Market in an old-school office building whose bones have been kept and dressed up by AvroKO in a palette that reads firmly present-tense. The result is a place that feels considered rather than corporate, and its East Market address puts guests within easy reach of some of the city's better dining and nightlife without making them work for it.

A hotel one block from the Treasury Building, which puts it about as close to the White House as anything that isn't the White House. The interiors run toward bold, design-forward choices that would raise eyebrows among the city's more buttoned-up regulars, which is precisely the point. Pennsylvania Avenue has never been known for its nightlife, and Hotel Washington seems quietly determined to do something about that.

A pointillist Ruth Bader Ginsburg covers an entire lobby wall, which tells you most of what you need to know before you've even checked in. Hotel Zena is a Viceroy property in Logan Circle that committed fully to a feminist theme after a full renovation, with warrior guardian sculptures flanking the entrance and women's achievements woven into the decor throughout. Subtle it is not, but it commits with conviction.

A 1940s Art Deco building in Dupont Circle, warm with wood and leather in the public rooms and quietly monochrome in the guest rooms, this boutique hotel leans into glamour without making you feel like you're in a museum. The neighborhood is genuinely lived-in, which helps. Lyle's, the in-house restaurant and bar, runs from breakfast through last call, so you rarely have a reason to leave before you're ready.

A former sugar factory at the quieter, river-facing edge of the French Quarter, ONE11 is a hotel whose exposed brick, timber joists, and original columns do most of the decorating. Rooms lean into the loft feeling without the austerity, landing somewhere warm and a little theatrical, which fits the neighborhood. Batture Bistro + Bar handles everything from morning coffee to late-night cocktails. The Michelin Guide has it among its selected New Orleans hotels.

A rooftop pool high enough to make you feel like you're swimming through the skyline sets the tone at this full-service hotel in River North. It runs on a go-big logic, with a 24-hour fitness center and complete business facilities, yet somehow still feels approachable, the kind of place that fusses over your dog and your kids in equal measure. Midwestern warmth, it turns out, scales up just fine.

A wrought-iron-balconied courtyard that stops you mid-step is the heart of this boutique hotel on Upper King Street. Morris Adjmi Architects designed the façade to nod at Charleston's architectural jumble without copying any of it, but step inside and the Victorian atmosphere takes over completely. Fifty rooms keep it from feeling like a scene. The Michelin Guide has it among its selected hotels.

The former home of the Portland Press Herald spent nearly a century printing the news; now it's a 110-room boutique hotel in the Old Port where the newspaper theme is more than wallpaper. The building itself does the heavy lifting, so the vintage journalist decor reads like atmosphere rather than concept. Selected by the Michelin Guide, it's a Marriott Autograph Collection property, which means independent spirit with loyalty points attached.

The cast-iron and red-brick facade fits right into Denver's River North Arts District, but the interiors take a sharp left turn into the salon of a 17th-century French marquise. This boutique hotel pulls it off without apology. Rooms run contemporary and plush, the staff dress the part, and the building houses Death & Co's Denver outpost alongside a pan-Latin restaurant from James Beard winner Dana Rodriguez.

A boutique-within-a-hotel concept tucked inside Park MGM, this feels like it belongs on a different block than the Strip. Jacques Garcia designed the rooms, which means rich fabrics and a faint sense of old-world theater. By day the pool is a pool; by evening it tilts Moroccan and nightclub. The bar and restaurant spread through the common spaces the way they do in New York and Los Angeles, which is to say they take over completely.

Sitting at 16th and Market, this boutique luxury hotel puts you within walking distance of Union Station, Coors Field, and most of Denver's better dinner decisions. Rooms lean into a retro-inflected modern sensibility that the Thompson brand does well. Ludo Lefebvre's French restaurant Chez Maggy is downstairs, and the rooftop bar Reynard Social has a Rockies view that makes it hard to go back inside.

Mid-century modern lines and warm, well-considered rooms put this Dupont Circle hotel in that narrow lane between aggressively trendy and forgettable business-chain. The Viceroy brand has a knack for making a lobby feel like somewhere you'd actually want to sit, and the DC outpost follows through with enough polish to satisfy the points-chasing traveler and enough personality to keep the boutique crowd from bolting.

Richard Branson's hotel brand carries its personality the way a tour rider carries a no-brown-M&Ms clause: loudly, and with full commitment. This New Orleans outpost is a full-service hotel on Baronne Street where the decor leans maximalist, the common spaces are built for lingering, and the vibe skews young and sociable without feeling like a hostel that found a design budget. Selected by the Michelin Guide.

A skyscraper hotel steps from City Hall, the W Philadelphia plays against type: the usual brand theatrics are dialed back in favor of something more sober and grown-up, without losing the style. Public spaces run to a swanky lounge, a rooftop bar, and a modern Italian restaurant evoking Sixties Rome. For a W, surprisingly easy to take seriously.

The oxtail gumbo here carries a whiff of hardwood smoke, which tells you everything about how this Beverly smokehouse operates. Sanders BBQ Supply Co. sits about twelve miles south of the Loop, deep in a neighborhood few tourists reach, doing the kind of slow, wood-fired barbecue that connects to Chicago's Great Migration roots. The New York Times put it on their 2025 restaurant list, and the pitmaster earned a James Beard semifinalist nod.

The darkly tinted windows and near-invisible signage in an East Nashville strip mall suggest you might have the wrong address, but push through. This casual Mexican restaurant built its following as a pandemic pop-up and landed here with a menu centered on masa, nixtamalized and ground in-house, turning up as tortillas, sopes, and tostadas. The New York Times named the asparagus tostada one of the best restaurant dishes eaten across the country in 2025. No liquor license, but the taco shop next door sells beer.

A red-brick building with white trim and a weathervane off Central Avenue that reads more Boston than Phoenix, until the palm trees remind you where you are. This outdoor coffee shop serves espresso drinks, cold brew, and specialty lattes through a window, with fresh-griddled waffles and Bagelfelds bagels to go alongside. Bring a book and a jacket in winter; in summer, you're in the sun.

Three historic buildings stitched together in Wilmington's waterfront district make up this Palisociety hotel, where rough post-industrial edges meet genuine Southern charm. Whimsical wallpaper, antiques, mid-century pieces, and contemporary furnishings share space without apology, the way a good thrift store wishes it could. The Michelin Guide awarded it one Key, and it earns the designation by feeling local in a way that most boutique hotels only gesture at.