The Best Places to Eat and Stay in the United States

The noodles come from Sapporo, which tells you something about how seriously this ramen counter takes its business. Downstairs, bowls of springy, custom-made noodles arrive in a long-simmered broth, with a vegetarian version that holds its own against the pork. Upstairs flips into a Japanese tavern pouring sake and yuzu cocktails alongside a full menu of drinking snacks. Two moods, one address, zero bad options on either floor.

This is a longtime Mexican restaurant on Las Vegas Boulevard that does tamales the old way, tucked into masa that stays soft, with sweet pineapple-and-raisin ones for anyone who wants dessert to count as breakfast. The menu runs from chilaquiles through mole and tortilla soup, and weekends bring a shrimp caldo that works as a hangover plan. Prices stay modest, and nobody dresses up for it.

Double Dragon is a Division Street lounge where the island-bar mood comes with a short, focused menu of burgers, banh mi, and rice bowls, plus well-made cocktails. Dinner here is bar-priced and nobody is dressed up. The potato salad is the side dish people bring up, creamy and funky with fish sauce and pickled mustard seed, and somehow vegan, which feels like a clerical error in the best way.

The buttermilk pancakes here have a firm, golden exterior with a pillowy interior, and the kitchen sends them out with salted clarified butter that makes the whole thing feel like a considered decision. Du-par's is a classic American diner, been around forever, tucked inside the Original Farmers Market on Fairfax. It serves breakfast into evening, which is the kind of flexibility a pancake this good earns.

A small espresso counter tucked into the side of a vintage clothing and furniture store, Earl serves coffee through a brick-inlaid window that connects the two spaces. Grab a seasonal flavored drink, then wander the racks next door, which is about as Nashville as an afternoon gets. The grab-and-go cooler stocks bites from a local caterer, worth checking before you leave.

Eatóri Market is a casual Italian-leaning cafe and grocery on Capitol Park, where the dining room grew into the old grocery space and the groceries moved next door into a former nail bar. The pours of wine are generous, the menu is the kind you can eat in a sweater, and the patio is built for watching Capitol Park go by. Reservations run through Resy, which feels fancy for a place that also sells you pantry staples.

El Moose is an all-day Mexican spot in Ballard where floral oilcloths and papel picado do the decorating and café de olla does the reviving. It's casual, priced like a place you'd go twice in a weekend, and the out-late-last-night crowd fills the room by mid-morning. The alambres come with cheese that melts on contact, and a fried egg on top is the sort of move the brunch gods tend to notice. Arrive early.

Extra Wavy is a seafood restaurant on Chouteau Ave where pink and green fishing nets hang from exposed brick and heavy wood beams, as if a New England dockhand had a very good decorator. The cocktails get most of the attention, including a cherry margarita with pistachio foam, and nearly every drink comes in a non-alcoholic version. Dinner runs to scallop crudo and fish and chips, and the bar suits a solo seat.

Fat Tuesday is a frozen-drink bar on the Strip, where the lines are made of sunburned tourists who have already started drinking. The machines churn out slushy cocktails, and a server runs between dispensers layering strawberry daiquiri over piña colada for the Miami Vice. You can add a floater of tequila served in a test tube, then carry the cup anywhere the Strip's open-container rules allow, which is nearly everywhere.

You walk through a working Italian grocery to reach the dining room, which is the first sign this isn't a place with a lot of interest in minimalism. Red-and-white checkered tablecloths, Chianti bottles overhead, and long family-style tables built for birthdays and rehearsal dinners. It's a red-sauce pizza and pasta joint with a cheap check, and the antipasto salad and garlic bread arrive like they were never optional.

Fine Company is a daytime restaurant in Downtown Summerlin that does breakfast and lunch in a semi-casual room, and it locks up at 5 p.m., so don't show up hungry for dinner. The morning pick is the soft brown butter French toast, and lunch leans toward light salads and grain bowls, with a bone broth borrowed from a steakhouse for the quietly virtuous. The founding chef's banana bread stuck around after he left.

A sandwich shop in Chinatown that stays open until 1:30 a.m. on weekends, which tells you most of what you need to know. The team behind it includes a Howlin' Ray's veteran, so the menu earns its confidence: a spicy Italian loaded with 'nduja and stracciatella crema sits next to a peanut butter and jelly, and nobody seems bothered by the range. A double hot dog is also available, for those keeping score at home.

Freedom Beat is the casual live-music restaurant inside the Downtown Grand, a few blocks from the Fremont Street canopy, where a Hell's Kitchen winner runs a menu of American greatest hits. The pot roast sandwich, gravy and cheese packed between crisp sourdough, is served until midnight or later, which matters at that hour. Weekend brunch is all-you-can-eat with bottomless mimosas, so plan accordingly.

An Italian American restaurant in Midtown that has been a fixture for Midtown media types and political regulars since the nineties, run by the Scotto family with the kind of front-of-house warmth that makes you feel like the reservation mattered. The linguine vongole and a chopped salad are the moves. Arrive late and you may find a DJ has materialized, followed shortly by a conga line, which is not something most pasta dinners promise.

Giau is a Vietnamese bar and lounge in Katy Asian Town, a quieter sibling to the Bellaire Boulevard original, lit by neon and a wall sign that puns on Hennessy. Weekends bring a live DJ, and the cocktails come with showmanship, like a pineapple and passion fruit drink crowned with a giant bubble that exists to be popped. Fish sauce wings and shaking beef rice plates keep the late-night snacking from getting dainty.

Ginger Mule is a casual plant-based restaurant in the Heights, which in Houston is a bold thing to be, and it has a loyal following to show for it. The menu runs from heart of palm ceviche to a Massaman curry, and brunch brings vegan sausage tacos and French toast with whipped oat cream. Gluten-free and dairy-free folks get to order without interrogating the server, a small luxury that explains the regulars.

Glitter Gulch Tiki is a dim tiki bar a few steps off Fremont Street, which is where you go once the neon and LED screens have worn you down. The booths are straw-thatched, the drinks are strong, and the scorpion bowls arrive swimming in 151-proof rum. The bartender sets the Luau In Vegas on fire with a torch, so keep your eyebrows back. The Infatuation lists it among Downtown's best restaurants.

The medium smash is the whole philosophy here: a juicy center, lacy crisp rim, nothing overthought. This is a smashburger shop in Los Feliz, one of several around the city, all using grass-fed California beef from regenerative farms. Singles and doubles come dressed with shredded lettuce, crinkly pickles, and white onion, with curly or straight fries alongside. Eater named it among Los Angeles's essential restaurants, which tracks for a place with a line of regulars who don't bother with the menu.

A Korean pub from the team behind Golden Diner, where the viral pancakes made the place famous. Here the drinks come first, running from martinis and milk punch to Korean spirits and low-ABV options, and the food is built to keep up with them. Fried wings in gochujang glaze, dumplings a few ways, raw bar picks, and savory pancakes that borrow from both sides of that tradition fill out a menu that has no interest in being subtle.

GoodMart is a casual Ballard seafood spot built for a sit-down lunch, which is a dying art that apparently never got the memo. Each fish gets its own preparation, served with salad and rice, so there's no assembling a meal from a dozen small plates. Black cod comes glazed in apple miso, ling cod wears a panko crust, and the playlist is good enough that you may find yourself quietly mouthing along.

This is the Gordon Ramsay reality-show restaurant on the Strip, where a hologram of the man himself greets you at the door. Past it, a cavernous dining room puts pitchforks on everything that can hold one, including the ice cubes. Expect a crowd of hungry people at the entrance and a three-course prix fixe that runs well over a hundred dollars a head. Skeptics and superfans tend to end up equally entertained.

A cafe and market the size of a generous toolshed on Coconut Grove's pedestrian strip, where a communal table out front has turned a 30-minute wait for a yuzu tuna sandwich and a cappuccino into a sunny Saturday ritual. The kitchen is small but restless, turning out whatever's seasonal alongside specialty pantry finds that will quietly devastate your budget. The crowd skews young and takes their sandwich symmetry seriously.

A Korean coffee shop on Colonial Drive where the black sesame latte has quietly become the reason people plan their Saturday mornings. The team recently banned weekend wifi just to reclaim some seats, which tells you something about the crowd. Rotating drinks like toasted rice cold brew and chestnut tiramisu lattes keep the regulars cycling back, and the croffle, a croissant-waffle hybrid, gives people something to eat while they wait.

Hai Cang is a Vietnamese-Chinese seafood house on Bellaire Boulevard where the platters of crab, lobster, and noodles arrive at a scale better suited to a group than a date. The lobster comes wok-fried in dry spices and the Dungeness is fire-red, so napkins are less a courtesy than a survival strategy. Bring a crowd, because the lazy susan has to earn its keep.

This is a sit-down hot pot chain in Katy where the wait is part of the show, with free snacks, a manicure option, and a robot servers rolling past on delivery runs. Once seated, you choose up to four broths for the table and build your own dipping sauce at a bar that gets treated with the seriousness of a chemistry final. Plan on a long, loud, bubbling dinner, plus a face-changing opera performance if the timing cooperates.

This is a Korean BBQ spot where the grilling happens at your table and the staff will politely take over if you're being slow about it. Service moves at a pace that suggests nobody here has ever lingered over a menu. Reservations only open up for parties of six or more, so everyone else joins the waitlist and hopes. There's an all-you-can-eat option, with a $20 penalty for leaving food behind, which is a surprisingly effective motivator.

This is a casual all-day diner on the ground floor of the Plaza, run by a chain with a "twisted farm food" theme, which mostly means everything arrives enormous. The fried chicken and waffles comes stacked with bacon and fried leeks and demands a plan of attack. Hashes land in cast-iron skillets, and the clientele skews toward people who stayed up late downtown and are now being sensible about it.

An all-day deli, market, and restaurant tucked into Echo Park's edge, sharing a complex with a bakery and a used bookshop, which is either very convenient or a plot to keep you there all afternoon. The team behind it cut their teeth at serious kitchens, and the menu runs from Clark Street bread sandwiches at lunch to a Zuni-riffing roast chicken at dinner. The room is casual and light-filled, the kind where people stop pretending they're just popping in.

The bar stools here are swings, which tells you everything about the mood. Heyday is a neighborhood restaurant and bar tucked into the courtyard of a midcentury hotel in Waikiki, leaning hard into the retro-tropical bit with mai tai variations and boozy slushies alongside cheesy toast and a fried mahi sandwich that reads as a Filet-o-Fish with ambitions. After dark, the Green Lady Cocktail Room in room eight opens as a dark lounge spilling into a palm-fringed courtyard.

This is a relaxed all-day restaurant on North Figueroa where the patio is the main event and the interior is more of a comfortable waiting room for it. The outdoor bar pours frozen daiquiris on weekends, which tells you how the afternoon will go. The dinner menu leans Midwest comfort, with chicken parm and steak au poivre, so nobody has to commit to a theme. Eater has it on its Highland Park list.

Hokkaido is a casual counter-order sushi spot tucked into a corner of a Bellaire Blvd shopping center, lit like the inside of a honey jar. You order up front, sit wherever you like, and a cashier somehow delivers each plate to the right person, a trick nobody has explained. The nigiri and sashimi combos are easy on the wallet, and the miso soup keeps coming. It made The Infatuation's list of Houston's Chinatown restaurants.

Nashville hot chicken shop in Chinatown where the line used to stretch far enough that people brought lawn chairs. The spice levels are genuine, and the brave ones who go scorching tend to provide free entertainment for everyone behind them. Wings, tenders, and sandwiches are the draw, with sides like collard greens and banana pudding worth ordering even if the chicken somehow lets you down. It rarely does.

The owner built this wood-fired pizza spot himself from recycled materials, made the stools, maintains a chicken coop out back, and processes rainwater on site. If that sounds like a lot, the thin-crusted, springy pizzas are doing their part too. Mostly outdoor seating means summer is the sweet spot, but the boutique brews, rotating ciders, and the easy International District energy make a case for showing up in a jacket anyway.

Il Culaccino is a sit-down Italian American restaurant across from Wintrust Arena, which explains the pre-game crowd and the chicken Vesuvio. The menu runs red-sauce classics, prime steaks, and lighter pastas, all under burgundy leather banquettes that look like they've heard a few secrets. A wine bar spills onto a covered patio for warmer nights, and the owners also run Franco's in Bridgeport.

Ilili is a Lebanese dinner-and-brunch spot at the Wharf, where hanging vines, cages of light-up birds, and a trickling stone fountain make the dining room look like a very well-funded aviary. Hand-painted tiles cover the floor, and graduation parties and promotion dinners show up in their Sunday best. Skip the small plates for the mixed grill, a charred platter built for sharing.