The Best Places to Eat and Stay in the United States

A boutique hotel planted steps from Coors Field, The Rally is what happens when a city's downtown revival actually takes hold. The LoDo neighborhood around it fills with bars, restaurants, and a game-day crowd that knows exactly where it's going, and the hotel sits at the center of McGregor Square's mix of shops, event spaces, and nightlife. A Michelin Selected Hotel, so the rooms won't let the location down.

Rooms on the river side look straight down onto the Riverwalk and across at Tribune Tower, which is a better alarm clock than most hotels can offer. The Royal Sonesta is a luxury hotel on the Chicago River, right where it bends around the Magnificent Mile, and that address is rarer than it sounds. The Michelin Guide lists it among its selected hotels. Pack accordingly for the architecture views alone.

A Gold Coast hotel that was doing the boutique thing before anyone called it that, the Talbott has the bones of an older, quieter Chicago and a recent overhaul by local designer Kara Mann to keep it feeling current. Rooms are residential-scale rather than grand, which suits the neighborhood, where the vibe runs more old-money discreet than convention-circuit splash. A solid, unfussy base for the North Side.

The minibar charges corner-shop prices, a small act of decency that sets the tone for this Loop hotel inside a restored building that's been around forever. Rooms split in two with sliding doors for travel companions on different sleep schedules, and the beds convert into lounge configurations, since apparently a chair that works is too much to ask of most hotels. A rooftop bar and two restaurants round things out.

Warm, eclectic interiors that feel like someone actually collected the pieces rather than ordered them from a mood board. Yours Truly is a boutique hotel in Dupont Circle that belongs to IHG's Vignette Collection, pitching itself somewhere between high-design cool and genuinely livable. The industrial bones nod to an earlier era of design hotels, but the result reads more like a well-traveled apartment than a set piece. The Michelin Guide has it among its selected hotels.

Thirteen rooms tucked into a pair of former South Street rowhouses, Yowie is a boutique hotel from a designer who spent years at Ralph Lauren before coming home to Philadelphia. The brick exterior is classic Queen Village, but inside it runs minimalist and colorful, full of the same eye that built her homewares shop downstairs. There's no front desk, just a self-check-in that feels less like hospitality protocol and more like borrowing a very stylish friend's apartment.

Fried oyster deviled eggs and a lobster corndog share menu space with whole grilled branzino and oxtail lasagna, which tells you everything about what chef Jasmine Norton is going for here. This casual-to-dressy neighborhood restaurant in Hampden has aquamarine walls hung with pop art prints and a hand-woven rope tapestry, a room that takes itself just seriously enough. A James Beard semifinalist and one of Eater's essential Baltimore spots.

This Korean pub on Northbrook's Milwaukee Avenue strip treats baseball, karaoke, and a very large amount of fried chicken as one coherent plan. Beer arrives in a tableside tower, which turns a seafood pancake into a group project. It's casual and loud in the way a place with a karaoke setup has to be, and it works best with a crowd that doesn't mind sharing a tteokbokki skillet and an opinion on the pitching.

Perched on its own peninsula about an hour east of Atlanta, this Ritz-Carlton breaks from the brand's usual playbook with Craftsman-style architecture that feels at home among the pines and lakeshore. Rooms and lakeside cottages cover the lodging, while five championship golf courses, kayaks, water bikes, and a full spa handle everything else. A Forbes Four Star and Michelin Key property that functions, without apology, as an upscale summer camp for adults.

Concrete walls, candles, and a staff you could count on one hand: this Little Havana tasting menu spot runs on a kind of controlled intensity that bigger kitchens couldn't pull off. The chef and a sous cook, plate, and clear the room themselves, turning out a frequently changing contemporary menu where the roasted plantain brioche, served hot with caramelized coconut butter, appears to be non-negotiable. Counter seats put you closest to the action.

The cured olive cookie has been living rent-free in regulars' heads for years, which tells you something about this East Village espresso bar. Abraço roasts its own, keeps laptops out, and occasionally pivots to cocktails for evening music events, which is either a flex or just very New York. The room fills fast on weekends, the bites are small and creative, and the whole operation runs with a neighborhood-institution energy that's genuinely hard to fake.

East Colfax doesn't usually do "sexy Eastern European," but Molotov Kitschen makes a convincing case for the phrase. The chef, a James Beard semifinalist, roots the menu in Ukrainian cooking, rotating dumplings and borscht alongside dishes that treat radishes and buckwheat like they have something to prove. Horilka cocktails and Balkan wines round things out. Counter seats are the move if you can get them.

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 private compound of log cabins and a main lodge sitting on 1,500 forested acres near the Allegheny National Forest, Glendorn is the kind of place that makes a weekend feel like a month. It holds a Forbes Four Star rating. Fishing, hiking, and shooting round out the days; the evenings quietly do the rest. The whole estate has the feel of a very wealthy family's old retreat, because that is exactly what it was.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A 1929 Art Deco skyscraper in Wicker Park, repurposed by Mexico's Grupo Habita into 89 rooms with the brand's signature low-key cool. A Belgian design team carved the old North Tower offices into spare, elegant guest quarters, and the 13th-floor indoor-outdoor bar is the kind of thing that makes you forget you came here on business. Tokyobike rentals at the door nudge you toward the neighborhood rather than the lobby.

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 old Atlantic Bank building on Michigan Avenue, a downtown landmark, now runs as a lifestyle hotel with Millennium Park views from many of the contemporary rooms. The gym is properly equipped, and the in-house restaurant, About Last Knife, folds West African and Latin American flavors into an American bistro menu. A solid base for anyone who'd rather walk to the lakefront than deal with a cab.

A former chain hotel that Provenance Hotels quietly stripped down and made over, the Dossier is a luxury boutique stay in the thick of downtown Portland. The hotel leans into local, with Oregon wines, regional beers, and an all-day bar pulling the neighborhood inside. Powell's Books is a short walk away, and so is most of what makes Portland worth visiting, which does a lot of the hotel's work for it.

A rooftop bar with a Latin-Caribbean lean, a pool bar that explains itself, and a diner that eats healthier than it looks: the East Austin Hotel packs a lot of personality into one address on East 6th. The rooms lean into classic Americana with a modernist eye, and the whole place has that particular Austin quality of caring about the good life without making a production of it. Selected by the Michelin Guide.

The timber beams running floor to ceiling were load-bearing long before this became a hotel, back when trains rolled through the basement hauling farm equipment across the Midwest. Now it's a boutique hotel in the Warehouse District, dressed in dusky mid-century rooms with industrial bones intact. The rooftop sauna is a sincere amenity in a Minneapolis winter, and Tullibee downstairs does locally sourced New American when you're ready to come in from the cold.

The name isn't a coincidence: this boutique hotel on the Magnificent Mile took Einstein's formula as its organizing thesis, and the stacks of books in the lobby are there to prove it. Rooms lean into an art-meets-science conceit with Deco-inspired design that manages to feel clever without being exhausting about it. The kind of place where the décor has a point of view, which is either appealing or a lot, depending on your mood.

A boutique hotel on Broadway where the staff seem to have actually read the memo about being helpful, which turns out to be rarer than it should be. The rooms won't break your Instagram, but the place has a genuine personality and the kind of attentive service that makes a downtown Portland stay feel less transactional. Selected by the Michelin Guide, which rewards exactly that combination.

A converted seed factory in the Union Market district, Hotel Nell is a boutique hotel where the horticultural past shows up in deep greens, live foliage, and a rooftop bar called the Treehouse. Rooms have exposed beams and art from local artists. The farmers market down the street supplies breakfast, and green roofs keep the building cool, because of course they do.

A vinyl collection the size of a small record store sets the tone at this boutique hotel on Fisherman's Wharf, the neighborhood locals love to warn you about. Named after rock-and-roll poster artist Alton Kelley, the Kimpton Alton leans into San Francisco's countercultural past with a bohemian-modernist look that earns the reference rather than just wearing it. The Michelin Guide includes it among its selected hotels.

A downtown Denver hotel that manages to be colorful without leaning on spurs and tumbleweeds. The rooms pull off local flavor with some actual restraint, and the Spa Rooms add soaking tubs for anyone who wants to edge toward full luxury. Kimpton's daily hosted wine hour is a genuine institution across their properties, and the in-house Italian restaurant, Panzano, punches well above hotel-dining expectations. The Michelin Guide has it among their selected hotels.

A boutique hotel sitting essentially next door to Independence Hall, the Monaco is Kimpton doing something a little looser and more playful than usual: brighter colors, a whimsical streak, less corporate gravitas than you'd expect from a building in the heart of Philadelphia's business district. Center City has no shortage of stiff, conservative hotels, and this one cheerfully ignores that tradition. Selected by the Michelin Guide.

A converted Beaux-Arts building in the middle of downtown makes a strong first impression, and the Monaco leans into it with bold, pattern-heavy rooms that feel more like a friend's well-traveled apartment than a chain hotel stay. It's a Kimpton property, so expect the pet-friendly door policy, the hosted evening wine hour, and a staff that's notably hard to rattle. Salt Lake surprises visitors more than its reputation suggests, and this hotel is part of why.