The Best Places to Eat and Stay in the United States

The fried chicken biscuit comes with a wooden skewer through it just to hold the whole thing together, which tells you something about the kitchen's ambitions. This Southern-Southwestern brunch spot from the family behind Lo-Lo's Chicken and Waffles leans into the occasion: tableside bananas Foster, a full cocktail menu you can nurse past noon, and a cheerful indoor-outdoor room that has enough energy to feel like a party without scaring off anyone's parents.

Finding it requires navigating a dark brick alley past a dumpster and through an unmarked green door, which is either off-putting or exactly the point. Inside, Bull in the Alley is a low-lit cocktail bar and steakhouse, all plush high-backed booths under starburst pendants and a piano player doing his thing in the corner. The menu stays short: pick your steak, build a drink from the long list, and order the spaghetti for the table.

Burien Press is the original coffee shop from the couple behind Moonshot, Seasmith, and Fable, which makes it the one the others are trying to be. Drinks lean seasonal and simple, built on Olympia beans, and the pastry case is anchored by a gluten-free banana bread that eats like coffee cake. When coffee o'clock passes, beer and wine take over, so nobody has to leave.

The name undersells it: Butchertown Grocery Bakery is a breakfast and lunch spot where the pastry case gets equal billing with the sandwich menu. The wagyu pastrami sandwich with hot mustard and a runny egg has the kind of following that fills tables before noon. Weekend mornings bring out the rolled croissants in rotating flavors, the kind of thing people plan their Saturdays around without quite admitting it.

The smell of butter hits before you've even read the menu, which is a fine way to start a weekend lunch. Butterjoint is a casual neighborhood spot in Oakland doing sandwiches, pierogi, and baked goods with a serious hand. The rolls with roasted cipollini onion butter and the vinegar pie, a Depression-era custardy thing with a crunchy top, are reason enough to come. Colorful booths in the bar section fill up fast.

Pandan Basque cheesecakes in a San Jose strip mall, which is a sentence that doesn't get old. CA Bakehouse is a takeout-only bakery working Southeast Asian flavors into croissants, milk breads, egg tarts, and whole cheesecakes you have to preorder. The banh bo, a soft honeycomb cake, sits alongside coconut-stuffed pandan milk bread that has no business being this good for the price. The San Francisco Chronicle named it one of the Bay Area's best bakeries.

A daytime sandwich shop tucked between the office towers of downtown San Francisco, Cafe du Soleil runs a tight lunch rush with a short line and shorter seating. The prosciutto sandwich, layered with brie and roasted bell peppers, is the kind of thing coworkers quietly compare notes on. Yerba Buena Gardens is a short walk when the tables fill up, which is most days.

Cafe Sous Terre is a basement cafe and bar tucked under a brick mansion that now rents rooms to strangers, and it plays the French cafe of a century ago with green subway tile and long banquettes. By day it's laptops, coffee sodas, and quiche. After dark it's martinis, a croque monsieur, and weekly Vinyl Wednesdays. Eater lists it among Detroit's best bars and best coffee shops, so the same table does double duty.

Café Zamora is a small coffee shop on Powell where the beans come from the family's own farm in Guatemala, which makes "single origin" feel less like a menu term and more like a family tree. They roast on Tuesdays, so the bags on the shelf are fresher than most of your groceries. There are a few tables, a few counter seats, and an owner who'll chat while he pours, which is how first-timers turn into regulars.

Calafia is a pink-lit cantina in Portland's West End, the sort of room where everyone looks like they've had a good week. The menu is Mexican by way of Baja, San Diego, and the Maine coast, so the fish tacos and the Jonah crab churros are both doing local work. Cocktails lean agave, including a tequila take on the sweetened condensed milk citrus smoothie. Expect dinner prices, and a dress code of whatever flatters pink light.

Calico is a casual Italian restaurant on Moose Wilson Road, tucked between Wilson and Teton Village, with a patio and a big fenced lawn where kids roam while their parents stay seated. A garden out back supplies some of the herbs and produce, which is a nice touch for people who like knowing where their basil spent the summer. It's on The Infatuation's list of top Jackson Hole restaurants, and the jalapeño margaritas draw their own following.

Camp Outpost is a casual counter-service spot in Springdale built around a custom rotisserie, which turns out whole chickens for a camp plate that comes in under $30. The patio is big and the fire pit is communal, so strangers in hiking boots end up roasting s'mores together like a very low-stakes cult. Breakfast burritos and overnight oats cover mornings, and the whole thing sits right beside the Desert Pearl Inn.

Café de olla arrives in a clay mug at this Latin-inflected coffee shop tucked into a converted bungalow in Montrose. The traditional Mexican brew, steeped with cinnamon and piloncillo, is reason enough to visit, but empanadas and tamales with plantain chips make a reasonable case for staying through lunch. Laptops outnumber idle hands on most afternoons, and the horchata keeps the non-coffee crowd from feeling like an afterthought.

Cà phê trứng, the traditional Vietnamese egg coffee, is the thing to know before you walk in. Càphin is a Vietnamese coffee shop that graduated from farmers market food truck to its first permanent spot, bringing along the creamy egg coffees, pandan espresso drinks, and ube matcha lattes that built the following. Pastries come from Cardigan Donuts and Mogi Bagel, so the case pulls its weight too. Order ahead if you're in a hurry.

A maiz latte made with corn milk is either the thing that convinces you or the thing you have to explain to your friends later. This Mexican coffee shop sets up inside a Northside bar during daytime hours, serving a short menu of coffee drinks built around Mexican flavors, from Mazapán-infused espresso to matcha laced with Fruit Loops. It's a coffee shop that knows exactly what kind of fun it wants to have.

Carlyle Club sits on the Chicago River and runs a menu that can't decide between a steakhouse and a sushi bar, then declines to choose. Dry-aged steaks share the table with raw bar towers, handmade pasta, and a wagyu cooked over binchotan. There's a small sushi counter for the committed, plus hand rolls at the bar for everyone else. Expect an all-day, expense-account kind of room where a burger and a lobster pie coexist peacefully.

A Foster-Powell coffee shop where the decor leans into geology: carnelian specimens line the shelves, roasts carry names like Thunderegg, and the view from the patio is a gravel yard across the street, which fits the theme better than intended. The house-roasted coffee is carefully made, the room is cozy and russet-toned, and the whole thing feels quietly, pleasantly odd in a way that Portland pulls off without trying.

A taco spot in Allentown where the al pastor comes with beets alongside the pineapple and onion, which sounds like a challenge and mostly works in its favor. The fish tacos, beer-battered cod with beet-marinated onion and herb aioli, tend to get overlooked next to the flashier options. Flavored margaritas run toward dragonfruit-ginger and hibiscus-coconut, so the room skews festive. Churros with dulce de leche close things out.

Castizo is a tapas bar in Seville, and the name is Sevillano shorthand for exactly that, so the pressure to deliver was built in. The open kitchen runs in plain view behind an L-shaped bar that wouldn't look out of place in a modern French bistro, and the sherry list is deep enough to keep you there past the point of reason. Eater named it among the 20 best restaurants in Seville. Ask about the seafood counter before you order.

A coffee shop built around crates of vinyl, Caydence on Payne Avenue doubles as a record store and a small live-music room. The drinks lean adventurous, pairing peanut butter and cardamom in one latte, caramel creme brulee in another. Weekend evenings bring local musicians into the back room, and the first Sunday of the month is a free bluegrass jam, which is either a reason to show up or a reason to plan around it.

A rambling beach shack just north of the Wrightsville Beach drawbridge, Ceviche's leans Panamanian rather than strictly Peruvian, with a long list of ceviches, empanadas, and tapas built for sharing alongside bigger plates like ropa vieja and paella. The whole setup, sandy-casual and loud with cocktails going around, makes the kind of sense that only works two blocks from the water.

The beef on weck here is the reason Buffalo has strong opinions about sandwiches: a massive rib roast, sliced to order, piled onto a kummelweck roll with enough jus to make you look confident or foolish, depending on your shirt choice. This is an old-school deli counter, the kind that locals treat as a civic institution. The corned beef and roast turkey are solid detours, and the snickerdoodles are comically oversized, as advertised.

There's no menu at this old-school New Orleans steakhouse, just a cut, a dressing, a starch, and the implicit social contract that you say yes to the onion rings. No leather booths, no cowboy kitsch, no performance of steakhouse-ness whatsoever. The room has been left mostly untouched by its current owners, which is the right call. The New York Times named it among the 25 best restaurants in New Orleans.

A former pop-up that found a permanent home inside Au Lounge in downtown Oakland, Chef Smelly's draws on Creole family recipes to put out Cajun-spiced seafood and soul food. Garlicky Dungeness crab and blackened shrimp anchor the menu, and the platters run large enough to qualify as a commitment. The San Francisco Chronicle named it among the Bay Area's top seafood spots. Dress accordingly: this is crab-cracking, garlic-breath, no-apologies territory.

Cherry Coffee Roasters started as a pop-up inside a deli and somehow ended up with a roastery across the river in Gretna. The Uptown cafe sits in a sunny old building on a quiet stretch of Laurel Street, and it's the sort of place where laptops outnumber conversations. Over in Gretna, the cafe is attached to the roasting floor, so your pastry comes with a free lesson in what you're drinking if you catch a cupping.

Chibanos is a casual sandwich shop in Washington Square West where Cuban and Chinese cooking share a single piece of toasted pan cubano. Char siu pork goes between the bread, and breakfast versions ride on soft bolo baos. The yuca fries and Chinese sausage croquetas are there if you want a side, and the jasmine flan closes things out. Order at the counter, then settle in at a table inside or out, where half the neighborhood seems to be doing the same. The Infatuation put it at number 25 on its list of Philadelphia's best restaurants.

The coffee ceremony here arrives in a jebena, the traditional Ethiopian clay flask, and it's not a performance for tourists but the way the place works. Chibo is an Ethiopian coffee shop tucked into a Lilburn strip mall, serving espresso and drip alongside house-roasted beans you can take home. Sambusa and kinche are made to order. The couple who run it treat every visitor like a regular they just haven't met yet.

Seafood restaurant, sushi bar, steakhouse, and pizza joint all share one menu here, which sounds like a dare but somehow holds together. Nick Saban used to bring recruits, so the room has seen its share of high-stakes small talk over gumbo. The sushi program is serious enough that the chef has a following of her own. A good place to bring someone you're trying to impress, whether or not you're offering a scholarship.

A former Darwin's location reborn as a worker-owned cooperative coffee shop, where the staff collectively run the place and share in the profits. The menu carries over some old favorites alongside new ones, and the coffee comes from Equal Exchange, another worker-owned co-op, because apparently the solidarity doesn't stop at the door. A neighborhood spot in Cambridge where your latte is, in a small way, a political act.

Fruit cobbler counts as a vegetable here, which tells you everything about City Cafe's approach to the food pyramid. This old-school lunch counter in Northport has been feeding working-class locals and college students forever, turning out cheap, hearty plates to roughly a thousand people a day. The menu rotates by day of the week, giving regulars a reason to come back Tuesday. Crimson Tide posters and a hand-painted mural hold down the walls.

Polished concrete floors and olive-green banquettes replaced the worn carpet when City View moved to its new spot overlooking Portsmouth Square, and the room now reads more gallery than dim sum hall. The classics still show up on the carts, though, and the baked pork buns arrive airy with a crackly top. A sleeker option than the old-school palaces nearby, and the San Francisco Chronicle named it among the best dim sum spots in the Bay Area.

This is a casual, order-at-the-counter cafe perched on a cliff above the Pacific, attached to a gliderport, so your sandwich comes with a floor show of hang gliders stepping off the edge. Wraps, sandwiches, and soup-and-half-sandwich combos run under $14, and you eat outside in whatever you wore to the beach. It closes early when the fog or rain shows up, which is also when the gliders call it a day.