Best Restaurants in America

This family-owned establishment in the California capital was founded in 1991. Executive chef Kelly McCown sources ingredients locally and from around the country for such seasonal preparations as crispy Maine lobster cakes, slow-roasted rack of lamb, and huckleberry and rhubarb crumble.

Chicago-born chef-restaurateur Daniel Rose made his reputation with a small restaurant he opened in Paris in 2006 called Spring, now closed. In 2015, he launched a second Paris restaurant, La Bourse et la Vie, and the following year he took over a classic bistro called Chez la Vieille. Also in 2016, he started cooking professionally in the U.S. for the first time in his career, with his comfortably elegant Le Coucou. His food, which is pure French, both modern and traditional — oysters with seaweed granité, grilled foie gras with artichokes, duck à  l’orange — has won rave reviews ever since.

The menus at this rustic but extravagantly accoutred institution northeast of Seattle, in one of the state’s major wine regions, change seasonally but also from day to day, and are built around seasonal themes (Chambers of the Sea, Salmon Nation, An Indian Summer, etc.). Such Pacific Northwestern ingredients as Alaska weathervane scallops, Dungeness crab, Rosario Strait halibut, and “historic bark and root decoctions [beverages] of the American West” are featured.

This Honolulu classic offers “the best of the season [from] ocean, forest, farm, ranch.” The restaurant’s three multi-course fixed-price menus include such local gastronomic treasures as confit Big Island abalone, roasted Keahole lobster, and onaga (longtail snapper) in tomato and ogo seaweed sauce for two, served tableside.

Herons is the dining room at the upscale Umstead Hotel and Spa, near North Carolina’s Raleigh-Durham International Airport. The dinner menu offers three- and four-course menus, plus a special eight-course Art Tour menu, inspired by the hotel’s art collection. Sample dishes include white asparagus soup with smoked trout, quail with salsify purée and fava beans, and jasmine sorbet with Meyer lemon curd and Earl Grey shortbread.