Joseph Hoffheimer
The Place That Seems Like It Doesn’t Want Your Business
Taylor, Mississippi

To find the best catfish in Mississippi, you drive deeper into the Hill Country than seems right (the best restaurants in the South are always a little terrifying to get to) until you reach the no-stoplight town of Taylor (pop. 372). You'll know Taylor Grocery by the crowd milling around the front porch of an old general store that looks like a set for The Road. That unlikely congregation sipping brown-bagged bourbon and waiting for tables is what tips you off: Something interesting is happening here. (The walls, blanketed in graffiti like a folk-art CBGB, reinforce the point.) As a general rule, if you see people tailgating before dinner—especially if they've descended upon a nondescript storefront—go see what all the fuss is about. Because they're probably there for really good food. In Taylor, that food is catfish, which is battered in cornmeal and crisped in oil to a deep golden crunch. Order more than you think you can eat. —Nick Marino

How to Spot a Great Southern Restaurant? Look for loiterers. For Gabrielle Langholtz, who traveled to all 50 states in search of the food in her new book, America: The Cookbook (Phaidon, out October 9), the rule is: "If there is a group of people smoking outside…yes! Construction workers, farmers, and so forth, yes! That's the place."

Escape Brooklyn
The Brooklyn Outpost
North Branch, New York

A night at the restored North Branch Inn—part of the continuing Brooklyn-ization of the Catskills, a trend no one who's ever been to the Catskills will ever lament—goes like this: A few Catskill Coolers, iced and gingery, at the historic bar, a bar you never want to leave. Until you step into the hotel's tiny cinema with seats from Radio City Music Hall, and then you never want to leave that. Until you sit down and try the farmerific food. (I don't know any farmers who eat their charcuterie plates with spent-grain crackers and whiskey pickles, but I want to.)

Dinner is served off the lobby next to a tiny bowling alley, and so you will keep thinking: This is delicious, but I can't wait to bowl. The pins are so old they have to be set manually, and you will be overly Catskill Coolered, so you will spend the next couple hours learning the art of drunken pin-setting and hoping you don't get hit by your friends' reckless attempts at a spare. Give in to it. This is country life as it was never meant to be. —Jim Nelson


Also try: Brushland Eating House, Bovina, New York, just northwest of the Catskills: a restaurant in an old two-story house, run by the former chef at Prime Meats and The Grocery in N.Y.C. (who's responsible for the burger up top).

The Dual-Purpose Joint(s)
New Orleans

Banh Mi Boys

Truth be told, it's hard to say whether Melba's is a restaurant inside a laundry or a laundry inside a restaurant. What is clear is that Melba's hit the scene a few years ago with all the subtlety of the circus coming to town. The 24-hour counter-service restaurant on the border of the Seventh Ward is a riot of signage, folk art, and come-ons. It also happens to serve superlative versions of neighborhood classics: seafood po'boys ("30 Shrimp Guaranteed!"); boiled crawfish; bell peppers stuffed with meat and shrimp; and dark, slippery "9th Ward Gumbo," filled with smoked sausage and the spicy balls of meat called chaurice. Personally, I'm waiting for any excuse to buy the most intriguing deal at Melba's: 1,000 pieces of chicken for $489. Two other NOLA newcomers extend the southern tradition of great food in gas stations to the ever expanding definition of southern food. Inside a Jetgo station in Uptown, Shawarma On-the-Go is the labor of love of Abbas Alsherees, an Iraqi refugee who made New Orleans his home 24 years ago and now serves hummus, fried-eggplant sandwiches, homemade chicken shawarma, and a lamb-and-beef delicacy from his homeland called Iraqi Lula Kebab. Meanwhile, Banh Mi Boys abuts a Texaco station out in the suburb of Metairie, serving a mash-up of traditional po'boys and what the locals call "Vietnamese po'boys." So, for instance, you can get a local hot-sausage patty, dressed with the pickled vegetables of a classic banh mi: fusion of the best sort, by the light of the diesel pumps. —Brett Martin

The Diner in Name Only
Biddeford, Maine
Greta Rybu

You've got to get to the Airbnb by three, traffic around Boston was murder, and who the hell is going to pull off I-95 for a tuna melt at a diner counter?! What do you think this is, Leave It to Beaver? Maybe! While you vent, we'll be over here at the Palace Diner Instagramming the butter-salt crust on our sandwich's legendary brioche toast, easily half a foot thick around some very cold lettuce and some very exceptional tuna salad (not an oxymoron!). It competes in perfection with the diner's burger, its fried chicken, and everything else on the teeny-tiny menu. Quietly foodier specials phase in and out. The whole circa-1927 dining car rattles as cooks take in wares from local farmers. It's traffic-erasingly good. —Sarah Ball

Greg Rannells
The New Fill-Up Station
St. Louis, Missouri

You can hear the thrum of Interstate 44 from Olio, a modern Israeli restaurant in St. Louis's Botanical Heights. It was a convenient location for the building's former life as a Standard Oil filling station, originally built in the 1930s. The exterior's neatly lined with red, white, and blue tiles now, and the garage door draws up in good weather. But only a few years ago, it was another decaying building in another forgotten strip of the city. The restaurant was part of the first wave of what has become a neighborhood renaissance, reclaiming design elements of the city's past to move into the present. —Jessie Kissinger

The Chef Side Hustle
Washington, D.C.

Pull up to an unassuming Falls Church, Virginia, strip mall and you'll find a tiny Mexican restaurant owned by the son of the woman who runs the Plaza Latina Market next door. That son, it turns out, is James Beard–nominated chef Victor Albisu of D.C.'s decidedly not strip-mall-situated Latin restaurant Del Campo, so whatever comes to mind when you hear "strip-mall tacos," Taco Bamba is not that: It's the most delicious (and, sure, maybe only) crispy tongue and tripe or spicy braised goat you can enjoy overlooking a parking lot. If you have time, head to the larger location, in nearby Vienna, which features a lush bar—think Mexican-soda-inspired cocktails—and rotating tacos from the best chefs in D.C. (whom you might see on the stools next to you, ordering another bulgogi taco). —Anna Peele

Cedric Angeles
Cedric Angeles
The Place on the Docks That Redefines “Place on the Docks”
Gloucester, Massachusetts

In the archipelago of coves and points in Gloucester, a narrow one-way residential street leads to a small marina. On the docks is a weathered old building that looks like it should be serving popcorn shrimp on paper plates out a window. Instead, it houses The Market Restaurant, where Chez Panisse alums offer up a super-minimalist, super-local menu—the Island Creek oysters are a must—along with natural wine. Parking is scarce, so be prepared to walk. —Benjy Hansen-Bundy

Also try: The Marshall Store, Marshall, California; Abbott's Lobster in the Rough, Groton, Connecticut.

The Godsend
On Interstate 5 between San Francisco and Portland, Oregon

Regular drivers of the lightly populated 635-mile Interstate 5 corridor have historically been forced to eat at a gas station or have nothing at all. Yaks, a burger paradise in yawn-and-it's-gone Dunsmuir, California (pop. 1,574), has changed everything. Among the 20-plus exotic concepts on Yaks' bravura burger menu are entrées slathered in fermented garlic, beer-battered jalapeño chips, and roasted-duck chili. The Cilantro Bomb Burger—you had no idea you could eat this much cilantro at one time—is a wonder. Almost everything is local, including the beef from a closed herd that grazes on grass in the shadow of nearby Mount Shasta. —Chuck Thompson

The Place That Only Tourists Think Is Surprising
San Leon, Texas
Jody Horton

On the one hand, Gilhooley's (about an hour's drive from Houston) is just what you'd expect to find in a speck of a Gulf Coast fishing town. Fashioned out of weathered wood, with a rusty boxcar parked out front, this seafood dive is proudly unpolished, like many of its regulars, who start drinking icy longnecks at 11 a.m. and have no problem with the strict "no kids, no pets, cash only" policy. But then you start in on the Oysters Gilhooley—each simmering in its own pool of butter, garlic, and Parm after being roasted over a pecan-and-oak fire—and you realize that the best bivalves in the country are being served in a no-bullshit shack on a road you'd otherwise never travel down. —Jordan Breal

The World’s Greatest Strip-Mall Dynasty
Los Angeles
Courtesy of Petit Trois

The most coveted seats in all of the many French restaurants in Los Angeles are in an unassuming storefront wedged beside a dry cleaner and a doughnut shop. That's Trois Mec, the high temple in the triumvirate of deliciousness from the "three guys"—Ludo Lefebvre, Jon Shook, and Vinny Dotolo. The fine-dining-in-a-strip-mall thing isn't the only trend they pioneered. At Petit Trois they went democratic by lowering prices and not taking reservations, and then they brought their flavors to the masses with Mexican-leaning fast casual at Trois Familia. Think churro French toast. That's something every hot-shit restaurant is doing now—the Eleven Madison Park team just opened a chicken-and-fries spot called Made Nice, also in Manhattan. You'll want to try at least two of the three, so plan a pilgrimage to that dinky mall off Melrose. —B.H.B.

Laura Davidson
Steven L. Raymer
The Taco Truck North of the Border (Way North)
Cordova, Alaska

The tiny fishing town of Cordova, nestled between the rain forest and the coast, is the last place you'd expect to find food that seems more suited to the Baja California Peninsula more than 2,000 miles away. But at Cordova's Baja Taco, fish tacos are made with some of the world's best wild salmon, fresh from the Copper River, fried up in a rickety red school bus and served within a small cabin overlooking the harbor. —Maddie Gressel

Also try: Xiao Bao Biscuit, Charleston, South Carolina: In an old gas station, a husband-and-wife team whip up pan-Asian dishes "inspired by kick-ass grandmothers everywhere," including the American South.

The Place That Put Its Town on the Map
Coleman, Texas

The tiny farming community's main drag is all lit up again, thanks to Rancho Pizzeria, where the pies being pulled out of the brick oven are so astutely crafted—with Calabrian chiles and Genoa salami and crushed tomatoes—that a pit-stop town is now a destination. (Grab a Rhône varietal or three from sister winery Rancho Loma Vineyards across the street.) —J.B.

The Old-School Pop-Up
Greenwood, Delaware

Every summer I load my children into the car along with five metric tons of cargo for the three-hour drive from the D.C. area to the brown-sugar shores of Dewey Beach, Delaware. You might think I dread this car ride with every Dad cell in my body, but I do not. For I know of a grand and delicious secret on tiny Highway 16: Greenwood's volunteer fire department cookout, which raises money every summer weekend by slathering half chickens in a mixture of cider vinegar and poultry seasoning. Then they're grilled over hot coals until the air is perfumed with a mouthwatering scent that floats over the train tracks and directly into your car. For seven bucks, you get a tray with half a chicken, a roll, a bag of chips, and the right to douse everything in a strangely addictive sauce. These firefighters are saving lives in so many different ways. —Drew Magary

Courtesy of Winslow + Co.
Jody Horton
The Multi-Purpose Mash-Up
Austin, Texas

One half of Dai Due is a butcher shop that chops up just about everything you could imagine—from wild boar to quail. And the other half, in the back, is a restaurant that Texas food critics are calling the best in Austin—which is saying a lot these days. Jesse Griffiths and Tamara Mayfield, proprietors of both, source nearly all their ingredients from within Texas, olive oil included. Pick from either à la carte dishes like beer-braised collard greens or venison hot dogs with kimchi, or a supper-club menu, with big, shareable family-style dishes of seafood on Friday and fried chicken on Sunday. So go on Sunday. (And then again on Tuesday, when they serve the Wagyu cheeseburger, the meat ground in the front of the shop.) —B.H.B.

The Restaurant in the Woods That Nabbed a James Beard Nomination
Freedom, Maine
Nicole Franzen

It's restaurant abiogenesis: when non-human matter (the Maine woods) burps up something barely sentient (a kitchenette in an Airstream) that, after sprouting legs and a cookbook, saunters off to the James Beard Awards. For The Lost Kitchen, that took three years. But the evolution of the 40-seater, now housed in a converted gristmill, is made more remarkable by where it happened. Which is—where again? As the locals say, "Ya can't get they-ah from hee-yah." The barely GPS-able Freedom, Maine, is an inland rural town so small that the population swells five percent if the restaurant is full. No quaint lobster docks. No buoy wind chimes. Just self-taught chef Erin French and her months-long waiting list—and, buoy, is it worth going they-ah from hee-yah. —S.B.

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