Our 20 Favorite Hidden Gem Restaurants From Our Cross-Country Road Trip

From Appalachian sausage to green chile lasagna

Greenwood Restaurant in Elk, Cali.

From lobster rolls in Maine to Hot Browns in Kentucky, and Sonoran hot dogs in Tucson to beignets in New Orleans, we’ve spent the past several months eating our way across the U.S. Road tripping since last August, we’ve criss-crossed the country in near-entirety, visiting more than half the states, both coasts, and every contiguous timezone in between. Along the way, we ate food. And as you can imagine, quite a diverse array of it.

Everywhere we go, be it a big city or a rural community, it’s important to us that we taste the local flavor, so we research as much as we can to find the restaurants that exemplify their environs. Sometimes, this means a frills-free pub or a diner, while other times it means tasting menus and locally produced wine lists. High and low, we’ve visited some incredible restaurants on our recent travels, so we decided to each blindly pick 10 of our individual favorites, without discussing our picks with each other ahead of time. That might mean some overlap, and it might mean some total surprises, all under the rubric of lesser-known gems you might not find on a Google search.

Now, without further ado, here are our 20 favorite hidden gem restaurants from across the country.