As rides go, the last 20 years have pretty much had it all. Thrills, spills, twists, turns, all at blinding speed—never mind those few flips upside down they didn’t warn you about—and here we are, just talking about the food. You can get off rides, but this one doesn’t seem to want to end, with city after city across the United States growing their respective restaurant cultures so quickly, it’s almost dizzying, even if we’re still terribly excited for what’s next.

Surfing from trend to trend, here today, gone tomorrow—as fast as we’re into something, we’re almost over it. For quite some time, this has been our normal, going back at least to the Great Recession, and nearly to the beginning of the century. At the dawn of a new decade, we’re still looking ahead, but this time, also asking, ever so quietly, in the nicest possible way: What if we slow down for a minute and take a few deep breaths? What if we took some time to appreciate what’s already here?

After the better part of three years traveling the 50 states (and beyond) for Food & Wine, sneaking into the new hotspots, glimpsing the future everywhere from Los Angeles to Columbus to Tampa, eating Instagram-famous sandwiches, lining up for the hottest breakfast tacos in Portland, and sipping too many single-estate espressos, I find my fascination with the past growing.

We didn’t invent restaurants in 2009, after all. There were FOMO-provoking dishes long before social media had them traveling around the world, people planned vacations just to eat (do you even New Orleans?), and America had celebrity chefs and must-see cooking shows, back when it was mostly PBS doing the heavy lifting. And we are still so fortunate, truly, to have so many of those restaurants, and even some of the chefs, with us still, from that long-ago era—let us say, for the sake of drawing a line, everything from right around the millennium, going backward.

In recent years, it is at these restaurants that I have made some of the most unique, most joyful memories from my travels—martinis after five o’clock at San Francisco’s Tadich Grill, one of the oldest restaurants in the country; smoked sturgeon breakfasts at the camera-ready Barney Greengrass in New York; a late night in the dessert room at Tampa’s thrillingly vintage Bern’s Steak House; the perfect smash burger at the 101-year-old, woman-powered Workingman’s Friend in Indianapolis. This is the stuff that I want more of in 2020, these are the experiences that will stick with me forever—long after I’ve forgotten about the latest all-day cafe in Silver Lake, the hottest new food hall in Chicago, or that one place, somewhere in Brooklyn, everyone will be talking about for the next six months before moving on.

This nearly 17,000-word survey features roughly 250 different restaurants, from furthest Alaska to sunny South Florida. It represents an attempt at examining each state’s unique fingerprint on this vast, remarkably diverse thing that we call American food. I’m grateful to have 20-plus years of experience traveling around the country on assignment to draw on, and I’m even more grateful to my colleagues at Food & Wine, past and present, for providing many a directional sign, particularly through our back catalog of the annual Best New Chefs and Best New Restaurants franchises, alongside countless feature articles. Ultimately, think of this guide as a road map, if a little rough, like it were drawn on the back of a napkin, designed to jog your memory, or to push you toward a greater appreciation of our shared culinary heritage. Have fun out there—I sure did.

MICHIGAN

There is nothing about little Frankenmuth, up there in the flat part of the state between Flint and Saginaw, that quite makes sense; sure, it has roots going back to the 1800s as a small German settlement, but this is the American Midwest, after all—doesn’t everywhere? How this modest, one-main-drag town with no mountains for miles became one of the region’s most popular destinations—sorry, Michigan’s Little Bavaria—has a lot to do with one thing: fried chicken, the star of generous family-style dinners, which around the middle of the 20th century began drawing travelers from the nearby cities, and Detroit, all still at or near their economic peak. Everything that happened to Michigan after that appears to have mattered little—today, both Zehnder’s and the Frankenmuth Bavarian Inn, across the street from each other and owned by different (and friendly) strains of the Zehnder family, rank comfortably among the most profitable restaurants in the country. Lording it over Detroit’s Woodward Avenue since 1894, the Romanesque Revival mega-mansion (Tiffany-designed stained glass windows, obviously) built by Detroit’s richest man at the time has since 1986 been The Whitney, one of the city’s most extravagant special-occasion spots, after a lengthy renovation bankrolled by a local businessman who found out the building was under threat of being torn down, and—rightly so—felt like Detroit, even in the early 1980s, could do better. Afternoon teas, a fantastic beef Wellington, flaming desserts, the Thursday garden parties (with live music) and one of the city’s deepest wine lists are just some of the highlights.

Metro Detroit is home to America’s largest Arab population, and Dearborn, with its broad selection of restaurants, many of them Lebanese, remains the cultural hub—since the late 1980s, the 100% halal Al-Ameer has been a standout. Early on in the same decade, long before the notion of reinvigorating the Jewish deli became a near-cliche, Ari Weinzweig and Paul Saginaw opened the ingredient and process-obsessed Zingerman’s in Ann Arbor, slowly building an empire that helped turn the college town into one of the Midwest’s best small cities for food lovers. Here we are in Michigan, of course, where the entire state, come summer, is either up north, or dreaming of same—way up near the Mackinac Bridge, the century-old, summer-only LEGS INN on Lake Michigan has been serving up Polish home cooking for generations, alongside an abundance of whitefish, served all the different ways. Start with the smoked.