17 Cities

• Asheville, North Carolina — A mountain town of ninety-five thousand with more bakeries and breweries than its size suggests, and Pisgah National Forest starting where…
• Aspen, Colorado — Four walkable blocks of restaurants serving a town of seven thousand that swells every December. The Maroon Bells are twenty minutes out.
• Austin, Texas — Barbecue queues that form before the smoke clears, a serious cocktail-bar scene, and food trucks treated as legitimate venues rather than…
• Bend, Oregon — High desert on one side, the Cascades on the other, and a brewery for roughly every thousand residents. Smith Rock is forty minutes north.
• Burlington, Vermont — Vermont's largest city is still under fifty thousand people. Church Street Marketplace is four blocks of it, and Lake Champlain sits at…
• Charlotte, North Carolina — A banking city that eats like a Southern one, spread across neighbourhoods that each make a case for being the good one.
• Charlottesville, Virginia — A university town of fifty thousand built around a pedestrian mall, with vineyards on the ridges above it and Monticello three miles out.
• Fredericksburg, Texas — A German settlement that became Texas wine country. Main Street is most of the town, and Enchanted Rock is eighteen miles north.
• Lynchburg, Virginia — A James River city in the shadow of the Blue Ridge, with a bakery count well out of proportion to its size.
• Naples, Florida — Gulf beaches, a fishing pier older than the city itself, and a restaurant scene pitched at people who eat out most nights.
• Raleigh, North Carolina — State capital, university town and farmers-market city at once. Angus Barn has been doing the same thing since 1960 and still fills.
• Richmond, Virginia — Cobblestone hills, a fine-arts museum that charges nothing, and a restaurant scene that got good in about a decade.
• Santa Fe, New Mexico — Adobe, altitude and green chile. The Plaza is four centuries old; Meow Wolf is ten minutes away and four centuries newer.
• Savannah, Georgia — Twenty-two squares under Spanish moss, and an open-container law that moves the evening outdoors. Forsyth Park anchors the south end.
• Scottsdale, Arizona — A desert resort city where the good restaurants and the good bars are mostly indoors, for defensible reasons. The Botanical Garden is the…
• Smith Mountain Lake, Virginia — Five hundred miles of Blue Ridge shoreline, and a restaurant scene organised around dock access. Roanoke is forty minutes west.
• West Palm Beach, Florida — Intracoastal on one side, Atlantic on the other. Clematis Street is where the city eats after work.