Price: $325-$495. If you have a fancy restaurant bucket list, Chicago’s Alinea is probably on it. Of course, fame and 50-minute features on Chef’s Table don’t necessarily mean a place is worth your time (or in this case, several hundred dollars), but Alinea definitely is. The 15-course mish-mash of flavors is devastatingly good, with Thai, Mexican, and French inspirations all at play.

Price: $390. Over the past half decade in New York City, Korean fine dining has staged a takeover. Across the city, there are tasting menus, prix fixe meals, and upscale takes on KBBQ—and Atomix helped kickstart all of that. The 14-seat restaurant in the bottom of a Manhattan townhouse opened in 2018, serving little bites of intricately constructed food that tasted Korean, but felt brand new (and still do).

Price: $390. At Quince in San Francisco, a server might gently lift a single stalk of asparagus out of a broth-filled bucket and place it on your plate. It’s one of many moments you’ll be mentally replaying on loop during a night at this hyper-seasonal fine dining spot. Throughout the 10 courses, you’ll get up close and personal with produce that lived its entire life a short car ride away, like wild ramps or peas smoother than a filter-happy influencer’s collarbone.

Price: $300. The seven-course tasting at this spot in Philadelphia is all about slow cooked rustic Italian, though they amp things up with truffle shaving and tweezer-plating precision. But it’s not stuffy, break-out-the-family-jewels fine dining. You’ll hear about how the chicken comes from a Harrisburg-area high school janitor who doubles as a poultry farmer, and you might get wine buzzed at the communal tables and trade stories about wild nights down the Shore.

Price: $255. With its hidden trick doors and tweezer-wielding chefs periodically engulfed in a haze of dry ice, Georgia Boy in Atlanta feels like a dinner at Willy Wonka’s house if he fetishized all things Georgia instead of candy. The 13-course menu pays homage to its home state, with locally sourced produce like sweet potatoes cuddled next to a wispy pile of bacon-flavored cotton candy. Even if you never thought you’d enjoy Georgia’s thick pollen, you’ll happily devour it on a spring salad.

Price: $231-$255. This small counter in Seattle’s Hillman City is more than a 10-course dinner inspired by the owners’ Filipino heritage. It’s a billboard for the Pacific Northwest, and a meal that should be required by law for every resident and visitor. Each dish represents a part of history that connects the city to Filipino culture, and only uses ingredients exclusively sourced throughout the region.

Price: $185-$245. Cantaloupe kimchi, sea urchin in wild rose custard, and foie gras donuts. Those are a few of the dishes we’ve tried at this Nashville restaurant, and we will, most likely, never eat them again. Unlike the other spots on this list, The Catbird Seat is an incubator. Chefs rotate every few years, and the menu changes daily, so expect the unexpected and arrive with an open mind. You’ll sit at a U-shaped counter in a small room and receive around 12 courses of genre-bending food.