10 Great Places for Comfort Food

Say all you want about the merits of fine dining and celebrity chefs, there’s still no substitute for good old fashioned home cookin’. Sometimes a fancy reduction or lobster three ways can’t hold a candle to a hearty plate of chicken fried steak and mashed potatoes. Fortunately, in these instances, there are still plenty of great restaurants to choose from.

These 10 restaurants from all across the country have each received local praise for delivering outstanding comfort food:

Broward-Palm Beach

Lola’s on Harrison

Chef Michael Wagner knows there’s more to American classics than chicken wings and turkey dinners. There are potatoes, for instance. And Coke. But what he does with corn dogs and hamburger meat goes well beyond anything your mama would recognize from her recipe-card file: Potato skins at Lola’s…More >>

Outside Lola’s on Harrison

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Dallas

Lucky’s Café

There’s no cure for the summer–or winter, fall or spring–time blues like a few squares of fresh cornbread and a slab of chicken-fried steak smothered in peppered cream gravy. More >>

Denver

Table 6

Here’s how you decide which restaurant in a city has the best comfort food: You spend a couple of months doing nothing but eating and obsessing over food, going out at all hours of the day and night for tacos and tamales and foie gras and fried chicken. Then you spend weeks assembling a list of…More >>

Houston

Barbecue Inn

Barbecue Inn has been a Houston favorite since the 1940s, and most of the waitresses appear to have been there just as long. The food itself is long on comfort — the same hearty and delicious chicken-fried steaks and fried shrimp platters that have sustained families eating there after…More >>

Kansas City

O’Neill’s Restaurant & Bar

There’s a reason that more restaurants are serving comfort foods: Who has time to be one of those happy homemakers wiping floury hands on an apron whil…More >>

Minneapolis

Brasa

Question: What’s a lot easier than importing the Creole grandmother you never had and chaining her to the stove? Answer: programming Brasa’s number into your phone. More >>

It doesn’t get much better than comfort food in the comfort of your own home.

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New York

Home

Whether or not your mother could cook, you’ll enjoy this wistful evocation of things past–from the owners’ cookbook collection cluttering the shop windows to the…More >>

Phoenix

Rancho Pinot

Is it dinnertime yet? The mouthwatering dishes at Rancho Pinot remind us of the kinds of things Mom used to make — if only Mom had been a gourmet cook. Chef Chrysa Robertson dreams up food that’s rustic and soul-satisfying, putting the finest local produce to good use (not a surprise,…More >>

San Francisco

Chenery Park

A classic neighborhood restaurant that’s worth a visit, no matter where you live, this three-level, warm and pleasant spot is located in Glen Park’s tiny shopping district, offering a seasonal menu of internationally accented American comfort food…More >>

Upscale comfort food at Chenery Park

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Seattle

Brown Bag Cafe

“No sissy food here!” reads the sign outside Brown Bag Café. That would be a gross understatement. Even a famished lumberjack would struggle to clean his plate at this family-owned restaurant. More >>