Where to eat

Chicago’s exceptional dining scene can be daunting to navigate, so I turned to Rick Bayless, the award-winning chef, restaurateur, and media personality who opened Frontera Grill in 1987 and now owns three other spots in the city. Frontera Grill remains a must-visit for authentic and inventive Mexican dishes made with local ingredients, like the meat-heavy taco menu.

Bayless told me he favors smaller establishments where chefs show “uniqueness and personal expression.” I followed his recommendations and added a few of my own stops, including my perennial favorites: the bar at RL Chicago, Ralph Lauren’s clubby yet intimate spot, and Mon Ami Gabi, a French bistro in Lincoln Park.

My journey began at El Che, a steakhouse celebrated for live-fire cooking. “When we’re in the mood for meat, it doesn’t get a whole lot better,” said Bayless. The steak tartare, served in a ceramic “bone,” was one of the best I’ve ever tried.

“I will say Monday night at Le Bouchon is one of the greatest things you could ever do in Chicago,” Bayless told me of the beloved 33-year-old French bistro. That’s when chefs dine out, since many restaurants here are closed on Mondays. Pro tips: Book lunch (dinner reservations are nearly impossible), and on Mondays bottles of wine are half-price.

Bayless also pointed me to The Duck Inn in Bridgeport, famed for its “duck dog,” a beef-and-duck-fat Chicago-style hot dog that lives up to the hype. I split it with a friend, along with my first- ever cheese curds and a glass of Palestinian arak for dessert.

Virtue is in Hyde Park, a short drive from the Obama Presidential Center. Chef-owner Erick Williams and chef de cuisine Damarr Brown, both James Beard Award winners, serve what Bayless calls “a slightly modern take on soul food—one of the best restaurants in our city.” They also serve their own house-label vodka, which makes for an excellent martini.

Bayless has noticed Chicago’s growing appetite for unexpected fusion and directed me to Mirra in Bucktown, where South Asian and Mexican flavors collide in dishes like a roti quesadilla made with Indian flatbread and dum biryani with braised lamb barbacoa.

Gallerist Mariane Ibrahim suggested Juno, an IYKYK spot consistently ranked among the city’s best. The chef’s-choice sashimi and signature nigiri were among the most unusual and delicious I’ve had.

Finally, food journalist and longtime TV personality Steve Dolinsky told me Chicago is “having a Filipino moment.” He wasn’t kidding. Kasama, in the East Ukrainian Village neighborhood, became the world’s first Michelin-starred Filipino restaurant, in 2022, earning a second star in 2025 for its 13-course tasting menu. Instead my brother and I headed to Boonie’s, a Bib Gourmand in our old neighborhood of Lincoln Square. We started with Sizzling Sisig, followed by a charred Chinese eggplant omelet with swimmer crab and Batangas kaldereta (Wagyu beef cheek).

Though food is the centerpiece here, there is indeed art, and each piece at Oberon plays into the general ethos of the space. The Los Angeles-based artist Ian Cheng created Shrine Oberon, a panoramic LED screen that illuminates the backdrop of the bar. The interactive work uses AI to feed off the ever-changing population of diners and features a character Cheng calls the “shrinekeeper,” a “curious alien who enjoys people watching.” The shrinekeeper greets bar patrons, gives them nicknames, will learn to recognize regulars, plays games of chess alone and with guests, and accepts tips that manifest into permanent flora or small totems within the microcosm of the work. Over time, the work will become an evolving portrait of Oberon visitors.

“I was struck by the enclosed architecture of the Oberon, with no outside lighting, but womb-like, and convivial, like the bar in Star Wars,” Cheng says. “It inspired wanting to make a creature, an alien, who would greet and recognize regulars, and hold a memory of them.”

The New York-based artist and designer Minjae Kim, whose furniture and interiors blend sculptural forms with traditional Korean woodworking techniques, created the bar tabletops, dining booths, and two-top tables in tones that complement the cork interior. He also designed a series of amorphous quilted fiberglass pendant lights that add a touch of warmth throughout the space.

“The focus of this project was to integrate with the architecture. I wanted to deliver something quiet that would serve the overall experience,” Kim says. “The negative space was the main component I responded to. I wanted the architecture to transfer to the tables and fixtures into something they can touch.”

This isn’t the first arts institution-adjacent restaurant for the Oberon Group, which has also helmed other cultural projects in New York City like the café at BRIC House, Clara at the New-York Historical Society, and the Metrograph Commissary. Building on that experience, managing partner Henry Rich says, “The idea was to create a restaurant for the downtown New York art world and that includes many communities—artists, galleries, collectors, and visitors. The process is really about understanding the community and creating a restaurant that serves its social, aesthetic, and civic needs.”

Heritage hotels are born anew across the board

They’ve been around for decades—now these beloved, classic properties are luring us back. Florida’s Art Deco grande dame, the Delano Miami Beach, reopened after an estimated $100 million reno. At the property once considered the Studio 54 of Miami, the revamp trades flash for discretion and whoopee for extensive wellness programming. In Arizona the landmark Sanctuary Camelback Mountain has a new, 12,000-square-foot spa with a reflection pond and meditation garden. Over in New England, Newport, Rhode Island, classic Hotel Viking celebrated 100 years of hospitality with a much-needed redo by LA-based Beleco Design. One of New Hampshire’s oldest hotels has reopened as the elegant and textured Inn at Hancock. Nearby, the historic Walloomsac Inn, long-ago used by Vermont’s pre-statehood legislature, is being reimagined by Litchfield, Connecticut, hospitality business Place in Mind.

Restaurant scene from The Cooper, Charleston’s new hotel

The Cooper

A new chapter for Charleston, South Carolina

In South Carolina’s largest city, The Cooper, a 191-room hotel, opened this spring. With it came a whole new way to explore the city’s prime waterfront. The hotel has a private marina on the banks of the namesake river—expect glamorous sunset sailings in classic Lowcountry style. It’s a sibling venture of Holy City mainstays The Charleston Place, the historic Riviera Theater, and more from the developer Ben Navarro, whose ambitious plans to glow up the area next to The Cooper in the coming years include taking over nearby Union Pier to bring a new spate of restaurants, parks, and residences to life.

Second cities on the upswing in Colorado, Indiana, and Ohio

Second cities have much to celebrate, with major milestones, infrastructure upgrades, and more. As Boulder, Colorado, ramps up to host its first Sundance Film Festival in January, its hospitality scene is rising to the occasion. Check in to the largest all-electric hotel as Limelight Boulder turns on the power, or the Hotel Boulderado, an all-American classic fresh off a major renovation. Indianapolis, Indiana, shifts into third gear as one of the country’s most cyclable cities. This year Indy will debut 38 miles of brand-new trails that will merge seamlessly into the region’s existing 77-mile network that takes you everywhere from the Fairgrounds to downtown. A new Trailways app maps it all as well. Meanwhile, independent commerce is alive in Columbus, Ohio, where the city’s historic public market is marking 150 years in business. To celebrate the milestone, The Merchant Building, a 32-story tribute to the North Market’s legacy, will unveil a 162-room luxury hotel at the beginning of next year.

After, I headed west, retracing my path up Shooting Creek Road in a rush to spend time on the Appalachian Trail, which I’d hiked from Georgia to Maine six years earlier. That you can spend your day in some of the country’s most beautiful landscapes and still make it to a show or jam by nightfall is one of the underrated features of the Crooked Road.

In the town of Marion, the Wayne C. Henderson School of Appalachian Arts, named for the legendary guitar maker who famously built one of Eric Clapton’s guitars, was hosting a Monday-night jam. Born in Grayson County in 1947, Henderson is such an area icon that a painting of him covers one side of the Skyline National Bank in Independence. This old schoolhouse has been turned into a community hub and arts center. In a former first-grade classroom, I found a dozen people seated in a circle, one person at a time selecting the next song that everyone else then played. Dropping his fiddle to his knee, Jim King, the de facto leader, looked my way and nodded, welcoming a stranger with a smile. His wife, Gert, sat to his right, checking the tuning on her banjo. A bassist stood behind her, another fiddler in turn at his side.

On the drive over, I’d been listening to a set of Smithsonian Folkways recordings by Uncle Wade Ward, a banjo and fiddle player from Independence. He’s been dead for half a century, but his mural remains on a wall there. In those sessions from the early ’60s, he talked about a buoyant fiddle number called “Arkansas Traveler,” one of those “wonderful old tunes…about to fade away.” I’d been at the jam an hour, the sinking sun shining through a bottle of Mountain Dew on the windowsill, when someone asked, “How ’bout we try ‘Arkansas Traveler’?” A young guitarist cued the chords on his iPad, and the fiddle began sawing. Sure, it was wobbly and ragged. It had not, however, faded away.

My last day along the Crooked Road was a rainy Tuesday, and I spent it shuttling between museums. I’d driven through Virginia coal country and McClure, the town where pioneering singer Ralph Stanley was born, then raced two hours southeast to Bristol, getting to the Birthplace of Country Music Museum just before it closed. I teared up when I saw the back of Jimmie Rodgers’s guitar, which read simply “THANKS” in enormous gold letters. It was a note of gratitude to an audience he had likely never imagined when he died from tuberculosis in 1933.

There is only a parking lot now at 408 State Street, right where Bristol splits across Tennessee and Virginia. In July 1927, though, it was home to the Taylor-Christian Hat Company, a building big enough for an ad hoc recording studio set up by the Victor Talking Machine Company. For a few days that summer, musicians rolled in from the surrounding countryside to cut their songs. There was the Carter Family, Ernest Stoneman, and Blind Alfred Reed, all pillars of what has since been called the Big Bang of Country Music. It was that moment, a century ago, when these hardscrabble acoustic sounds began their journey to becoming global exports, when the songs that had once seeped out of these hills began to rush out and form the foundation of country music. It was the moment that made this region’s music famous.

Over eight days in Tamil Nadu I feel the centuries ripen and coalesce within me, like words finding a tune. Doesn’t the wonder of the present moment—and therefore of travel—sometimes lie precisely in its all-seeing belatedness, the way in which it can gather the entire past into itself? Walking on the flagstones in the vast temple complex dedicated to the fish-eyed goddess Meenakshi in the ancient city of Madurai, home to more than 30,000 statues of celestials; or marvelling at the 80-ton cupola perched atop 11th-century monarch Rajaraja Chola’s magnificent Brihadeeswara Temple in Thanjavur (said to have been hauled to the summit by a retinue of elephants on a ramp more than four miles long); or facing a life-sized elephant on the 43-foot-tall open-air frieze made in about AD 600 at Mahabalipuram, one of the -greatest examples of street art from the ancient world, I feel time differently. It’s a vital, sensual force, as teasing as Vishnu’s enigmatic smile.

“In north India the great monuments of the past are usually royal palaces and forts,” observes my wise guide and companion, N Paneer Selvam, whose two great passions are temples and birds. “But the great dynasties in the south, such as the Pallavas and the Cholas, devoted their energies to building temples. There was a social consciousness among the monarchs: the king’s duty was to build a bridge between divine and human. So the temples were at the heart of the everyday life of old India. They were centres of learning and poetry, schools of music and dance, places of refuge when invaders came raiding.”

He’s right. The old temples of Tamil Nadu are a treasure-trove of forms incised on stone or magicked from brass, and lavished daily with fruit and flowers, incense and sandalwood, music and light. They entangle divine, human, animal, vegetative, historical and fantastical life into one shapeshifting, passionate pictorial script open to endless elaboration. This language can also, suddenly, drop several octaves into minimalism. In the milling crowds I can tell a follower of Siva from the three horizontal white lines on their forehead, and one of Vishnu from two vertical ones, like the finials atop a temple. So simple.

Hinduism is a narrative religion; its mercurial wisdom is lightened and sweetened by stories, softened by ambiguities, sharpened by paradoxes. In the many legends about Siva and Vishnu portrayed in the temples and re-narrated by Selvam, things happen in a dimension distinct from historical time. They take place in an eternal present, as immediate as the hot breath of the cow I feed sheaves of spinach to on a morning walk in Madurai, as around me scores of women stoop over their thresholds making kolams, decorative patterns, with rice flour.

In the season premiere of Dutton Ranch, we see Beth Dutton (Kelly Reilly) and Rip Wheeler (Cole Hauser) forced to relocate after the Montana ranch of their Yellowstone days burns down. In this latest spinoff from the Taylor Sheridan universe, Montana falls away to the far away lands of Rio Paloma, Texas—trouble nevertheless follows. Sheridan has a gift for creating a seemingly infinite universe of dogged American dramas and in this series, Beth and Rip are both quick to make friends, and just as quick to make enemies—namely Beulah Jackson (Annette Bening), matriarch and owner of rival 10 Petal Ranch.

As the series moves across the country, the landscape of the show transforms along with it. Dutton Ranch’s production designer Yvonne Boudreaux describes herself as “very Southern” having been born in Louisiana and spent the last 22 years in Texas and married to a seventh generation Texan. “Authenticity is everything,” she says of the locations selected for the show. Prior to working on this series, she was working on Yellowstone, and she’s been determined to transition the aesthetic over from the other show while giving it a bit of a Texas makeover. “Beth and Rip’s color palette is a sunrise,” she explains, “We took from the earth, the colors, the vegetation, the agaves, those greens and the dust and the dirt. It’s grittier.”

Rip Wheeler (Cole Hauser) surveys his new Texas terrain.

Emerson Miller/Paramount+

Like any good Sheridan show, gratuitous violence and clichéd wisdom are doled out with abandon, the spoonful of sugar to help the medicine—in this case ranching gone awry—go down. And there’s something almost Shakespearian about the innocent, young love between Carter (Finn Little) and Oreana (Natalie Alyn Lind) from warring families. The season finale, which wraps just in time for America’s 250th anniversary, feels like it might have something to say about the political moment we’re in. Marching into her office, Mariano (Raoul Max Trujillo) tells Beulah, “You’ve built a kingdom in a country that hates kings.” This of course begs the question: does it?

The finale may leave viewers feeling unsettled, but the show has already been renewed for a second season. We can expect to be seeing more of the extensive acres of high grass and cattle, limestone walls, and the occasional Dallas skyline, come the next season. To learn more about the real-life locations used in the series, Boudreaux walks us through the Lone Star locales used to tell this South Texan story.

In a city where cattle drives, railroads, and rodeos helped define its identity, The Best Hat Store remains a living piece of that history. Its hats—many bearing the family’s understated “+X” (or “positive times”) logo—appear far beyond the Stockyards, from Professional Bull Riders tours to skijoring events across the West.

Most of the hats begin their journey in Bowie, Texas, before arriving in Fort Worth. “Every hat is handmade, touched by up to 24 hands before it leaves the factory,” says Maddox as she walks me through the store. “The one on my head is 100% beaver.” Much of what’s made here starts with beaver felt, prized in traditional Western hatmaking for its density, resilience, and ability to hold a shape. Unlike straw or lower-grade wool blends, beaver felt can be reworked without collapsing its structure, which is what allows hats to be reshaped by hand rather than stamped out of a mold.

“People might consider this a dying art,” says Maddox. “Finding folks with the knowledge and patience to master every step of the process isn’t always easy.” Preserving a skill set—especially in an era when so much production happens far from view of the buyer—makes the shop one of the rare places where visitors can watch the craft of cowboy hats unfold in real time, from raw felt to finished crown. “It’s something we’re very proud of. And we love to share it with every single person that walks through these doors.”

It’s experts like Adams, who started shaping hats at 17, who are front of house every day, giving visitors a glimpse of the magic. “Getting to meet everyone is my favorite part,” he says. “You really get to know the person you’re working with by the time they leave.”

“Chapstick was a totally selfish endeavor,” says Suppan. “I always wanted to have a bar to highlight women’s sports because there was no one even showing women’s sports. If you went to a sports bar, you had to beg to get them to put something on.”

The last time Condé Nast Traveler wrote about lesbian bars in 2024, we covered the prevailing narrative of their protracted decline. Then, American lesbian bars had dwindled to a small stock of 21 establishments across the entire US, and were struggling to keep their doors open amid the ballooning costs of running small businesses, the passage of anti-discrimination laws that opened up more of the world to queer patrons, and, then, the global pandemic that closed much of the world for everyone. But over the past two years, the LGBTQIA+ institution has entered a different era: One in which 16 more bars have joined the ranks, from Dani’s Queer Bar in Boston to the Boyfriend Co-op in Brooklyn, and historically beloved spots like East Nashville’s Lipstick Lounge are not only sustaining themselves, but also expanding into new territory.

Portland, Oregon’s lesbian sports bar The Sports Bra has plans to expand to four other locations over the next two years.

Zack Dean

Lesbian sports bars in particular have grown as a niche, with venues continuing to pop-up around the country’s well-known LGBTQIA+ hubs. There’s the new Babe’s in Chicago; and both Athena Keke’s in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, and Blazers in nearby Williamsburg. The Sports Bra, which opened in Portland, Oregon, in 2022, has plans to expand to Boston, Las Vegas, St. Louis, and Indianapolis throughout 2026 and 2027.

Nashville may appear an unlikely city for a space like Chapstick. The main driver of the city’s billion-dollar party economy is downtown’s South of Broadway, or SoBro neighborhood: an infamous downtown corridor that has only grown honkier and tonkier in recent years with flashy new bars like Morgan Wallen’s This Bar & Tennessee Kitchen, a six-story, 30,000 square-foot temple to all things bro, and Luke Combs’s Category 10, an omnibus of a bar that houses a honky tonk, a sports bar, a bourbon lounge, two full rooftop bars, and the largest dance floor in the city. The neighborhood’s cross streets remain ever-clogged with Ubers and commuters weaving through the stream of open-air party buses and pedal taverns ferrying day-drinking bachelorettes. Chapstick, a little under 15 minutes away from the heart of SoBro, feels a world away from the downtown rowdiness that earned the city its “NashVegas” moniker. It sits at a cozy residential corner of an artsy neighborhood not known to the majority of tourists; dogwoods grow between neighboring houses, with small rainbow flags hanging off their porches.

This essay is part of Going Out, a series of stories celebrating LGBTQIA+ travel.

By early morning in Granada, Nicaragua, the heat is settling in and a thick humidity hangs in the air. People move through the streets snacking on spongy quesillo; others sell sliced fruit, weaving between cars that are beep-beeping their way through intersections. I hear the theme song of a telenova through the screen door of a nearby home. “Buenas!” our tour guide Aurora Alvarez-Granados Ramírez calls out, rocking a crop top as she bounces into the courtyard where we’ve gathered.

I’m on a two-week journey winding from Nicaragua to Guatemala (with stops in Honduras and El Salvador), joined by a dozen travelers from the US, the UK, and Australia, ages 20 to 75. The group is almost entirely women, save for one accompanying husband. Some are queer. All are equally curious to learn about this storied region.

Founded in 1524, Granada, Nicaragua, is the longest standing Spanish colonial city across the Americas.

Getty

As a Chilean-American—with a mother who did an extensive photojournalism project in Guatemala in the ’90s—I have long felt a pull to explore here. It’s been a while since I’ve signed up for an organized tour like this, though. I usually prefer solo travel, which allows me to wander languidly and choose my own itinerary, but I also like the comfort of letting a local expert lead the way. Alvarez-Granados Ramírez works as a bilingual guide throughout Central America, and, as a transgender woman, offers a perspective on these countries that considers how queer people experience them. She conducts one- to three-week trips with Intrepid, and on her own, threading a route through Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, and Nicaragua.

For Alvarez-Granados Ramírez, this means navigating a region where visibility can come with risk. LGBTQIA+ protections remain limited and unevenly enforced in the countries on our itinerary “[Trans people] do not have a seat at the table where we can be respected, appreciated, and loved by our culture as who we are,” says Alvarez-Granados Ramírez. “At least not yet.” Misgendering and stares are not uncommon, she says, and safety often depends on quickly reading whatever room she walks into. Yet that awareness shapes how Alvarez-Granados Ramírez guides, what she shares, and who she trusts to receive it. “I felt I didn’t belong anywhere until after my transition,” says Alvarez-Granados Ramírez. “I now know I was meant to be in tourism, because of who I am and where I come. My story is meant to be shared.”