If you want to taste America’s real flavor, skip the chains and head to the small towns where recipes are passed down like heirlooms. These places are serving food you can only taste if you show up in person. Here are 10 local dishes worth the road trip.
10. Prickly Pear Cactus Candy (Tucson, Arizona)
Prickly pear cactus candy transforms the bright magenta fruit of the Sonoran Desert’s cactus into chewy, sugar-coated squares that taste like a cross between watermelon and bubble gum. While you can find prickly pear products elsewhere, Tucson earned UNESCO’s prestigious “City of Gastronomy” designation partly for keeping the indigenous Tohono O’odham tradition alive.
9. Cheese Frenchee (Lincoln, Nebraska)
Cheese Frenchee is basically a combination of white bread, American cheese, and mayonnaise dipped in egg batter, rolled in crushed cornflakes, and fried until golden and crispy. The sandwich is best eaten immediately, when the exterior crackles and the cheese inside reaches that perfect molten stage.
8. Pasties (Calumet, Michigan)
Deep in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, the pasty reigns supreme. These hand-held meat pies arrived with Cornish miners in the 1840s who needed portable lunches they could eat in copper mines with dirty hands. Calumet hosts PastyFest every August, drawing over 40,000 visitors. The festival includes pasty eating contests, a pasty olympics, and fierce debates about the eternal question: ketchup or gravy?
7. St. Paul Sandwich (St. Louis, Missouri)
The St. Paul sandwich features a crispy egg foo young patty (eggs, bean sprouts, and onions) sandwiched between white bread with mayo, lettuce, tomato, and dill pickles. Despite its name suggesting Minnesota, it’s a St. Louis original found almost exclusively in the city’s Chinese-American restaurants.
6. Cincinnati Chili (Cincinnati, Ohio)
Cincinnati chili will violate everything you think you know about chili…and you’ll love it. Greek immigrant Nicholas Lambrinides created this Mediterranean-inspired meat sauce in the 1940s, adding cinnamon, chocolate, allspice, and cloves to create something that’s technically chili but tastes like nothing else on earth. It’s served over spaghetti and ordered “by the way”: three-way means chili, spaghetti, and cheese; four-way adds onions; five-way includes beans.
5. Biscuits and Gravy from Loveless Cafe (Nashville, Tennessee)
While biscuits and gravy exist everywhere, Loveless Cafe’s version has reached legendary status. The biscuits arrive hot, flaky, and tall. The sausage gravy is thick, peppery, and generous. Food Network named Loveless one of America’s top five breakfast spots, and country music stars regularly stop by after shows.
4. Boudin (Scott, Louisiana)
This rice-and-pork sausage combines ground pork, rice, onions, peppers, and Cajun spices stuffed into casings, creating Louisiana’s ultimate road food. The town of Scott attracts thousands of visitors every April for its Boudin Festival, featuring live Cajun music, a boudin eating contest, and a boudin queen pageant. The key to eating boudin properly: squeeze the filling directly into your mouth like toothpaste, discarding the casing.
3. Fry Sauce (Arctic Circle Restaurants, Utah)
Utah’s secret sauce sounds deceptively simple: ketchup mixed with mayonnaise. But like many simple things, the execution matters. Arctic Circle, a regional burger chain founded in Salt Lake City, popularized fry sauce as the ultimate dipping companion for French fries and onion rings. What started as a regional condiment has become Utah’s unofficial state sauce, now served at virtually every restaurant.
2. Shave Ice from Matsumoto’s (Haleiwa, Hawaii)
Matsumoto Shave Ice has been cooling down visitors to Oahu’s North Shore since 1951. Matsumoto offers over forty flavors including local favorites like lilikoi (passion fruit), li hing mui (sweet-salty preserved plum), and haupia (coconut cream). Order yours with ice cream and sweet azuki beans at the bottom, then drizzle condensed milk over everything. Thank us later.
1. The Juicy Lucy (Matt’s Bar & Grill, Minneapolis, Minnesota)
This burger innovation stuffs molten cheese inside the beef patty rather than on top, creating a ticking time bomb of dairy lava that will scald your mouth if you’re not too careful. American cheese works best because it melts uniformly, though adventurous souls experiment with pepper jack or cheddar.
