You won't spend quite as much at Joe's Stone Crab in Miami Beach (alright, never mind, you do you), where the story now goes back over one hundred years, but at least you can get a table - providing it's stone crab season, which begins in October. With just fourteen tables, and only one seating per evening, only a select few get the white glove treatment. Langoustines from New Zealand, the finest caviar, Alaskan King Crab-if you want it, you can have it, if you can get a booking. When Victoria & Albert's opened at Walt Disney World's Grand Floridian resort back in 1988, even its earliest fans probably wouldn't have bet the farm on this extravagant homage to classic French fine dining outlasting so many of the restaurants it was designed to evoke. Guests so inclined will be escorted to secluded, wine barrel-shaped booths in an entirely different section of the restaurant, where they can choose from a sampling of piped-in music (just flip your away around the dial) to accompany their Framboise Macadamia Decadence, a multi-part house favorite, centered around a chocolate-macadamia nut creation, topped with raspberry-infused chocolate cream. Proudly the home of the world's longest wine list (ask for a tour of the cellar), one of the many memorable quirks here is the dessert service. If there's a window in here, we've never found it, though there's a lot of ground to cover, admittedly. Half as old, but equally memorable, and no doubt inspired by its predecessor, Bern's Steak House, also known as the other Tampa restaurant that's a whole thing, feels more like a theme park dark ride for carnivorous grown folks. At capacity, there will be roughly 1,700 people seated, spread across fifteen different and distinctive spaces, each imbued with its own energy, each no doubt with countless stories to tell. The oldest restaurant in the state, going back to 1905, and still in the same family, isn't just a another date with history, it's a city within a city. Nothing can ever really prepare you for that first meal at Tampa's Columbia Restaurant, with her that's-so-Tampa devil crab croquetas, the iconic, made to a 1915 recipe, house Cuban sandwich, the iceberg lettuce salads mixed tableside, by waiters in jackets. At the much more casual Fry Bread House, an everyday Native American staple gets the royal treatment, served alongside good pozole and menudo since the early 1990s, which is nearly yesterday compared to Tucson's El Charro Cafe, said to be America's oldest Mexican restaurant, laying claim to the invention of the chimichanga, otherwise known as the deep-fried burrito. Make sure to enter through the back door, like the locals do. He was only supposed to be visiting, but ended up deciding to stay, soon after opening a pizza place inside a local supermarket, which answers the question, how did one of the country's greatest pizza joints, Pizzeria Bianco, ended up in the middle of the Sonoran Desert? Today, it remains one of the Valley's most important restaurants, alongside much older greats like the mid-century Durant's, a bordello-like (so much red!) steakhouse on Central Avenue opened by a former Vegas pit-boss back in the 1950s. Bronx-born Chris Bianco ended up in Phoenix on a whim, back in the '80s. Pretty much every pizza lover knows the story by now. Cruising your way through Alaska's Southeast? Most ports continue to sustain at least one Filipino restaurant, the legacy of well over a century of migration, both seasonal and permanent in Ketchikan, the giant-sized lumpia at the Diaz Cafe, a local fixture since the 1940s, are always a good idea. Alaska's smallest towns will often feed you very well- in Denali-adjacent Talkeetna, the starter going into those sourdough pancakes at the Talkeetna Roadhouse is said to date back to 1902 - that's a few years before the hotel even opened, where where a cozy all-day café and bakery occupy the ground level. Anytime is a good time for rubbing shoulders with the well-connected South Anchorage crowd that tends to treat the Southside Bistro - going strong in a back street strip mall since the 1990s - like an extension of their homes book into the main dining room for Alaskan oysters, followed by rack of lamb, or show yourself over to the bistro side for a glass of wine, and maybe one of the best nacho platters north found of the 55th parallel.

Gnocchi rails steakhouse