Palace Diner

In 2014, Chad Conley and Greg Mitchell took over a decades-old, 15-seat restaurant housed in a Pollard train car built in 1927 and turned it into the ideal realization of a daytime Americana diner. Eating here haunts me: I can’t find better light, lemony, buttery pancakes, or a more precisely engineered egg sandwich, and theirs is the only tuna melt I ever hunger after. Location plays a charming role: Sleepy but quickly burgeoning Biddeford, Maine (also home to Rabelais, one of the country’s finest food-focused booksellers), sits about 20 miles south of Portland. It’s all worth the trek.