The Best Places That Do Just One Dish

A short menu is usually a good sign; a one-item menu is the best one. A kitchen that only makes one thing has had nowhere to hide for years, and these ten have been cooking the same dish long enough to stop thinking about anything else. Order what the place is named for, or what everyone around you is eating. Here, that's the same thing.

Start in Southeast Asia, where it's the norm. Bún chả Hương Liên in Hanoi still serves the one dish it's named for — grilled pork with rice noodles — at plastic stools, Obama visit or not. Pa Lek, by one of Ayutthaya's old canals, is a third-generation stall serving boat noodles: bowls kept small on purpose, so you order them in rounds. Chiang Mai gets two, because its signature dish deserves the comparison: Khao Soi Lung Prakit Kad Kom cooks over charcoal in the old Kad Kom market and is one of the shops credited with making khao soi famous; Khao Soi Mae Sai, just north of the old city moat, is the cheaper, more local habit. Both sell out once the day's broth runs low, so go at lunch.

Japan has a regional argument instead. Chitose, a canteen in Osaka's working-class Nishinari, makes thick Osaka-style okonomiyaki on the hotplate in front of you, everything mixed into the batter. Nagataya in Hiroshima does the city's own version — cabbage piled high, noodles, layered rather than mixed — and it's a different dish, not a variation. Eat both and pick a side.

The rest are scattered. Yamo is a four-stool Burmese counter in San Francisco's Mission, cash only, built around one order of rice noodles. Tacos Don Luis in Zapopan, outside Guadalajara, runs its entire menu off a single giant pot of birria, with the tacos dipped and griddled and a cup of consommé alongside. Bar Arocena in Montevideo is known for the chivito, Uruguay's national sandwich, which Anthony Bourdain called "the Everest of steak sandwiches." And Pan con Chancho, in a small craft-beer hotel in Puerto Varas, built its name on one slow-roasted pork sandwich that locals cross town for.