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Delmonico's
Delmonico's opened in 1837 in Lower Manhattan, founded by Swiss immigrant brothers John and Peter Delmonico, and it's widely credited as the first fine-dining restaurant in the United States, a genuinely foundational claim in American culinary history predating most other restaurants on any "oldest in America" list by decades. The restaurant is credited with introducing several dishes now considered permanent fixtures of American cuisine, including Lobster Newberg, Baked Alaska, and the eggs Benedict, along with popularizing the printed à la carte menu itself at a time when most American restaurants served a fixed, limited daily selection rather than letting diners choose individual dishes. Delmonico's steak, a bone-in ribeye cut named directly for the restaurant, has become its own enduringly popular cut sold at steakhouses nationwide regardless of any connection to the original restaurant, a rare case of a single restaurant's signature dish becoming a permanent, generic part of American butchery vocabulary. Delmonico's combination of its foundational status as America's first fine-dining restaurant and its direct role in inventing multiple dishes now considered permanent American culinary staples has made it one of the most historically significant restaurants of any cuisine anywhere in the country.
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Rao's
Rao's opened in 1896 in East Harlem, founded by Charles Rao, and the tiny restaurant — with just a handful of tables — has been run by the same extended family for well over a century, becoming one of the most difficult reservations to obtain of any restaurant in the entire country. The restaurant doesn't take reservations from the general public at all; instead, its limited tables are effectively "owned" by longtime regulars on specific recurring nights, a genuinely unusual system that's made a table at Rao's more a matter of inherited social access than something available to book directly, regardless of a prospective diner's wealth or fame. That exclusivity has drawn a steady stream of celebrities, politicians, and mob-adjacent regulars over the decades — the restaurant's founder's grandnephew, Frank Pellegrino, became a minor celebrity in his own right playing an FBI agent on "The Sopranos" while continuing to run the family restaurant — and Rao's jarred pasta sauce, now sold nationally in supermarkets, has become one of the most successful restaurant-branded grocery products in the country. Rao's combination of over a century of continuous family ownership, its genuinely inherited-access reservation system, and its wildly successful jarred sauce spinoff has made it one of the most culturally mythologized Italian-American restaurants in the entire country, more famous for who can't get a table than for what's actually served.
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