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This Map Guides You to the Top-Rated Breakfast Spots in Every State

Restaurants + Bars Food + Drink
by Nickolaus Hines Aug 6, 2020

In the 19th century, two devout Seventh-day Adventists named James Caleb Jackson and John Harvey Kellogg brought breakfast cereals to the mainstream United States. To sell more of these cereal grains, their lobbyists came up with a maxim that would define American eating for centuries: Breakfast is the most important meal of the day.

There’s not a whole lot of truth behind the saying, and many people view breakfast with a take-it-or-leave-it attitude. Wherever you stand on breakfast’s importance, it’s undeniable that breakfast restaurants in the US are some of the tastiest places to start the day. SavingSpot, a personal finance blog, crowdsourced the top-rated breakfast restaurants in every state and created a roadmap of the fastest route to make it to every single one.

Opting for a road trip approach to seeing them all has obvious appeal. Road trips are surging in popularity as COVID-19 has made other types of travel untenable, though the great American road trip looks a lot different today than it has in the past.

True breakfast fanatics can take their time on scheduling this one out, considering the route has 144 locations and it would take around two months to complete if you ate breakfast three times a day and drove whenever you weren’t eating. For the rest of us, the map can serve as food-focused day trip inspiration.

Rating the “best” of anything is a consistent recipe for creating disagreement. Good breakfast is good breakfast, though, regardless of whether you opt for savory or sweet. To narrow down the options, SavingSpot used the top-rated breakfast restaurants on TripAdvisor for the three largest cities in each state (every spot in list form can be found here). Then it used Google Maps and a routing method designed by data scientist Randal S. Olson to find the fastest route.

As we navigate this new world and weigh the concerns of travel, it’s nice to have these itineraries waiting for us. Whether you’re a national park person, a wine-loving person, or you want to explore the lesser-driven roadways of California, there’s an optimal route out there. Happy eating.

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