The best fried chicken I’ve ever eaten in my life is at a little restaurant in Pellston, Michigan, near the tip of the Lower Peninsula. Homemade biscuits and noodles and their own canned preserves and relishes, including phenomenal pickled watermelon rind. I’d go there tomorrow to eat there again, but I don’t have a lot of reason to travel that way. More’s the pity–I could live on that fried chicken.
As much as I rag on Texas, I have to say the best Thai restaurant I’ve found in the US was in Lubbock. There’s several of them scattered across the city, and not sure but I think they’re all owned by different members of an extended family.
Conversely, every Thai restaurant in Honolulu sucked while I was living there. Not only my opinion but that of every Thai student I knew there including my future wife. And that included the big fancy one in Waikiki that all the movie stars went to when they were in town. You’d think a place like Honolulu could do better than that.
Trying to drum up some business? 
Yeah, we’ve all made that joke. They also have a Starbucks. Not just Starbucks coffee, an actual Starbucks.
Being sick while traveling by motorcycle sucks, so consequently we were stuck in Moses Lake, Wa. for three days last year. Just down the highway from our motel was a little Thai restaurant in a strip mall. Wow, fantastic food. Wasn’t expecting food like that in this place.
I did a bit of searching, and it’s simply called Thai Cuisine.
I had possibly the best steak au poivre I’ve ever eaten in a small restaurant in Diego-Suarez at the northern tip of Madagascar in 1985.
…fast food restaurant in Barbados, called Chefette.
It must have been the winter of 1963–64, when my dad was taking my brother and me back home to Minneapolis after Christmas vacation in Joliet, IL. We had been on the road all day (must have been on old US 12 through Wisconsin) and it was a cold, grey late afternoon when we stopped for lunch at an Italian restaurant. I doubt the place is still there (wherever it was, it was in a very small town in the middle of nowhere), but we had some of the best pizza I’ve ever tasted, along with a basket of warm garlic bread dripping with real butter. Fifty years ago, and I remember that meal like it was yesterday.
In Joliet in the summer of '65 (I think) we went for lunch at a British-style pub in a big red brick building on what must have been the bad side of town, because it looked like London after the Blitz (it was probably being redeveloped). We had the best flame-broiled hamburgers ever, huge and served in baskets with sides of delicious fries (they must have been fried in lard).
There’s an outdoor museum of ethnic architecture on the outskirts of Riga, Latvia. I had spent the day there with my daughter (I’m pretty sure it was 2007, so she would have been 12), and we were going to take the bus back into town when we got caught in a thunderstorm. We ducked into the visitors’ center to get out of the rain and found they had a restaurant tucked into one of its corners. We decided to have dinner there and ate soup and a variety of delicious Latvian dishes. Very nice!
That wasn’t brisket.
Why hasn’t grude posted anything? 
There is an Indian restaurant in one of our local Mobil stations, back in the corner near the beer cave. Mostly takeout, but they have 3 tables and a deli counter. Only place for 40 miles that you can get really good deli meats, Indian curries, and made-to-order gyros. Not so hot for ambiance.
When I was last in New Zealand I had the best meal of the trip at an unpretentious restaurant in Twizel, a one-horse town in the middle of nowhere in the South Island.
When I moved to the city years ago, my ex found this small, dirty looking, badly lit Chinese restaurant with no sign or anything to indicate it wasn’t condemned, next to a busway ramp. I never saw anyone sitting down and eating in the restaurant, but they did pretty decent takeout business.
Sadly, it has gone (the owners moved back to Thailand), but I’ve not found better Lo Mein since.
I have no idea if it’s there are any good any more, but there was a steak place near the Wilson stop of the Red Line in Chicago that served, I swear, a better steak than I had at Ruth’s Chris. It was a dingy, hole in the wall place, but this should have been shoe leather, instead it tasted like dry-aged prime beef.
Another shocking discovery was a strip mall Chinese place in Overland Park, KS. We ate there late at night, and the printed menu was the usual, dull stuff. But the friend who brought me there ordered a bunch of stuff that wasn’t on the menu - “hot pots” and it was amazing. Everybody else in the place besides my friend and his family was Chinese, and this apparently was the place where people who worked at other Chinese restaurants ate after finishing their shift.
Great place, and you won’t be able to eat it all. Everyone leaves with bags and carryout containers.
Not near Lotus of Siam quality, but the best Thai restaurant in my area is in a strip mall on the outskirts of Binghamton stuck between two strip clubs, an S&M shop, a liquor store, and a laundromat.
The restaurant in the Lee Vining, CA Mobil gas station is well-known for it’s very good food.
It’s become famous now but Dixie’s BBQ in Redmond, WA started out in one half of a car garage.
I lived briefly on an Indian reservation in New Mexico in the mid 1990s, and their best restaurant, which could best be described as “Mexican with frybread”, was in a building that looked like a decrepit tool shed. It had a couple of tables but was mostly carryout.
MMMMMMMMMM!
That reminds me: Beaumont has a good pizzeria inside a trio of side-by-side shipping containers. One container had windows and a door cut into it for the entrance & seating area; the center container has the counter & take-out window. Seating is kinda cramped, though, which often results in a seating queue.
There was a very good Mexican restaurant in the flyspeck sized rural village of Woodbine, IL back in the mid to late 1970’s. I’ve no idea why; it’s a very rural, white, isolated community with maybe 20 occupied homes in it.
Sadly the restaurant didn’t last long.