Start from 43 curated places around Nantucket, MA, then choose the recommendations that fit your guests.
Restaurants & cafés
The Nautilus
An izakaya-style downtown room of loud, shareable Asian-leaning small plates: crab fried rice, oyster tacos, and a Peking duck that regulars build their order around. It is widely considered the hardest reservation on the island and worth the effort.
Via Mare
A Venetian small-plates room from the Ventuno family pouring cicchetti, fresh bread with whipped butter, and the smoked-salmon everything-bagel-spice arancini people come back for. Tighter and more interesting than the island's bigger Italian rooms.
Trails & outdoors
Sanford Farm
The island's signature walk: a Nantucket Conservation Foundation property running 780 acres from a barn through open moor and meadow down to Ram Pasture and the south-shore ocean. The full out-and-back is the classic moderate Nantucket hike.
Ram Pasture
The grassland-and-pond turnaround at the ocean end of the Sanford Farm system, open coastal heath running down to an undeveloped south-shore beach. It is the payoff stretch and can also be reached as its own shorter walk.
Things to do
Nantucket Whaling Museum
The Nantucket Historical Association's flagship museum in a restored 1847 candle factory, with a sperm whale skeleton, scrimshaw, and a harbor-view rooftop deck. The island's main rainy-day cultural anchor and a real museum, family-friendly.
Maria Mitchell Association
The science nonprofit honoring island-born astronomer Maria Mitchell, running an aquarium, natural-science museum, two observatories, and her birthplace house. The smaller, hands-on, family-leaning museum counterpart to the Whaling Museum.
Landmarks & sights
Brant Point Light
The short white wooden lighthouse at the harbor mouth that every ferry passes on the way in, on a site lit since 1746. It is the picture people take of their arrival and the spot the island says goodbye from, with a sand beach right at its base.
Sankaty Head Light
The red-banded 1850 brick tower on the bluff above 'Sconset, moved 400 feet inland in 2007 to outrun the eroding cliff. It sits in open grassland with one of the widest ocean horizons on the island and almost no crowd.