By Kevin Gray
For all the tropes about Texas, at least one is actually true: Everything really is bigger. You could cover 800 miles and drive for more than 12 hours without crossing state lines, and with all that land comes a lot of places to eat. The 2024 debut of the Texas Michelin Guide shined a light on the state’s culinary scene, granting 15 stars to some of its best restaurants, and providing locals and travelers with a definitive dining road map.
Texas cities are diverse, and its restaurants increasingly match the population. So while barbecue, steaks, and Tex-Mex are practically local religion—and rightfully so—the inaugural Michelin list bestowed stars to a wide range of cuisines: omakase counters, fine-dining Indian, French, Spanish, and plenty more. Of course, the guide includes a few barbeque spots, too. After all, this is Texas.
LeRoy and Lewis of Austin is one of the newly awarded barbecue joints. Last year, the restaurant moved out of its original food truck and into a standalone space, where it can better meet the public’s seemingly insatiable appetite for tender smoked brisket, perfect beef cheeks, and other Texas-raised meats.
“It means a lot that people who are respected so highly in the world of fine food and service recognize barbecue as a cuisine and its place in the industry,” says co-founder Evan LeRoy, who launched LeRoy and Lewis in 2017 but has been manning a smoker for more than 15 years. That experience, and the obsessive level of execution across the menu, make it easy to see what attracted Michelin to the restaurant’s doors, and why there’s always a line of hungry customers hoping to fill their trays before their favorites sell out.
Austin diners also flock to Hestia for its live-fire cooking, but instead of smokers, this fine-dining restaurant uses a custom 20-foot hearth. “Every culture has their own expressions of food cooked over fire,” says Keith Rzepecki, corporate executive chef for Hestia’s Emmer & Rye Hospitality Group. “With that approach, we were able to create an almost limitless amount of inspiration to pull from for what cooking over fire looks like.”
That means charring, roasting, grilling, and otherwise coaxing flavors out of dry-aged Wagyu rib eyes, halibut, scallops, and vegetables. “For the scallop, there is no better firepower than unlimited firepower,” says Rzepecki. The scallop is seared to a golden brown, while the halibut is handled in the opposite manner: It sits in a steel rack three feet over the flames, where it is slowly cooked and smoked in ambient heat. The kitchen sources as many ingredients as possible from independent farms and ranches, so the menu changes weekly to accommodate what’s in season. “The farmers do the hard work, we just follow along on their schedule,” Rzepecki says.
More hard work can be found at Texas’s newly starred omakase counters, which are proving that local chefs can compete with sushi capitals like Tokyo and New York. “I hope that each restaurant and chef will inspire each other and further improve the level of food culture in Texas,” says Tatsuya Sekiguchi, chef and owner of Tatsu Dallas.
Sekiguchi, who formerly ran an omakase counter in New York City, serves traditional Edomae-style sushi, which expresses value by using minimum ingredients for maximum flavor. He orchestrates a show each night, relying on elemental methods like temperature and time to prepare bites of fish and rice with exacting precision. Seeing omakase proliferate across the state has been a source of pride for the chef, and he notes how readily Texas diners have embraced the sushi style.
Houston’s restaurant scene is among the most exciting and diverse—not only in the state, but also in the U.S., with seemingly unlimited casual and fine-dining options across modern American, Vietnamese, Indian, French, and other cuisines.
For sheer wow factor, it’s hard to beat Musaafer, which translates from Hindi and Urdu to “traveler.” The stunning restaurant is a two-story labyrinth of distinct rooms, each featuring custom artwork, tile, wallpaper, and chandeliers by Delhi-based Chromed Design Studio to keep your eyes busy—at least until the food arrives and refocuses your attention. Standout dishes include the aloo gobhi tart, a crisp shell stuffed with spiced cauliflower, ginger, potato, and tomato chutney, and juicy, chargrilled lamb chops marinated in spiced yogurt and finished with dots of pomegranate molasses.
Continue your Houston culinary journey with a trip to March, one of several excellent restaurants under the Goodnight Hospitality umbrella (another of its standouts is Rosie Cannonball, which also joined the Michelin guide and was awarded a Bib Gourmand). March operates with a unique concept that explores the breadth of Mediterranean cuisine, focusing on a single region for several months before closing temporarily to completely remake the menu. Past featured regions have included Maghreb in Northwest Africa and Andalusia and Murcia in Southern Spain, while recent iterations took deep dives into the Republic of Genoa and Venice, Italy. Eating at March is as much a geography lesson as it is a culinary experience, and it’s an apt parallel to Texas’s restaurant scene: worldly, ambitious, and always more to discover.
