There’s a distinct Texas twang to Odd Duck on South Lamar. It’s wood smoke, fire, chiles, game, and Gulf Coast seafood, with a menu that riffs on classic Texan dishes like tamales, green chili pork shoulder, or icebox cake. What’s brilliant about this casual and upbeat restaurant is that the menu gets revamped at a rapid-fire pace. From day to day, week to week, every dish is subject to change. It’s the kind of place you go back to over and over again, and it never gets old.

With only one seating each night at Tsuke Edomae, securing a reservation is not easy. Other spots might feel more celebratory, or provide more value for your dollar. But you’re here to try edomae-style sushi in its purest form—combining a blend of thick-grained rice, aged vinegars, and high quality fish with nothing but wasabi and soy sauce. Each piece is served to one guest at a time, and when your turn comes, it’s just you, the nigiri, and seven curious diners, attentively waiting their turn.

No place is more dedicated to the concept of “local” than Dai Due in Cherrywood. This place does things the hard, Oregon Trail way. That means brined pork chops and 80-day dry-aged ribeyes cooked over a wood-fired grill, wild Hill Country game, and a menu made from locally sourced everything. It’s as Texas as it gets—with a semi-casual formality to match it—and every dinner here is just a little bit different from the last, with a menu that changes nightly.

While most of the pitmasters in Texas argue over who makes the jiggliest brisket, LeRoy And Lewis is looking at the rest of the cow—and it’s cooking all of it. It feels like a love letter to beef, and it’s this broad-minded approach to barbecue that makes it the best way to experience smoked meat in Austin. Everything has a Central Texas-style approach—simple seasonings, low-and-slow smoke, and local meat—and it’s applied to more than just beef.

A meal at Birdie’s is homey and thoughtful, like a backyard dinner party thrown by your very talented chef friend where creative plates keep coming and you can never seem to find the bottom of your wine glass. The food is “New American” in the sense that it’s difficult to pin down the exact influences other than seasonality and stuff that simply tastes good, but that’s not really important anyway.

In a city full of so much barbecue, KG BBQ brings something new to the brisket-filled table. This is Central Texas-style barbecue with an Egyptian twist, whether that’s in the form of more subtle influences like za’taar-dusted pork ribs, or the signature bowl that combines turmeric rice with brisket, tahini, nuts, and pomegranate seeds. It’s a place where smoked brisket shawarmas feel less like fusion food, and more like a shawarma that happened to spend its formative years in Central Texas.

Bufalina has been Austin’s original pizza-and-natural-wine spot since it opened in 2013. With bare Edison bulbs and unfinished walls, it always felt kind of like an underground clubhouse, but with esoteric wines alongside classic and sometimes unconventional Neapolitan pies. The pizzas are great, but the devastatingly excellent pastas transform Bufalina from a simple pizza joint into an Italian restaurant worth waiting for a table in a parking lot in the blazing Texas summertime sun.

Uchi is a restaurant that’s earned its reputation by offering a mix of traditional sushi and inventive Japanese fusion dishes at a time when most places thought “Japanese fusion” just meant putting spicy mayo on a tuna roll and calling it a day. While Uchi may have since expanded to half a dozen states across the US, it all started right here in a tiny, renovated house on South Lamar. And there’s no better place to go to see what makes it so special than the source.

Fabrik lets a vegetable be a vegetable. It’s a vegan restaurant that doesn’t rely on Franken-pseudo meats to try and convince you that soy protein is just as good as meat. Instead, they know that a skewer of oyster mushroom grilled over hot charcoal can, in fact, trigger the same rush as any piece of poultry or beef. Just know that by signing up for dinner here, you’ll be buckling in for an inventive five- or seven-course tasting menu that feels a little bit like a plant-based roller coaster.

Austin doesn’t have a lot of places that fit the bill for fine dining, but we do have Jeffrey’s. It’s a little bit classic French, a little bit standard American steakhouse, and every bit a place where you come to celebrate big milestones in exchange for a bill you’ll try to avoid thinking about. It’s a classy restaurant with a martini cart, and where epic 30+ day dry-aged steaks occupy half of the tables, next to golden osetra caviar, seared foie gras, and deviled eggs topped with truffles.

This is the best Chinese food in Austin. Not just the best value or the place with the best portion sizes—but it’s certainly strong in those fields, too. It’s at its best with Sichuan classics, but even if you’re not in the mood for chongqing chicken or mapo tofu, you can get good renditions of Chinese-American classics as well. Sometimes we’re here when the craving for spicy eggplant hits, other times it’s for a last-minute date night.

Dinner at OKO feels like a tropical oasis set in an old factory warehouse, where coconut vinegars and tangy fish-sauce glazes add a punch to course after course of slow-roasted pork, chicken, and oxtail. Their innovative small-plate spins on Filipino street foods make it the rare event worth double-circling on your calendar. You won’t want to come back a second time. You’ll need to come back a second (and third) time, just to make sure you don’t miss a single thing on the menu.

Over the course of a few hours, chicken at P Thai’s gets prepped, poached, cooled, hung to dry, and whispered words of affirmation to bring about the most tender meat possible. The end result is the best khao man gai in Austin. This same zen-like focus extends to the rest of the small but mighty menu, made up of regional Thai street foods like the spicy boat noodles that are rich with pork blood, or a highly refreshing pig tongue salad.

If you’re going to blow well over $300 per person on dinner, the sushi restaurant Otoko is where to do it. The futuristic design of the dining room makes it feel like you’re in a fancy spaceship, along with a soundtrack of Bowie, Sun Ra, Fugazi, and a chef that looks like he could have just hopped off any of their stages. The omakase experience is a dizzying procession of small plates and nigiri, with a menu that brings together fish, smoke, umami, and vinegar for an unforgettable meal.

This Louisiana-influenced trailer parked behind Batch in East Austin isn’t just doing Texas barbecue with a twist—it’s rewriting the whole script. Crawfish dressing, jalapeño cheddar boudin, and smoked ham join forces with brisket and ribs to form a new barbecue supergroup. The pitmaster trained at Franklin and Interstellar, but Parish is in a genre of its own. Even the sides are standouts—pimento mac and cheese, pickled okra succotash, and a vinegary coleslaw that makes cabbage cool again.

Canje is best experienced with a small group eager to tackle as much of the menu as possible, because listen: You don’t want to miss the wild boar pepperpot. Or the sour orange ceviche. Or the oxtail beef patties. Or the jerk chicken served with garlic chutney. Or the… you get the point. Fortunately, plates are meant to be shared, and the servers at this boisterous Caribbean restaurant on the East Side are happy to walk you through the optimal combinations.

Suerte makes a statement from the moment you heave open the enormous wooden door—a dramatic welcome that would feel gratuitous if this Mexican restaurant had lost its shine since becoming one of Austin’s most famous spots in 2018. It hasn’t. Suerte’s savory highlights include barbacoa, ceviche, and suadero tacos with confited wagyu brisket and something called “black magic oil." They pair nicely with anything off the tequila- and mezcal-heavy cocktail menu.

Nixta isn’t the place you come when you want to scarf down half-a-dozen small, street-style tacos. It’s where you go when you want to experience unique, rich Mexican flavors that just happen to arrive on a nixtamalized corn tortilla. It’s unstuffy and unpretentious, but seasonal ingredients and a great list of natural wines make it equally suited for special occasions and random Tuesday nights (but you can also just get a Modelo).

Barley Swine feels like a secret supper club tucked inside a cozy ski lodge, but it’s actually one of Austin’s OG trailer-to-fine-dining success stories. Now in Brentwood, this tasting-menu spot serves seasonal Texas-inspired dishes. You might start with a bite-sized tartare puff and end with a masa tres leches that tastes like cornbread’s fancier cousin. Book a seat at the bar for a front-row ticket to the culinary show. Barley Swine’s menu changes monthly.

Texans can spend all day debating which city makes the best tacos, but if we had to nominate one candidate to showcase Austin's qualifications, it would be Paprika. Some taco trucks specialize in hyper-regional styles or specialty fillings, whereas Paprika is a jack-of-all-trades that excels at everything it does. Confit suadero and sous vide carnitas are among the most tender versions you’ll find in town, and the weekend-only al pastor special takes the No. 1 spot in our al pastor ranking.

Kemuri Tatsu-Ya is a place where you can get chili cheese takoyaki, grilled skewers, and smoked brisket bento boxes that are kind of a DIY handroll situation made for the whole table to share. And it all happens in an eclectic dining room that feels like a Texas hunting lodge that picked up its decor from a vintage store in Tokyo (there are also lots of robots). A restaurant like this couldn’t exist anywhere else in the world, other than right here, in Austin.

This family-run diner has been serving breakfast and lunch in South Austin for over 20 years, and it’s part of the city’s landscape. If you go during a prime breakfast hour, especially on the weekends, there will be a wait. It’s worth it, especially for the killer fajitas or the huevos gringos, the most perfect (and unique and absurd) breakfast combo plate in which over-easy eggs get covered in queso, and then served with carne guisada, refried beans, fries, and tortillas for good measure.

The pho at Pho Phong Lu'u is the best in town, and we’re clearly not the only people who think so, as evidenced by the line spilling out of this North Austin restaurant around lunchtime every weekend. Don’t expect any frills here, just a large, open dining room that doubles as a holding area for the rich aroma of beef bones slow-cooked with cinnamon and clove. The menu is small and simple—a few pho options, fried rice, crispy garlic fish sauce chicken wings, and excellent bánh mì.

Ling Kitchen is a Chinese tasting-menu restaurant that's as committed to the presentation as they are the food. There’s one seating per night (at 6:30), and everyone dines around a long metal table next to the open kitchen where the staff prepares a procession of creative dishes. Get ready for a wooden chest that opens to a plume of smoke revealing pork belly, peking duck, or some other flavorful meat.