Where to Eat Now 2015

Last year’s ten best and brightest new restaurants.

Got the midwinter blahs? Or craftily thinking ahead to Valentine’s? Here’s a plan for either situation: check out our annual list of the best new restaurants in the state. I promise you’ll find something to like because, as usual, they’re all over the map, from a splashy Mexican seafood emporium in Houston to a chic French dining room in Fort Worth to the home of the year’s most ballyhooed steak, in Dallas. In Austin you can even have a foie gras pizza, buckwheat crumpets, and goat confit, all in the same place.

One of the best parts of doing the research for the fourteenth edition of this story was checking out the trends. Vegetables are definitely sexy, especially radishes. Salads are everywhere, even perched right on top of the entrée. Tacos and chicharrones are in, ditto biscuits and Southern cooking in general. Sea urchin is showing up in non-Asian restaurants. Heritage-breed pork is hot, and charcuterie is still in style (San Antonio chefs even threw a Charc Week). Pickles of all types are cool, and kimchi has gone mainstream. I kept reading that insects were going to take off, but all I noticed were crickets, and just once (maybe I wasn’t looking very hard).

On to the rules: To make the list, a restaurant must have opened between November 1, 2013, and October 31, 2014, and it must be a first location. There, that’s out of the way. Let’s eat!