You know how tough it gets when you try to get people to agree on what to eat for dinner. Agreement between four to six people seems tough enough but imagine increasing that number to six million people.
The city of Houston handles the problem by offering multiple solutions with hundreds of restaurant choices covering a multitude of ethnic foods.
The ethnically diverse population loves to eat out, so the city offers restaurants to serve all of the 70 ethnicities represented within the metropolitan area as well as all regions of American cuisine. You could order via Uber Eats or Door Dash and let every person in your family eat precisely what they want.
The diversity of cuisine and the work ethic of the city’s restauranteurs earned it the title the "newest capital of great food" from Food & Wine magazine. Tasting Table magazine named it the country's most exciting food city.
While the city does have its share of fast food and quick service joints, it also serves a plethora of cuisines at sit down and fine dining establishments. With 10,000 choices before you, you might find making a choice a bit daunting, especially if you live in a small town and happen to visit the city for a conference or vacation.
Only in Houston will you find the Aquarium Restaurant where you can eat while big fish like dolphins or sharks swim by or Cool Runnings, a restaurant themed on the Jamaican bobsled team. Explore the area called Upper Kirby, the home of some of the city’s many fine dining experiences such as Eunice, State of Grace, Chapman & Kirby. Don’t miss Davis Street at Hermann Park, especially if you love bananas Foster which the chef turned into bananas Fosters pancakes for breakfast. Also, try the buffalo chicken spring rolls.
This restaurant guide should help you hone your choices and choose a restaurant that suits your needs including special diets and healthy eating.
This guide breaks the city down into geographical areas and discusses the main cuisines available as well as including suggestions for restaurants in each major category.
Downtown Houston: Restaurants in a Central Place
Downtown Houston provides the largest business district in the city where the interstates I-10, I-45, and I-69 meet.
Although its city center covers only 1.84 square miles, it offers a plethora of eateries most of which cater to those staying in the downtown hotels and the business crowd. The restaurants in this area include 024 Grille, 51Fifteen, and 85C Bakery Café.
Eat at Restaurants in West Houston
West Houston consists of Cinco Ranch, Katy, Spring, and the Energy Corridor. This area of rapid residential growth also offers many eateries including Watson’s House of Ales, The West End, and Barnaby’s Cafe.
Houston Airport Restaurants
The massive Houston Airport offers numerous retail and shopping locations. You can choose from almost 90 places to eat in the Houston airport, a number rivaled only by Chicago and Denver.
Try Pappasito’s Cantina for Mexican food, Cat Cora’s Kitchen for American, or Ember for steaks.
Galleria Eats: Houston Restaurants
Shop the Galleria for a once in a lifetime experience and don’t skip the lunch or dinner experience. Forget every mall food court you ever visited.
The Galleria is different. Choose from 90 eateries, including Grotto, Nara Café, Kara Wok, and more. These sit-down restaurants perfectly cap off a shopping trip including numerous designer stores.
Houston Heights Restaurants
The Houston Heights area includes the Holly Park, Woodland Heights, and Brook Smith areas. Pick up gluten-free baked goods at Angie’s Online Gluten-Free Bake Shop which despite the name has a physical address on Mercer Street.
Also, grab a slice at Pink’s Pizza or a steak at Beck’s Prime.
Montrose Area Restaurants for Houston
The Montrose area of Houston houses the University of St. Thomas and the High School of Performing and Visual Arts so you will compete with students for a table if you dine during the day.
The youth of the neighborhood helps keep the offerings diverse though so you can choose from Pan Asian at General Joe’s Chopstix, deli sandwiches at Acadian Bakers, Tex Mex at Chapultepec Lupita, Italian food at Rita’s, and much more.
Rice Village Restaurants
The area surrounding Rice University offers similar diversity to Montrose from Tapas at El Meson to Italian at Prego to Mediterranean at Istanbul Grill & Deli. You can also catch a seafood or American meal after attending an arts or sports event at Rice.
Mexican Cuisine
Whether you want traditional Mexican food or TexMex, Houston offers it. You can find the ubiquitous tacos and burritos as well as empanadas and tamales. Enchiladas usually come in corn tortillas topped with either salsa Verde, salsa, or queso, a cheese sauce. Try the spice mole sauce, an unsweetened chocolate sauce.
Hugo’s and The Original Ninfa’s on Navigation top the list of the Mexican eateries at which the city’s residents dines. While you explore the city, look for the taco stands and food trucks that serve delicious Mexican street food such as fish tacos.
Restaurants with Italian Food
Craving chicken marsala? Dreaming of lasagna? Perhaps you need scungilli or calamari. Houston’s Italian eateries will happily serve you. Accompany your meal with garlic bread.
Wash it down with a tasty chianti. Dessert is a necessity in this European cuisine with foundations of pasta topped by butter sauces or marinara, a tomato sauce. Many restaurants swear by their cheesecake, cannoli, and tiramisu. Locals dine at La Griglia or Grotto Ristorante.
Indian Food and Restaurants
Indian food consists of thick stews, grilled meats, flatbreads, basmati rice, and tasty sweet desserts like gulab jamun. Must eat food include chutney, naan, and tandoori chicken as well as meat samosas if you can find them. Houston provides a hotbed of Indian restaurants, including Aga’s Restaurant & Catering, Maharaja Bhog, and Surya India.
Fish, Lobster and Seafood: Fresh, Gulf Seafood in Houston
This city on the gulf loves fish. Most of the eateries in the city of Houston use fresh caught seafood so you can count on your shrimp, crab, crawdads, mussels, and more having just come from the Gulf of Mexico.
Skip the chain restaurants and try Truluck’s Seafood, Steak and Crab House for the crab cakes or Eddie V’s Prime Seafood. Save room for dessert at Eddie V’s and order the bananas foster.
Vegan Restaurants
Vegan refers to cuisine the uses no meat or meat by-products. The food typically consists of vegetables and grains only with a vegetable-based sauce. Fruits comprise the dessert offerings. Most serve American vegan such as True Food Kitchen, but you can find a kosher vegan meal at Green Vegetarian Cuisine which also offers a vegetarian menu.
Chinese Restaurants
Chinese cuisine uses a foundation of rice or noodles for its dishes. Although the vegetables and meat or fish typically come served on the side, once on the table, the diner tops the rice or pasta with the vegetables and meat. You then sauce them to taste with either duck sauce or soy sauce. Egg rolls, spring rolls, paper wrapped chicken, and moo goo gai pan top the list of commonly ordered dishes, but you can find spicy dishes like General Tso’s chicken.
On a chilly day, pair your meal with egg drop soup or hot and sour soup. Hu’s Cooking and Heights Asian Café top the list that locals love.
French Cuisine: Restaurants with European Cuisine
French cuisine consists of light meats such as chicken, fish, and lamb as well as baked vegetables.
Some dishes add cheese such as Gruyere, but most use au jus, meaning its own juices. Common dishes include quiche, croque Madame, croque Monsieur, foie gras, cassoulet, poulet basquaise, and coq au vin. Cognac and wine often accompany the meal.
Tasty Thai Restaurants
Thai food uses a base of rice or thin pastas such as vermicelli or glass noodles paired with grilled chicken, beef, pork, or fish.
A vegetable medley typically includes peppers, chilies, and spices. Many people assume all Thai food is spicy, but restaurants offer a scale of zero to five or ten. This lets the customers who like bland food order a zero or one, but customers who like very spicy dishes order a higher number. Salads often also contain spices and chilies.
No Meat Please: Vegetarian Restaurants
Vegetarian restaurants offer various ethnicities of food but prepared with only vegetables and vegetable products.
This often includes vegetable burgers and vegetable pizzas. These meatless dishes typically remove only the meat typically used in the dish leaving the remainder of the recipe intact. For example, vegetarian lasagna uses soy cheese with a plant-based meatless substitute or just the soy cheese to replace the ingredients that usually come in the meat version.
Steak Restaurants
Texas knows its steaks.
A thriving cattle industry provides local beef year round, so you can count on the local eateries to provide tasty steaks. Try Pappas Bros. Steakhouse or Vic & Anthony’s Steakhouse for some of the best steaks in the city, according to Houston residents.
Top your steak meal at The Capital Grille with a dessert of crème brulee.
Greek Food and Restaurants
Lemon potatoes, falafel, mussels, spanakopita, lentil soup, cheese pie, gyros. Did we make you hungry yet? This city adores Greek food and goes far beyond the gyros and Greek salad of most cities. Eat at the highly-rated Niko Niko’s or Alexander the Great.
Korean Restaurants
You will find Korean restaurants wildly popular in Houston. Korean cuisine includes many American favorites, but cooked the Korean way. Just as the Americans love fried chicken, chicken wings, and barbeque ribs, so do Koreans.
They flesh out their meals with rice soup, bi bim bop, bi bim bap, and a spicy pickled cabbage dish called kimchi. Houston residents swear by Dak & Bop, Seoul Garden Restaurant, and Korea Garden Restaurant.
Japanese and Sushi Restaurants in Houston
In addition to the city’s many sushi eateries, many Japanese restaurants serve hibachi dishes, steak, fish, stir fry meals, and traditional soups such as miso. You can also get a side dish of sushi.
Sushi, a popular Japanese dish of rice, vegetables, and sometimes meat or fish, wrapped in seaweed, has grown so much in popularity that in Houston, TX, you can find restaurants that serve nothing but sushi. You can also find Japanese restaurants with full menus.
BBQ Restaurants
American BBQ refers to any meat cooked in a hearty tomato-based sauce with chilies or peppers blended into it. Commonly, it uses beef, chicken, or pork as the meat although many restaurants also offer turkey.
Some eateries serve the meats in a variety of cuts such as sliced, chopped, or cubed. Brisket differs from beef steak, but both can be BBQ. Top the meat with any of the available BBQ sauces in varieties such as Hickory smoked, sweet, spicy, sweet and spicy, and honey BBQ. City residents give Goode Company BBQ and Rudy’s Country Store and Texas Bar-B-Que House the highest ratings.
American Restaurants
American food consists of regional foods from the northeast, Deep South, Midwest, and West coast. These typically blend elements of the region with those of the countries from which its original settlers came. Also referred to as home food, it consists of steaks, pork chops, fried chicken, boiled, baked or steamed vegetables such as lima beans, green beans, mashed potatoes, rice, collard greens, rounded out with buttered rolls or cornbread. Try Taste of Texas or The Grove for a satisfying meal.
Soul Food Restaurants
An American invention, soul food or home food refers to a cuisine developed in the Deep South region of the US originally cooked by African-Americans. Its dishes range from the ubiquitous fried chicken to the rarely served in restaurants chitlins, a dish of pork intestines. Other entrees include pork chops and fish patties, typically salmon or crab.
Vegetables such a fried okra, collard greens, black-eyed peas, and fried tomatoes often accompany white rice with brown gravy. Mashed potatoes and rhubarb often accompany the entrée.
Restaurants Serving Vietnamese Cuisine
While Vietnamese cuisine offers a variety of dishes similar in some aspects to Chinese and Korean food, it is best known for its vast bowls of light broth called pho. The diner usually chooses their meats which come on the side with a serving of sautéed vegetables. They add these to their broth and spice it to taste with peppers and spices brought to their table. Also, try the vermicelli bowl, egg rolls, fried rice, and chicken shrimp.
Both Huynh Restaurant and Pho Saigon provide highly rated dining experiences, nearing a five on a scale of zero to five.
Restaurants with Brazilian Meat and Delicious Cuisine
The South American country of Brazil offers diverse dishes of barbequed meat and stews as well as cheese breads and steamed porridges. Black-eyed peas favor heavily in its dishes as does rice. The country’s national food, feijoada, consists of meat and beans in a stew.
Another stew, pato no tucupi, uses duck meat. Both pair well on a chilly day with pao de queijo, cheese bread.
Cajun Restaurants
Houston’s close proximity to Louisiana and Mississippi make it a natural home away from home for Cajuns and Cajun food.
Although the city lacks a bayou, or cypress swamp, it offers a number of tasty restaurants serving this spicy cuisine that merges French food with traditional food of the Deep South. Common dishes include blackened chicken, fried catfish, crawdads, Cajun shrimp, and fried alligator. The vegetables accompanying these hot and spicy dishes that make hearty use of cayenne pepper range from okra to black-eyed peas.
Desserts tend toward a southern creation called cobbler which bears resemblance to a pie, but in the shape of a brownie. Cobblers use fruit as the filling topped with a light, flaky crust, baked in a square pan.
Empanadas, Anyone? Restaurants with Cuban Offerings
Visitors from Cuba or Florida can find a few Cuban eateries in Houston. From stews to Cuban sandwiches, you can find it locally.
Most of these restaurants serve two menus. For example, Rincon Criollo Restaurant serves Cuban and Caribbean fare while El Rey Taqueria serves Cuban and Mexican. You can taste sweet breads, lechuga, tomate y cebolla, empanados, or milanesa de pollo.
Ethiopian Restaurants
Meat lovers fare well at Ethiopian eateries. A meal typically consists of a vegetable and a selection of spicy meats.
You might try wat, a spicy stew, with injera, a sourdough flatbread. In this culture, it is typical to pick up the stewed meats with the bread served, so you may not get flatware. It is perfectly okay to eat with your fingers in this culture though.
Persian Restaurants
Persian food relies on delicious taste and gorgeous presentation. Expect your food to come out prettily plated and perfect for an Instagram food post. Try halva, chicken, lamb, or beef kabobs, kidney beans, ghormeh sabs, an herb stew, or ads polo, a rice and lentil dish.
Peruvian Restaurants
Peruvians delight in fish and seafood dishes so Houston proves a perfect place for restaurants from this culture. This cuisine generally pairs a hot and a cold dishes on each plate as well as a starch and a protein.
Try the sudado de pescado, a steamed fish stew, or the choros a la chalaca, steamed mussels. You can get your seafood and your salad in one dish with Jalea.
Restaurants with Turkish Influence
Once part of the Ottoman Empire, the traditional foods of Turkey provide some of the first fusion fare cooked. It blends influences of Central Asia, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, the Mediterranean, Armenia, and the Balkans which it blends with the foods of southeast, central, and western Europe. You can order kabobs, spelled as Sis Kebap or Shish Kebab in Turkish.
Also, try the lamb or beef meatballs called kofta. Its boat-shaped flat bread, pide, comes stuffed with cheese, ground meat, pastrami, or sausage with tomatoes, onions, or eggs.
German Restaurants
Houston provides your sausage connection as well as authentic German beer. Whether you dine indoors or in the beer garden, you can enjoy a bit of bratwurst and cabbage, at Rudi Lechner’s German Restaurant or King’s Bierhaus. Also order the sauerkraut, potato salad, zucchini bread, or sauerbraten.
New Restaurants for the Modern Food Lover
Yes, even though the city already has 10,000 eateries, since you have to eat, Houston continues to open new cafes and dining experiences.
The latest options include the Cajun/seafood option Brennan’s of Houston, the American café Houston’s, and Spindletop which serves both American and seafood.
Michelin Star Restaurants
Houston currently has no eateries with a Michelin star. The Michelin Guide does review a number of restaurants in the city though. The guide employees secret inspectors who dine at the establishment. Their overall experience determines their rating. They can review the restaurant favorably without designating with any stars.
A rating ranges from one to three stars. A single star means you should dine there should the opportunity arise. Two means it is worth a detour to dine there. Three stars puts the eatery in the category of exceptional cuisine, worthy of a special trip just to dine there.
Nice Restaurants for Fancy Occasions
Whether you need an upscale/expensive spot for a business dinner or to meet the parents of your new love, Houston offers the ideal fine dining experience. In a city known for oil deals, a steakhouse provides a perfect backdrop at Pappas Bros.
Steakhouse Houston LLC and Mezza Grill offer the ambiance and the steaks. When looking for a "good fancy" restaurant, also try the aforementioned La Griglia or Fadi’s Mediterranean Grill.
In Love: Romantic Restaurants
Romance and fine food go together. When you want soft lights and softer music as a back drop for find food and a staff that respects privacy, visit the places Houston residents do. Dine at Chez Nous or the old school Da Marco.
Kid-Friendly Restaurants
Many of Houston’s family friendly places to visit also serve food. The Downtown Aquarium offers tow restaurants while the Lake House at Discovery Green provides a counter-service café owned by the same individuals as Café Annie.
It provides an affordable dining experience. Enjoy sitting on the patio at Niko Niko’s. These also qualify as some of the cool and fun restaurants the port city has to offer.
Dog-Friendly Restaurants
Do you dream of dining in a spot that welcomes your German Shepherd, too? Your favorite blue-eyed dog can accompany you to many Houston area cafes.
You can both have a delicious meal although we imagine your pup will want to eat everything on your plate, too. Although it seems a drop in the bucket since the city has 10,000 eating places, you find more than 20 that let your canine dine, too, including The Kitchen at The Dunlavy, Boheme, Backstreet Café, and Barnaby’s Café.
Rooftop Restaurants
Houston offers a mild climate that lets you enjoy year-round. This lends itself to outdoor dining and with a seaside city that offers a gorgeous skyline, too, why not dine on the rooftop? You can at Harold’s Restaurant, Bar & Rooftop Terrace or La Grange Houston. At The Dogwood, you can dine late since it does not close until midnight. These eateries do also serve alcohol, so grownups only.
Patio Restaurants
American, Mexican, Latin American, Greek. They all have in common café patios to let you enjoy the beautiful Houston weather and Gulf breeze while dining.
Some coffee houses in the city, such as Empire Café, also offer patio dining. Try The Rustic or Traveler’s Table for tapas under the sun.
Cool and Fun Restaurants that You Can’t Miss
For a unique dining experience, celebrate the movie Cool Running about the first Jamaican bobsled team at a restaurant that shares the movie name and serves Jamaican food.
Try the jerk chicken or coconut curry shrimp. The Rooftop Cinema Club also offers one-of-a-kind dining with a movie. Try the gourmet hot dogs.
What are must-try Restaurants in Houston?
Whether you dine in, take out, or have dinner delivered, try these delicious Houston options. Order home food and cakes from Nancy's Hustle or enjoy a pie from Pizaro's Pizza Napoletana. The drip is real, says restaurant Riel, known for its beef and cheddar sandwiches and burgers.
Giacomo's Cibo e Vino offers a small menu of succulent dishes available for pickup or delivery via a thrid-party service.
How Many Restaurants are in Houston?
More than 10,000 eateries call Houston home, so you will always have plenty of options.