Austin Travel Guide
Eating Austin
The food guide for the city where brisket lines are a sport — how to do barbecue without wasting a morning, the breakfast-taco religion, queso and Tex-Mex, food trailers and a Lockhart pilgrimage.
Austin eats with conviction. The city's food identity rests on four pillars — Central Texas barbecue, breakfast tacos, Tex-Mex and a food-trailer culture that turned parking lots into dining rooms — and visitors who plan around them eat better than those who chase whatever opened last month. Restaurant openings and closings move fast here, so treat names as starting points and check current hours before you go.
Barbecue: the Central Texas canon. Central Texas barbecue is about beef brisket smoked low and slow over post oak, seasoned with little more than salt and coarse black pepper, sliced to order and sold by weight on butcher paper with white bread, pickles and onions. Sausage, pork ribs and beef ribs round it out; sauce is optional and sometimes frowned upon. The style descends from the German and Czech meat markets of small Central Texas towns, and Austin has become its most famous showcase. The headline name is Franklin Barbecue in East Austin, which made the multi-hour brisket line a national phenomenon. The line is a ritual in itself — people arrive well before opening with chairs and coolers, and the brisket often sells out — so either commit to it as a morning activity or check whether advance pre-orders are available for your dates. Across the city, a generation of pitmasters trained in the same tradition runs trailers and restaurants with shorter waits; ask a local which one they queue for this year.
How to do barbecue without losing a day. Go early, on a weekday; lines and sellouts are worst on weekends. Order by the half-pound and share — a mix of fatty and lean brisket, a link of sausage and a rib or two feeds two people well. Do not fill up on sides. And consider the pilgrimage: Lockhart, about forty minutes south, is the official barbecue capital of Texas, where historic meat markets including Kreuz Market, Black's Barbecue and Smitty's Market have served smoked meat for generations in rooms that smell of a century of post oak. Taylor, northeast of the city, has its own landmark in Louie Mueller Barbecue. A barbecue road trip makes a brilliant half day.
Breakfast tacos: the daily sacrament. Austin's most democratic food is the breakfast taco: a warm flour tortilla wrapped around eggs with bacon, chorizo, potato, beans or migas (eggs scrambled with crisp tortilla strips), finished with salsa. They are cheap, portable and available from gas stations to trailers to sit-down cafes, and locals argue about them with passion. Order two or three with different fillings, ask for both red and green salsas and eat them hot. Coffee-shop patios on South Congress, including Jo's Coffee, serve them alongside strong coffee, and food trucks across East Austin are famous for theirs.
Tex-Mex and queso. Tex-Mex — the hybrid cooking of Texas's Mexican-American communities, with its enchiladas in chili gravy, combination plates, fajitas and frozen margaritas — has old-school institutions all over the city, many of them family-run for decades. Queso, the molten cheese dip served with chips, is the city's unofficial appetizer and a source of fierce loyalty. For more regional Mexican cooking, look to East Austin and the city's many interior-Mexican restaurants and trucks, where you will find birria, cochinita pibil and handmade tortillas.
Food trailers. Austin's food-trailer culture took off in the 2000s, and while some trailers graduated to bricks and mortar, the format remains central: clusters of trucks with picnic tables, string lights and craft beer, often attached to bars. They are where young chefs experiment, and where you can eat very well for little money. Check social media for current locations and hours, which change.
The rest of the table. Austin's restaurant scene has grown sophisticated, with ambitious tasting menus, Japanese and Vietnamese cooking, wood-fired everything and excellent cocktail bars. Hotel restaurants are often strong — the Carpenter Hotel's Carpenters Hall and Geraldine's at the Hotel Van Zandt among them. In the Hill Country, Fredericksburg's German heritage shows in biergartens and bakeries, and the wineries along Highway 290 pour Texas wines that have improved enormously.
A day of eating, sequenced. If you want one perfect Austin food day, it might run like this: breakfast tacos and coffee on a South Congress patio; a mid-morning swim at Barton Springs to make room; barbecue for a late lunch, either in the city or on a drive to Lockhart; a long rest through the afternoon heat; then an early Tex-Mex dinner with queso and a margarita before music at the Continental Club or the Broken Spoke, where the chicken-fried steak is its own argument. Late at night, a food trailer near the bars finishes the job. Pace yourself — portions are Texan.
Drinks. Austin's drinking culture matches its food: Texas craft breweries pour across the city, often with big outdoor yards; Hill Country distilleries make whiskey, vodka and gin; and the frozen margarita is a civic institution. Coffee is taken seriously too, with independent roasters and patio cafes in every neighborhood. In summer, the smartest drink is water, and plenty of it.
Practical tips. Reserve dinner on weekends, especially during festivals. Carry water in summer while queuing. Tip well. And arrange your day so the heavy meal falls at lunch: barbecue at noon and tacos in the morning leave room for a lighter dinner before the music.