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New year, same old me — and extremely happy to still be writing about food. I ended up taking December off because I was writing so much. There were stories for D mag about the social mission-driven franchising model that chef Tiffany Derry and her hospitality company are pursuing with Roots Chicken Shak, a sit-down with Travis Street Hospitality partners Stephan Courseau and chef Bruno Davaillon about a lot of changes in their group of Dallas restaurants, and one that dropped this week about CNTRD Juice in Victory Park and its mission to incorporate sustainable practices.
I made my debut on Dining Out Dallas with a story about chef Wyl Lima of the Charlotte’s new restaurant in Oak Cliff, Ateliê, which is part art gallery and part moody trip to Mexico. I shared seven of my best bites of 2025 (it was so hard to narrow the list to just seven!) with the Dallas Observer, and you’ll see more of my work there this month as I step into writing some more restaurant reviews for the outlet after giving it a swing writing about El Molino. If you happen to like music, I also wrote a short review of the Ryan Davis and the Roadhouse Band album for No Depression – fell in love after seeing them play at Doublewide this fall.
One of the pieces I spent a lot of time on was revising the Infatuation’s best Tex-Mex restaurant list. Growing up in the suburbs of Houston, Pappasita’s was the platonic ideal of what great Tex-Mex is. That restaurant drew much of its inspiration from the Original Ninfa’s, a Houston legend. Houston’s Tex-Mex style informed my palette for the food, and I think it is the best in the state, behind San Antonio, where it originated.
Los Tios, where all the tortillas are corn.
I had a point of view going into the list that chains shouldn’t be punished. Food writers generally want to fill these maps and lists of places like pizza, burgers, and tacos with locally owned mom-and-pop spots. And that is the right thing to do. However, Houston has a wealth of long-running, locally owned Tex-Mex restaurants that, in my opinion, are the backbone of the cuisine. That includes Spanish Flowers, Los Tios (which purports to have served the first frozen margaritas in Houston), Lopez Mexican Restaurant, and, of course, Pappasitos.
Tex-Mex is a cuisine that particularly lends itself to replication, using the same rather limited list of ingredients, making it an ideal candidate for chains. It is theoretically easy to replicate the experience from location to location, although my parents will talk for hours about how the Pappasita’s in the Woodlands is so much worse (in food and service) than the one further South on 1960.
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When I research lists like this one, I do it over a few months, taking time to eat at restaurants by-and-by. But the nature of this assignment finds me spending three to five days in Houston, eating multiple meals a day to write short reviews. It’s a gauntlet. I took my cousin on this particular trip for one day, and by the time we finished two lunches, two coffee shops, and a grand finale dinner at the Original Ninfa’s, his enthusiasm had waned completely. He wanted to know how I do it, how one gets into the mindset to eat like this. What can I say? It takes commitment, an iron stomach, and a great love of food.
Spanish Flowers serves killer cheese enchiladas.