In January, I started researching queso. When I say researching, I mean eating it in vast quantities to update the map of Dallas's best queso map on Eater. When August came around, I was still eating queso. There is a lot of it here, unconstrained by the idea of being exclusive to Tex-Mex restaurant menus. It was taking a long time because I would take breaks for weeks, and because I was eating a lot of disappointing queso.
If you don't know the metrics of making an Eater map, writers make selections that are not only the best, but that span multiple neighborhoods and price points, don't include numerous restaurants by the same hospitality group or corporation, and take into consideration who the owners are — the no assholes rule. I found that my favorite queso bowls were frequently at chains and no-frills Tex-Mex restaurants. Among the top contenders on a very long list are Chuy's, Torchy's Tacos, Velvet Taco, E-Bar Tex-Mex, Mattito's, Meso Maya, Vidorra, HG Sply's vegan queso, and a surprise entry from Chelsea Corner.
Chuy’s queso, with ground beef, doesn’t photograph impressively, but it was among the tastiest and most filling quesos I tried.
Many of the places with disappointing queso were down to texture. Too watery and thin or too thick and viscous. The second sin was a lack of chile, producing a flat flavor. It should be easy to make good queso, which is at its finest is American cheese, roasted tomatoes, and green chiles — and at its simplest, Velvetta, Rotel, and canned green chiles. When it comes to queso, it is better when it's cheap and made from processed cheese in large batches. Reheating it? Hell yes.
Early queso recipes called for American cheese, which melts really well. Kraft patented American cheese, made from melted chunks of cheddar and usually Colby or Swiss cheeses with an emulsifying agent, to avoid food waste and sterilize cheese back in 1916. Is calling it American cheese some weird shade on France and their love of unpasteurized dairy? Probably. At any rate, it's the emulsifying agent that makes American cheese so damn melty and delicious in queso, on burgers, and in grilled cheese and the tomatoes and chiles that give it the kick that makes it more than simply melted cheese dip.
In Amy McCarthy's piece breaking down the history of chile con queso, or relatively what little we know of its history, for Eater in 2017, she writes that several people claim to have invented the dish. There's a claim that queso was the best-selling dish at the Original Mexican Restaurant in San Antonio circa 1900. That restaurant, opened by Chicago businessman Otis Farnsworth, would become the blueprint for Tex-Mex restaurants in terms of the menu. As described by San Antonio magazine, the aesthetic was "run by Anglos for Anglos" and required men to wear a jacket. The kitchen served enchiladas, tamales, chili, and queso on fine china. A menu from the restaurant in the 1930s puts chile con queso as a part of the special supper offering for 60 cents, or a dollar for big spenders.
From flavor to texture, Meso Maya nails its queso recipe. Don’t be afraid to dump the salsa in too.
The New Yorker finds a different history, via research by blogger Lisa Fain at the Homesick Texan. Fain's book, Queso, traces the history back to a recipe from 1896 published in a magazine that was a more chile forward version of the dish akin to salsa, and posits that the rise of queso's popularity can be tied to the rising popularity of the Welsh rabbit, a British dish of cheese on toast, at the turn of the 20th century, with a Mexican counterpart called Mexican rarebit that added the chiles.
Yes, there is a fancier version of queso in which restaurants use peeled, fire-roasted tomatoes and roasted Hatch chiles rather than a can of Rotel. The cheese mix might even differ — earlier this week, Jose Ralat wrote in Texas Monthly about El Paso's preference for Muenster on its food, which melts just as nicely as American (although most use white American cheese to make queso blanco).
Loro’s mushroom and brisket queso is among the least flavorful and most expensive that I tried in 2025.
All of this to say: I was struggling not only with telling readers that the best quesos they might find in Texas were all at the same price point, but also with how to differentiate writing about those quesos because they all have the same flavor profile. It doesn't lend itself nicely to map or list making as a dish, because the most satisfying bowls of queso replicate the early recipes for queso. Adding other ingredients, trying different cheeses, and modernizing the recipe tend to lead to disappointment.
Sometimes, cheap and easy is the best way.
Correction: Thursday, August 29, 2025, 1:35 p.m.: A previous version of this newsletter said that Vidorra in Deep Ellum has closed. That is Stirr, the other Milkshake Concepts restaurant in the neighborhood.