CITY GUIDES | TEXAS
Waco’s Restaurant Scene Has Entered a New Era
Mediterranean small plates, raw bars, serious steakhouses, and the institutions that made Waco hungry in the first place.
By Rebecca Thompson
Updated July 21, 2026
Milo All Day
AUTHOR BIO: Rebecca Thompson has held many jobs, from newspaper writer to middle-school teacher. As a restaurant critic, she’s reviewed the Michelin-starred to gas station BBQ.
Waco has long known how to feed people, from old-school burgers and Vietnamese clay pots to barbecue served in quantities best followed by a nap.
What’s changed is the ambition.
The Waco food scene now includes Mediterranean small plates, raw bars, seasonal neighborhood cooking, serious steakhouses, and chefs who seem less interested in competing with Austin or Dallas than in building something that belongs here.
The best restaurants in Waco still include the institutions that gave the city its appetite, but this list of where to eat in Waco now has far more new answers than it did even a few years ago.
Alpha Omega Grill & Bakery
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Alpha Omega’s gyro menu takes the usual choice between chicken and lamb and keeps going: beef, ribeye, shrimp, chickpea, and even a version built around grilled fish. The ribeye arrives with peppers, onions, fries, and a white-wine mushroom sauce folded into the pita, while the souvlaki platter makes a strong argument for sitting down rather than carrying lunch back to the car. Save room for the bakery case, especially the ekmek, layered with syrup-soaked shredded phyllo, Bavarian cream, and white chocolate mousse.
Best for: A gyro followed by an entirely unnecessary trip to the bakery case
Blaine’s Restaurant & Wine Shoppe
$$$$ | MAP | WEBSITE | INSTAGRAM
Blaine Fischer built his neighborhood restaurant around an open kitchen, a rotating seasonal menu, and enough wine to make choosing a bottle part of dinner rather than an administrative task. The cooking moves between French-bistro instincts and Texas appetites: triple-cooked fries with Dijon, pork schnitzel, steak with pommes frites, and Japanese-style karaage have all appeared. Wednesdays bring Sicilian-style pizza and live music, but the better reason to visit is a kitchen willing to change its mind with the season.
Best for: A seasonal dinner with a bottle worth discussing
The Blasian Asian
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Chevy Vongdara began The Blasian Asian as a food trailer before moving into Union Hall, where her compact menu remains one of downtown Waco’s most distinctive. Order the nompang sach chrouk, a Cambodian sandwich filled with lemongrass-marinated grilled pork, or the yellow chicken curry with rice. Garlic fried rice comes with egg, vegetables, and enough fried garlic to announce itself before it reaches the table. The restaurant’s Cambodian dishes make the case here; orange chicken can wait for another day.
Best for: Cambodian pork sandwiches and garlic fried rice downtown
The Butcher’s Cellar
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The Butcher’s Cellar is more than a steakhouse, with wagyu dumplings, short-rib bao buns, tuna crispy rice, and a potato rösti sharing menu space with dry-aged beef. Steaks remain the center of things, including a wagyu Denver cut and steak frites, but dinner doesn’t require ordering the largest piece of meat available. The Woodway restaurant has the polish expected of a special-occasion steakhouse and enough range to keep the table from eating the same meal four times.
Best for: A celebratory dinner that goes beyond steak
Cafe Homestead
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Cafe Homestead sits within the Homestead Heritage community, where the phrase “farm to table” involves an actual farm rather than a chalkboard near the hostess stand. The menu turns local beef, house-smoked meats, fresh bread, and nearby produce into chicken-fried steak, green-chile brisket quesadillas, Reubens, and corn fritters. It’s comfort food with enough connection to its surroundings to feel specific to this patch of Central Texas. The shops, gardens, and working crafts nearby make lunch here part of a larger afternoon, though the biscuits don’t require an educational component.
Best for: A leisurely lunch tied to the land
Clay Pot
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The Le family has been serving Vietnamese food in Waco since the 1980s, and Clay Pot’s current downtown restaurant has grown well beyond the bowl-of-pho description it often receives. The deluxe pho packs its spiced beef-and-chicken broth with brisket, meatballs, rare tenderloin, and tendon, while handmade pork-and-shrimp wontons also turn up slicked with sweet chile oil, garlic, sesame, and cilantro. Start with spring rolls wrapped around shrimp, grilled pork, herbs, apple, and a fried wonton stick for crunch.
Best for: Pho, chile-oil wontons, and one more spring roll than planned
Harvest on 25th
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Harvest on 25th treats dietary restrictions as an invitation to cook, not an excuse to serve something joyless. J’s pancakes combine oat, buckwheat, and sorghum flour with blueberries, coconut-ginger whipped cream, and vanilla-cardamom maple syrup. The beef chorizo hash piles smoked tomato salsa, cotija, cashew sour cream, a fried egg, and zucchini pickles over potatoes and winter squash. Even the vegan breakfast taco has enough going on—house-made tofu scramble, sweet potato hash, coconut bacon, and tomatillo salsa—to keep carnivores from feeling charitable.
Best for: Breakfast that happens to accommodate nearly everyone
Health Camp
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Health Camp has been flipping burgers beside the Waco traffic circle since 1949, long enough for the name to become one of the city’s better jokes. Burgers are thin, straightforward, and properly suited to a paper wrapper; onion rings are made in-house; and the shake menu stretches to 39 listed flavors before customers begin inventing combinations of their own. Banana pudding is a sensible place to start, though restraint feels beside the point at a restaurant built around burgers, frozen custard, and neon.
Best for: Burgers, onion rings, and a shake chosen without restraint
Helberg Barbecue
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Helberg Barbecue cooks prime beef over oak, makes its sausage by hand, and cuts everything to order, which helps explain why the restaurant may close before the posted hour when the smokers have been emptied. Brisket and ribs cover the fundamentals, while smoked-and-fried wings, brisket mac-and-cheese balls, and an unusually persuasive pork steak give the menu its personality. The larger Woodway location leaves more room for the crowds, though arriving early remains the safest barbecue strategy in Texas.
Best for: Central Texas barbecue beyond the usual order
Kitok Restaurant
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Kitok has spent decades proving that Korean food, cheeseburgers, and a basket of fried vegetables belong at the same table. The menu moves from bulgogi and fried rice to an egg burger topped with cheese, but nearly every order should include the “oriental fries,” or thin strips of potato, carrot, onion, and parsley battered together into a crisp, tangled heap. The combination would sound eccentric if Waco hadn’t spent roughly half a century eating it. At this point, ordering anything else on the side feels like unnecessary rebellion.
Best for: “Oriental fries” with anything else you order
Milo All Day
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Milo All Day helped establish that Waco could support a restaurant with a point of view, then kept changing the menu so it wouldn’t become a monument to its own early success. The kitchen works from Southern cooking and seasonal ingredients sourced from nearby farms, moving comfortably between brunch, dinner, and the hours when either seems reasonable. Menus change often—sometimes during service—so individual dishes come and go. The through line is cooking that feels connected to Central Texas without dressing every plate in cowboy boots.
Best for: The dinner that proves Waco’s restaurant scene has grown up
Moroso Italian Ristorante
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Moroso began with Neapolitan-style pizza and has expanded into a full Italian restaurant without abandoning the wood-fired oven. The Honey Bear pizza balances soppressata, mushrooms, Calabrian chiles, basil, and honey; the Cipolla covers its crust with gorgonzola cream, caramelized onions, pancetta, rosemary, and shoestring potatoes. Pastas have become equally persuasive, particularly bronze-cut bucatini with family-recipe meatballs and lobster ravioli finished with tomato-brandy cream and caviar. Moroso’s new name fits: pizza remains essential, but it no longer tells the whole story.
Best for: Wood-fired pizza when everyone else wants pasta
Opal’s Oysters
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Opal’s Oysters gives landlocked Waco a seafood restaurant that behaves as though the coast might begin just beyond the patio. The raw bar changes daily, backed by tuna tartare with avocado and jalapeño, citrus ceviche, smoked salmon with trout roe and apricot preserves, and a crudo plate sharpened with citrus-wasabi vinaigrette. Brunch can escalate into a seafood tower of oysters, lobster, shrimp, clams, and crab claws. A martini helps the illusion along; the nearest beach remains several hours away.
Best for: Oysters, martinis, and pretending Waco has a coast
Red Herring
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Red Herring occupies the dining room at Hotel Herringbone, but the food gives it an identity beyond being the restaurant downstairs. Coastal Mediterranean cooking runs from oysters and house-made sourdough focaccia to fresh pasta, whole fish, wood-fired ribeye, and duck confit served with hummus. The raw bar, European-leaning wine list, and piano lounge make it one of Waco’s most complete nights out. It’s stylish enough for an occasion, though the crispy potatoes with Sicilian pesto argue against spending the entire meal admiring the furniture.
Best for: Waco’s most complete night out
Southern Roots Brewing Co.
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Southern Roots makes beer in Waco, but the kitchen saves it from becoming a place where dinner means whatever food truck happened to show up. The pizzas are broad, generously topped, and built to stand up to a pint. The Southern Belle pairs smoky Italian sausage and fresh mozzarella with arugula, chile flakes, and local honey; the Sow goes considerably heavier with pulled pork, bacon, red onion, Gouda, Monterey Jack, and barbecue sauce. Order a flagship lager or one of the rotating seasonal beers and accept that sharing the pizza was probably an overly optimistic plan.
Best for: Local beer and a pizza nobody actually wants to share
Vitek’s BBQ
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Plenty of barbecue restaurants smoke brisket. Only Vitek’s can claim the original Gut Pak, a Waco creation that treats restraint as a character flaw. Fritos disappear beneath chopped brisket, sausage, beans, cheese, pickles, onions, jalapeños, and barbecue sauce, with white bread standing by as though it might restore order. The fourth-generation family business dates to 1915, giving it history beyond its most famous pile of food. Order the full size only when the remainder of the day has been left deliberately blank.
Best for: The Gut Pak and the nap that logically follows
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