CITY GUIDES | TEXAS
The New
Fort Worth
These 12 restaurants have redefined the city's food scene.
By Rebecca Thompson
Updated Aug. 31, 2026
Goldee’s Barbecue
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.
I’ve been eating across Fort Worth for a generation, long enough to watch the city’s dining identity grow far beyond the Stockyards without surrendering what made it distinctive. Barbecue still matters here, deeply, but the best restaurants in Fort Worth now also draw on northern Mexico, Ethiopia, France, Italy, and the farms surrounding North Texas. Through all that change, the city has held on to an appealing lack of pretense: Dinner can be exacting without making a performance of it. After years of return visits, these are the Fort Worth restaurants I recommend first.
61 Osteria
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Downtown’s 61 Osteria nails that modern-Italian sweet spot: simple, smart, composed. Best of all, the ingredients here are largely sourced not far away, making this elegant spot feel more like Texas meets Italy. Burrata on toasted focaccia, housemade pasta with guanciale and saffron—this place understands restraint. Service is slick without smarm, and the wine list speaks softly but firmly in Italian.
Best for: Modern Italian downtown
Birrieria y Taqueria Cortez
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Birrieria y Taqueria Cortez began as a food truck and now draws steady lines to its East Rosedale shop. The menu sticks to all-beef birria—tacos, quesatacos, flautas, even birria pizza—based on a Jalisco family recipe. The quesataco, crisp-edged and dripping with cheese, deserves every dunk in the consommé, so rich and deeply flavored it has earned the place a spot in the Michelin Guide.
Best for: Quesatacos dunked in consommé
Caterina’s
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Chef Tim Love built Caterina’s around the increasingly radical idea that dinner deserves your full attention. Phones are put away in the dining room, Sinatra plays against the brick walls, and a house phone waits for emergencies. The menu stays with Italian American classics, including rigatoni alla vodka, veal chop parmesan, and a Wagyu New York strip. The rules loosen at lunch, the bar, and the patio, where phones are permitted and jackets are optional.
Best for: A phone-free Italian dinner
Chumley House
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Walking into The Chumley House feels like crossing from Cowtown into a London club, with mahogany paneling, Chesterfield banquettes, and a bar made for lingering over brown liquor. The menu applies a loose European accent to beef Wellington, butter chicken pie, tenderloin Stroganoff with ricotta dumplings, and a halibut “porterhouse” with chimichurri. Dinner opens with scones and rose-lychee tea, a welcome that makes perfect sense by the time the Wellington arrives.
Best for: Beef Wellington and London-club atmosphere
Don Artemio
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Juan Ramón Cárdenas Cantú founded Don Artemio in Saltillo before expanding the restaurant to Fort Worth with his son, Rodrigo Cárdenas, who studied food science and worked for Daniel Boulud’s Dinex Group. Their menu is grounded in northern Mexico: slow-cooked cabrito, handmade blue-corn tortillas, fried nopalitos tossed with bacon, and in-house dry-aged Texas Wagyu. The cactus arrives ready to fold into tacos, which is a useful reminder that serious cooking can still be eaten with your hands.
Best for: Refined northern Mexican cooking
Ellerbe Fine Foods
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Chef Molly McCook turned a former gas station into Ellerbe Fine Foods in Arlington Heights. Her seasonal Southern plates—Gulf fish on stone-ground grits, locally sourced veg—have been drawing diners for years. I once spent three hours catching up with a friend here, the kind of place that makes time irrelevant.
Best for: Seasonal Southern cooking and Texas ingredients
Gemelle
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Gemelle, at Tim Love’s boutique Hotel Otto, does garden vibes, small plates, and sheet pan pizza like it’s hosting a garden party you’ve always wanted to be invited to. Cacio e pepe that actually has bite. Aperol spritz like it matters.
Best for: Pizza and spritzes in the garden
Goldee’s Barbecue
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Childhood friends Jalen Heard, Lane Milne, and Jonny White run Goldee’s in Southeast Fort Worth, smoking Black Angus brisket over post oak and opening only a few days each week. That narrow schedule and deliberately small production have helped turn the wait into part of the ritual, although the brisket remains the point. Goldee’s earned a Bib Gourmand in the inaugural Michelin Guide to Texas, and slice after pepper-crusted slice explains why.
Best for: Brisket worth an early start
Le Margot
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Felipe Armenta and Graham Elliot’s French brasserie sits on South Hulen Street near TCU, serving steak frites, steak tartare, and other Parisian standards alongside a wine list that stays largely in France. It is elegant without feeling stiff and indulgent without becoming Instagram-thirsty. I stopped in midweek for an appetizer and a martini and stayed through dessert.
Best for: French food and a midweek martini
Mariscos Cortez
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The Cortez family earned Michelin recognition by concentrating on beef birria at Birrieria y Taqueria Cortez. Here, they turn toward the seafood cooking of coastal Jalisco, piling lime-cured shrimp onto tostadas and offering aguachiles in green, red, black, or mango-habanero sauces. Shrimp also gets dipped in batter for tacos or folded into crisp birria tacos, an inevitable family crossover that works better than it has any right to. Order the whole fried tilapia when lunch needs to occupy most of the table.
Best for: Jalisco-style seafood and shrimp birria tacos
Panther City BBQ
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Panther City BBQ started as a food truck and now holds court just off South Main, with picnic tables out front and offset pits puffing away behind. The brisket is textbook—thick slices, smoke ring, pepper-heavy rub—and you’ll want to get there early before the line snakes past the fence. They lean Tex-Mex too, with brisket burritos and street tacos, plus sides that actually matter—like the smoked mac and that potato salad built from baked and smashed red potatoes with cheese and scallions.
Best for: Barbecue with a Tex-Mex streak
Smoke ’N Ash BBQ
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Fasicka and Patrick Hicks built Smoke ’N Ash around a union that still feels singular: Ethiopian cooking and Texas barbecue. The Tex-Ethiopian platter gathers smoked doro wat, pork-rib tibs, awaze brisket, and awaze pork ribs beside injera, rice, and sides such as misir wat and berbere mac and cheese. The drive to Arlington ends with enough food to explain the idea without requiring a speech.
Best for: Texan barbecue with Ethiopian flavors
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