It’s a big day for the D food section. We’ve uploaded our Best New Restaurants list for 2023, showcasing the eight restaurants that most won our affection this year. We’ve updated our 50 Best Restaurants list, the perennial showcase of the very best food and drink that the Dallas area has to offer. And we’re teasing menu items for our Best Restaurants event next week, bringing food and chefs from both those lists under one roof for one night.
You can click away at all those links. Or you can scroll down for more information on each.
Best New Restaurants
This year we honor eight new restaurants—defined as restaurants that opened between mid-October of 2022 and 2023—as being the year’s best. They range in price point and style from the opulent Mister Charles to the fill-you-up-for-$5 Alfonso’s Breakfast Burritos.
To judge the Best New Restaurants, I dedicated around 65 meals this year to visiting brand-new places to eat. 2023 saw a number of new openings that led with hype and failed to follow through, so you may notice some big, famous names are missing. We know about those. We hope you’ll try and love our picks, too!
50 Best Restaurants
With this update, six new restaurants join our list of 50—three of them new openings in 2023, three of them established spots that forced their way onto the list through sheer awesomeness.
For a quick primer on how the 50 Best Restaurants are chosen, and the values that motivate our decisions, read this explainer published alongside the last update. The only thing I’d like to add here is an emphasis on the six-month grace period we give to new openings before they appear on the 50. Thus some of our Best New Restaurants, like Mister Charles and Via Triozzi, aren’t eligible yet. We’re also keeping a keen eye on the newly rebranded and reimagined Georgie, and temporarily dropped Meridian until it establishes its new less Brazilian identity.
The next update to the 50 Best list should be in early June.
Best Restaurants Event on Tuesday, Dec. 5
Want to try a bunch of our favorite restaurants all at the same time? Join us for dinner on Tuesday, Dec. 5, when more than a dozen of the 50 Best Restaurants and Best New Restaurants will be serving up sample bites at our Best Restaurants event.
Want examples? We got examples:
- Brass Ram is bringing its deluxe pigs in a blanket—think Wagyu beef, puff pastry, and dijonnaise.
- Taco y Vino will be serving two kinds of crispy taco.
- Feeling like luxury? We’ll have Wagyu-caviar surf and turf from El Carlos Elegante and Mot Hai Ba’s gougères filled with onion and makrut lime marmalade. I don’t know why Rye is using quotation marks in their description of foie gras “ice cream cones,” but they create some of the craziest, coolest, most inventive food in this city, so I bet the “ice cream cones” are interesting!
- We’ll have barbecue from Zavala’s (fajitas) and Cattleack (brisket and chile Q-T-Pies).
- If you’ve never tried Sri Lankan food, this is your chance: SpicyZest, the best in Texas, will be joining us with a hopper station.
- And chef Regino Rojas—who runs two of our top 10 restaurants—will be serving up tacos with the tortillas made on-site.
That’s only about half the menu. I don’t want to spoil all the surprises. Learn more about tickets here, and see you there. If you can’t make it, start your journey through the full 50 now.
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