Texas Food & Traditional Cuisine

Texan cooking is the food of a Southern state with a Southwestern border, shaped by Tejano and Mexican, Native American, Creole and Cajun, African-American, German, Czech and Southern hands, with New Mexico's chiles and Louisiana's hot sauce in the pantry. Its two great inventions are barbecue and Tex-Mex. Barbecue came two ways: the cowboys learned to cook tough range beef over coals, and Black Texans from the south-east brought the open pit, which became the closed pit of indirect heat and smoke; the Central Texas meat markets of German and Czech immigrants along the Chisholm Trail -- Lockhart and Luling are the shrines, Southside Market at Elgin the oldest, open since 1886 -- sold the smoked meat on red butcher paper and still do. Tex-Mex is the Tejano kitchen with additions Mexico rarely uses, above all the cumin the Canary Islanders brought to San Antonio in 1731; chili con carne was made the state dish in 1977, the fajita was born at a county fair in 1969 and popularised in Houston in 1973, and San Antonio invented the puffy taco.

The rest of the table is the immigrants': kolaches from the Czech bakeries of West and Caldwell, strudel and sausage from the Germans of the Hill Country, Gulf seafood from an Italian, Croatian and Greek fishing culture that Vietnamese and Cajun cooks have turned into Viet-Cajun crawfish, chicken-fried steak from the Southern cooks, pecan pie as the state pie since 2013, and Dr Pepper, invented by a Waco pharmacist in 1885, Blue Bell ice cream from Brenham since 1907 and Shiner Bock, brewed since 1913 by the state's oldest independent brewery.

Brisket

The whole beef breast smoked low over post oak for most of a day, sliced at the counter and served on butcher paper with white bread, pickles and onion, sauce optional and in Central Texas faintly disapproved of; ribs and sausage beside it.

Chili con carne

The state dish since 1977: beef and chiles, and in competition never beans, from the San Antonio chili stands that took it to the 1893 world's fair in Chicago; first canned in 1908.

Fajitas and Tex-Mex

Grilled skirt steak on a sizzling platter, introduced at a county fair in 1969 and popularised by Ninfa's in Houston in 1973; with it the enchiladas, nachos and cheese-and-cumin plates of the Tejano kitchen, and San Antonio's puffy taco, fried until the tortilla balloons.

Breakfast tacos and kolaches

The road food of the state: eggs, potato and chorizo in a flour tortilla in the south and centre, and the Czech fruit-filled sweet bread from West or Caldwell on the interstate between Austin and Dallas.

Gulf seafood

Shrimp, oysters and redfish from Galveston to Corpus Christi, cooked by the descendants of Italian, Croatian and Greek fishermen -- Gaido's in Galveston since 1911 is the oldest -- and by the Vietnamese and Cajun cooks who made Viet-Cajun crawfish a Houston dish.

Pecan pie

Pecans in a filling of eggs, butter and sugar or corn syrup, the official State Pie of Texas since 2013, from the state tree.

The barbecue counter is the institution: you queue, order by the pound, watch it cut, and eat at a communal table, in Lockhart, Luling, Austin and the small towns of the Chisholm Trail; the best places sell out by early afternoon and close. The taquería and the drive-through are where the breakfast taco lives; the Czech bakery on the interstate is where the kolache lives. The dance hall of the German and Czech Hill Country serves beer and sausage with the music.

The rodeo and the fair are the state's great eating festivals: the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo opens with the World's Championship Bar-B-Que Contest, and the State Fair of Texas in Dallas invents a new fried food every year under Big Tex. Farmers' markets run year-round in the cities; the Fredericksburg–Stonewall orchards are the Peach Capital of Texas in early summer.

Beer and wine: Shiner from the Spoetzl brewery since 1909, the state's oldest independent, and the tasting rooms of the Hill Country, one of Wine Enthusiast's ten best wine destinations in 2014.

Wine has been made in Texas since Spanish missionaries pressed grapes near El Paso in the 1650s, and the state was the fifth-largest producer in the country in 2024, with over 9,300 acres of Vitis vinifera and more than two million gallons a year. It has more native grape species than anywhere on earth, fifteen of the forty-two Vitis found here, and one of them saved Europe: in the Texoma region the 19th-century viticulturist Thomas Volney Munson worked out the grafting of French vines onto American rootstock that rescued the vineyards of France from phylloxera after 1870. Val Verde Winery on the Mexican border, founded in 1883, is the oldest still operating.

The map is two regions: the Texas High Plains around Lubbock, which has the highest concentration of growers in the state, and the Texas Hill Country west of Austin and north of San Antonio, the second-largest wine appellation in the United States by area and the one visitors tour, with Fredericksburg its centre. Cabernet Sauvignon and Tempranillo lead the plantings, with Merlot, Black Spanish and Blanc du Bois behind, and the sunny dry climate is compared to Portugal's and Spain's rather than California's. Wine Enthusiast named the Hill Country one of the ten best wine travel destinations in the world in 2014; no tasting fee is stated here, because no winery page was opened.