The Best Restaurants in Arlington, Texas

Patrick and Fasicka Hicks built this from weekend pop-ups off a smoker trailer into the restaurant that put Arlington on national food lists. Patrick grew up in Waco, Fasicka was born in Addis Ababa, and the menu is the two of them refusing to pick a side. Central Texas brisket and pork ribs on one plate, and doro wat, tibs and berbere on the next.

The awards are unusually specific for a strip center barbecue joint. The New York Times put it on its 2022 restaurant list, the inaugural Michelin Guide to Texas recommended it in November 2024, and Guy Fieri filmed there for Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives. The City of Arlington wrote up the family's story on its own news page, which is not a thing that happens for an ordinary restaurant.

Brandon and Hannah Hurtado started serving barbecue at breweries in 2018, moved to a food truck in 2019, and opened the Front Street restaurant in February 2020, weeks before the shutdowns. It survived on online orders and then grew into one of the fastest expanding independent barbecue brands in the state, with a stand inside Globe Life Field.

Texas Monthly put Hurtado on its Top 50 barbecue list in 2021 and gave it an honorable mention on the 2025 list. The brisket is straight central Texas. The rest of the menu is not, which is the point, and the barbacoa and the Tex-Mex sides are the reason locals argue about the order.

Francis Kobty opened Prince in 1989 and the family has run it since. It is a small room with a counter, not a destination dining room, and it has outlasted almost every fine dining restaurant that opened in Arlington in the same era. The Arlington convention and visitors bureau still lists it, which tells you how long it has been the answer to this question.

Order the shawarma, the kibbeh, the grape leaves, the garlic sauce that comes with everything. This is the pick if you want the best meal per dollar in the city and you do not care about the room.

Caravan Court is the old Caravan Motor Hotel rebuilt as a 145 room boutique property. It soft opened in May 2026 and launched fully on June 1, timed to the World Cup matches at AT&T Stadium. The Vandy is its restaurant, named for Tom Vandergriff, the mayor who spent decades building the Arlington that has a stadium district at all.

The kitchen is run by Preston Nguyen, an Arlington native who was named World Chef Champion at the World Food Championships in 2025, the same title he won in 2021 at eighteen, and who competed on Next Level Chef in 2023. That is a serious resume for a city that has historically exported its cooking talent to Dallas and Fort Worth.

This is the Arlington outpost of the Fort Worth original, and it took over the ninth floor at 2221 East Lamar that Cacharel held for about thirty years before it closed. Same tower, same windows, same reason people booked it in the first place, which is that you can see the whole Entertainment District from your table.

It is the city's prime steakhouse, with the wood, the piano and the wine list that go with that. If the occasion needs a reservation and a jacket you will not feel silly in, this is the short list in Arlington, and the list is short.

Antonio Capaccioli, from Siena, opened Piccolo Mondo in 1983, and more than forty years later it is still the place Arlington families book for anniversaries and graduations. Linen, tableside service, a piano bar with live music Wednesday through Saturday evenings, and a menu that has not chased a single trend.

It is not trying to be a new Italian restaurant. It is trying to be the same one it has been since the Reagan administration, and in a city that tears down and rebuilds as fast as Arlington does, that is the whole appeal.

Mariano Martinez opened his first restaurant in Dallas in 1971 and, unable to make frozen margaritas fast enough by hand, converted a soft serve ice cream machine to do it. That machine now sits in the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. The Arlington Hacienda is one of the family's restaurants, and the margarita is the reason to be here.

The food is unapologetic Tex-Mex, fajitas and enchiladas and queso, in a big room with a patio and music. It is listed with the Greater Arlington Chamber of Commerce and it has been the default celebration dinner on this side of town for decades.

Randy Ford and his late partner John Gilligan opened this in 1979. In 1980 Ford bought the bar's first fryer, ran out of baskets one afternoon, spread cottage fries across a plate and topped them with cheese and jalapenos the way a tostada is topped. Irish nachos exist because of that. UTA's student paper, The Shorthorn, has gone back and retold that story more than once, and Downtown Arlington has run a piece comparing every local version against the original.

It is a bar with a grill attached, near campus, and it has been the pregame and postgame room for two generations of Arlington. Come for the nachos and the history, not for a quiet dinner.

The Tipsy Oak opened in August 2018 in the Urban Union block and gave downtown Arlington the thing it did not have, which was somewhere to sit outside for three hours. Adirondack chairs on gravel under string lights, a Texas heavy beer list, burgers and tacos and a chef-driven menu that is more ambitious than the setting suggests.

It is family owned, it is dog and kid friendly, and it is the easiest place in the city to bring a group with no plan. The convention and visitors bureau and Downtown Arlington both list it, and it anchored the block before Hurtado made it a destination.

You order your burger at the counter and then walk next door to the Conoco to pay for it. The Dallas Observer called it the unofficial king of Arlington drive-ins in its piece arguing that Arlington is not the chain food wasteland its reputation suggests, and that reputation is exactly what a place like this exists to correct.

Burgers, chicken tenders, gyros, fried shrimp, all off a griddle in a gas station bay. It is not a discovery to anyone who lives within two miles of it, and it is a surprise to everyone else.