The Best Restaurants in Conroe, Texas

The restaurant that anchors downtown Conroe and the one we would send a visitor to first. It opens at 7 a.m. and runs through to late, which no other kitchen on this list attempts, and it covers the whole day without obviously phoning any of it in. Upscale comfort food, burgers, wood-fired pizza, craft beer on tap and a cocktail list that is made rather than poured.

Sunday brunch is the service that locals name, and it is a proper Southern spread rather than eggs and a mimosa. Chilaquiles, Texas poutine, breakfast tacos, and fried chicken with waffles, with gospel music playing. Live music runs most nights of the week. It sits in a red brick building on Simonton a block off North Main, within walking distance of the Crighton and Owen theatres, which makes it the obvious pre-show dinner.

The most ambitious kitchen in Conroe, and the only one with a career hotel chef running it. Conroux opened with the Hyatt Regency Conroe on May 25, 2023, part of the $107 million hotel and convention centre in Johnson Development's Grand Central Park off Interstate 45. Executive chef Christian Brady came from Grand Hyatt Washington D.C., Miraval Arizona and Hyatt Regency Scottsdale.

The menu crosses Texas Gulf Coast cooking with Vietnamese technique, which is the Viet-Cajun idea that Houston invented, and it is the only place in Montgomery County doing it at this level. Crawfish fritters, corn chowder, pork belly banh mi, steaks and Gulf seafood, on plates that change with the season. It is ranked second rather than first because it is a hotel restaurant in a new development rather than a room with roots in this town.

Vernon and Mary Bowers opened this in 1984 with ten tables and seating for forty, and it has grown into the restaurant Conroe takes out-of-town family to. The catfish is the whole point: cornmeal-crusted, fried hard, served with the country sides that go with it. Gulf shrimp, oysters and country plates fill out the rest of the menu.

It is out on Highway 105 west of downtown rather than in it, which is where a restaurant like this belongs and part of why it works. If you want to understand what Southeast Texas country cooking tastes like before the Houston suburbs reached Conroe, this is the place that still serves it.

The best Middle Eastern food in Montgomery County and the room most likely to surprise somebody who came to Conroe expecting catfish and barbecue. The kitchen makes its own hummus and babaghanouj, runs grilled kebabs and lamb through a full mezze menu, and keeps a bar with arak alongside the wine list.

It also runs the liveliest week of anything here. Belly dancing Friday and Saturday nights at 8, live music Thursday evenings, happy hour all day Monday and most weekday afternoons, and half-price wine bottles midweek. The restaurant describes its own position as where Lake Conroe meets the Middle East, which is a fair summary of both the menu and the clientele.

Chris and Mandi Sadler opened this in July 2020. Chris is a US Marine Corps veteran and a former Houston-area law enforcement officer, and the cafe is half diner and half military museum, with walls of memorabilia donated by customers and photographs of veterans arranged under the flag of each branch. The Legacy of Patriots programme picks a veteran each month, serves their favourite meals, and gives a share of proceeds to a charity they choose.

None of which would matter if the food were bad, and it is not. Breakfast runs all day, and the lunch side is a cut above a standard diner, with sandwiches, burgers, seafood and salads cooked to order. CBS Mornings came to film it, which is more national attention than any other restaurant in this town has had.

An old icehouse across from the railroad tracks, converted and opened in September 2017, and the place downtown Conroe goes to drink outside. The building is the draw, a 117-year-old Texas structure by the restaurant's own count, with a large dining room, a proper bar and a covered patio.

The kitchen calls itself an upscale roadhouse and cooks to that: appetizers, sandwiches, salads, steaks, seafood and barbecue. It is solid rather than exciting, and the reason to come is the room and the music, which runs Thursday through Saturday nights with happy hour Monday to Thursday from 4 to 7 p.m. A second location trades in Onalaska on Lake Livingston.

The McKenzie family opened the Conroe store in the mid 1990s and it has been the county's default barbecue counter since, with Darin and Colin McKenzie both listed as owners in the Conroe chamber of commerce directory. The Conroe Convention and Visitors Bureau credits it with winning Best Barbeque of Montgomery County fifteen years in a row, which is the CVB's count rather than ours, and it is the only barbecue claim in this town that anybody bothers to make.

It is a family counter rather than a destination smokehouse, and it is honest about that. Chopped beef, ribs and sausage on plates and sandwiches, burgers for the half of the family that did not want barbecue, onion rings that people order specifically, and a catering operation that feeds a good share of Montgomery County's office lunches. Open from 6.30 a.m. Monday to Saturday, closed Sunday.

A family-owned and operated Italian room on North Frazier that gets named more often by locals than by any guide, which is usually the sign of a place worth finding. Pizza and the standard red-sauce repertoire, cooked properly and priced for a family rather than an occasion.

There is nothing novel here and that is the appeal. It is the restaurant in Conroe that a table of six can walk into on a Tuesday without a plan, and the kitchen will not have run out of anything. Closed Monday, open 11 to 9 the rest of the week.

A small Mexican room in downtown Conroe, a fixture for about two decades, that fills at noon with people from the courthouse and the county offices a block away. The lunch buffet is what most of them come for. Tamales are the thing to order if you are only ordering one thing.

Breakfast starts at 8 a.m. on weekdays, which is worth knowing because almost nothing else downtown serves Mexican breakfast at all. The catch is the schedule: it shuts at 3 p.m. and does not open Saturday or Sunday, so this is a working-week restaurant.

Trading since 2005, and the only restaurant in Conroe people drive in from out of county specifically to visit. The pie case runs apple streusel, cherry streusel, chocolate cream and southern pecan, baked fresh each day, with cake balls alongside. The company ships pies nationwide, which tells you where the business actually is.

It is a full restaurant and not just a bakery, serving breakfast, lunch, dinner and weekend brunch out on North Loop 336, and the comfort food holds up on its own. But order the pie. Anybody who eats here and leaves without pie has made a mistake.