The Best Restaurants in Midland, Texas

Chef Chip Hight named Opal's Table after his grandmother and built it into the restaurant the rest of downtown Midland now orbits. The kitchen runs prime steaks and seafood against a seasonal menu rather than a fixed one, and the wine list is the deepest in the city. It is a Midland Chamber of Commerce member under fine dining, which is a duller signal than a review but a checkable one.

Underneath it is The Basement, a separate bar with its own small plates menu and spirits list. The two work as one visit if you arrive early, and The Basement is the better answer when you want the kitchen without the dining room.

Felipe Armenta, the restaurateur behind Cork and Pig Tavern and Red Oak Kitchen, opened Cowboy Prime in the old Butter space in December 2022 and brought in Graham Elliot, a two-time Michelin star winner, as partner and culinary director. CBS7 and the Houston Chronicle both covered the opening, which is more independent press than any other steakhouse in the Permian Basin has drawn.

The result is a steakhouse that takes plating and sourcing seriously without pretending it is in Chicago. Almost the whole staff was hired out of West Texas, which is the detail the local coverage kept returning to.

Saint Blaise is a modern American brasserie on the ground floor of Frost Tower, and its useful trick is the clock. Most of Midland's good restaurants open for a lunch window, shut, and reopen for dinner. This one runs breakfast, lunch and dinner in sequence, which makes it the default when you land at an odd hour.

The menu is comfort cooking with an oyster program attached, oysters sourced from the East Coast, plus a cocktail and martini list that gets as much attention as the food. It carries its own entry in the Texas Monthly restaurant directory.

Georgie's opened on January 26, 2026, the second Midland restaurant from Chip Hight, and it is named for his niece Georgia. Where Opal's Table is the occasion restaurant, Georgie's is the one you can get into on a Tuesday, with a menu that leans European without turning into a tasting menu.

It has indoor and patio seating, a full cocktail bar and an international wine list. Being the newest good room downtown, it is also the easiest reservation of the three on Wall and Marienfeld.

Santomar took the space the Cattle Baron used to occupy and did something Midland had no version of, a surf and turf menu that runs Peruvian ceviche and rolled sushi on the same page as picanha and braised short rib. Texas Monthly reviewed it on March 31, 2026 and put it in the celebratory night out category, which is the right bracket.

It is newer than the downtown restaurants above it on this list and the service reports are still uneven, so we have ranked it on the cooking rather than on the whole evening. Go for the ceviche.

Louis and Zelda Hochman opened Luigi's on September 2, 1958, which makes it older than most of the buildings around it, and it moved across the parking lot to its current spot in 1972. The Better Business Bureau file, opened in 1969, backs the founding date, which is rarer than it sounds for a claim like this.

The cooking is red-sauce Italian and pizza, not a modern trattoria, and that is the point. It is the one restaurant in Midland where three generations of the same family have all eaten the same dish.

Wall St. Cocina is a downtown lunch counter in the honest sense, open weekdays and shut both weekend days, which tells you exactly who it is for. The tortas are the reason to go, with the estofado the one most often singled out, and the birria and quesadillas hold up alongside.

It is three blocks west of Opal's Table on the same street, so it slots neatly into a downtown day that does not involve a tablecloth.

Providencia is the weekend answer to Wall St. Cocina, a contemporary Mexican kitchen on Mockingbird Lane that runs six days and stays open Sunday, which almost nothing else on this list does. The room is more restaurant than taqueria and the menu is built accordingly.

It does not take reservations, so the trade is that you can always try and you might wait. On a Friday evening, expect to.

KD's has smoked over mesquite on Garden City Highway since 1997 and is the barbecue Midland actually eats, as opposed to the barbecue Midland drives to Lockhart for. Brisket is the order. It is a counter, not a destination smokehouse, and it does not pretend otherwise.

Note that the awards KD's advertises are readers' choice polls run by the local paper, which we cannot independently verify year by year, so treat them as a local reputation signal rather than a ranking.

Murray's has been feeding Midland lunch since 1984 and has the menu to prove it, deli sandwiches, burgers, seafood gumbo and now pizza, all on one page. The seafood gumbo and the green chile burger are the two dishes regulars order without reading.

It is not trying to be any of the restaurants above it. It is the place you go when you have 45 minutes and want something better than a chain.