The Best Restaurants in Nacogdoches

This is the single most reliable dinner in town and the restaurant that sits at the top of Tripadvisor's Nacogdoches ranking. It opened in 2002 in the space that had been Nacho Mama's, and the draw is as much the room as the food, a high brick warehouse beside the old rail line that the owners' own history describes as part of the first refrigerated warehouse west of the Mississippi.

The menu is built around choose-your-own pasta and sauce combinations, with grilled steaks and fish for anyone who does not want noodles, and a beer list that carries local taps. It is a real occasion room that does not price itself like one.

Butcher Boy's is a butcher shop first. You order at the counter, they grind the beef in-house, and the dining room is folding-table casual. That is exactly why it works. The Texas Bucket List drove out to film it in 2020, and KTRE reported it taking the number one spot on Wide Open Eats' ranking of the ten best burger joints in Texas.

The smokehouse side does sausage and smoked meats you can take home by the pound, so a stop here doubles as the grocery run. Founder Billy Huddleston built it into the place locals name first when a visitor asks where to eat.

Brendyn Todd moved into a brick-and-mortar on East Main in 2020 and has been the town's craft barbecue answer since. Texas Monthly's barbecue team reviewed him and led with the coffee-rubbed brisket, which is the thing to order and the thing that separates this from the county's older barbecue.

It runs like most serious Texas barbecue, which is to say a short week and a hard stop when the meat is gone. Four days, daytime into early evening, and no Sunday.

Clear Springs is the seafood half of the same Old Tyler Road warehouse, run by Richard and Barbara DeWitt, who also own Auntie Pasta's next door. The Nacogdoches County Chamber of Commerce named the pair its Large Business of the Year in 2015, which is a fair measure of how long they have been feeding this town.

Order the fried catfish or the jumbo shrimp and share. Portions here are the running joke in Nacogdoches, and the onion ring stack is a table order, not a side.

The Fredonia Hotel opened on April 1, 1955, sat neglected for years, and reopened in June 2017 after the DeWitts bought it and put it through a full renovation. CultureMap has covered it twice as a midcentury modern hotel worth the drive, and the restaurant is the reason to eat there rather than just look.

1st City Cafe takes its name from the town's claim as the oldest in Texas. The kitchen leans Southern with produce coming off the hotel's Fredonia Farm, and it is the closest thing downtown has to a proper dining room. The Nine Flags Bar in the lobby is where the evening usually starts.

Maklemore's started as a college class project between two friends and turned into the restaurant Stephen F. Austin students actually take their parents to. Texas Monthly carries it in its restaurant directory and describes it as pub fare alongside more accomplished plates, which is accurate.

The menu spans burgers, tacos and pasta, and the item everyone orders is the Mak Balls, fried macaroni and cheese with a red pimento sauce. It is also the most dependable place in Nacogdoches for a large group that cannot agree on anything.

Jose Lara and his family opened El Ranchero in 2007 after running Rancho Grande in Timpson and Center, so this is a third East Texas restaurant from people who already knew what they were doing. It has stayed family-owned and operated since.

The kitchen does the expected enchiladas and fajitas well, but the order that separates it from every other Tex-Mex room in town is the Mexican-style shrimp cocktail, chopped shrimp with avocado, tomato and cilantro in a tomato broth.

Billy Huddleston Jr. opened NacBurger to do a short list of things properly, which is burgers ground fresh and grilled to order, fries cut by hand, and pie made in-house. The bacon cheeseburger and the bacon avocado cheeseburger are the two the counter will point you at.

He is the son of the man who started Butcher Boy's, so the two burger places on this list share a family more than a rivalry. NacBurger is the easier stop of the two if you are on the north side of town or the counter line at Butcher Boy's has beaten you.

This is the one entry here that is not strictly a restaurant, and it earns the spot because it has its own pizza kitchen rather than relying entirely on whoever parked outside. Local food trucks rotate through the beer garden, so what you can eat changes week to week.

Live music runs Friday and Saturday, trivia runs Thursday, and the garden is kid and pet friendly, which makes it the default place in Nacogdoches to take a group that includes children and people who want a beer.