The Best Restaurants in New Braunfels

The cotton gin here was built in 1878 and burned in 1922. The brick and stone boiler room survived, and in 1977 it became the first dining room of the Gristmill. The restaurant has grown out from that shell into a stack of open terraces dropping toward the Guadalupe, and Community Impact marked its 45th year in 2022.

The cooking is steaks, burgers, chicken fried steak and catfish, done properly rather than cleverly, and the setting is the reason this is the meal visitors remember. It is a large operation with well over a hundred tables, so the wait moves faster than the crowd at the host stand suggests.

The building opened as the Palace Theatre on 23 December 1924 and became a cafe in 1932 once the Brauntex and the Seekatz drew the film crowd away. Myron "Bill" Been opened the steakhouse in the shell of it in 2003, keeping the pressed tin ceiling, and a second location followed in San Antonio in 2011.

The kitchen builds the menu around Chicago prime beef, which the restaurant describes as the top band of American prime, with the usual steakhouse sides and a long wine list. This is the special occasion room in New Braunfels, and it is priced like one.

Don and Lynn Forres opened Huisache on 10 October 1994 in a 1920s building with a working rail line about fifteen feet from the wall. Community Impact wrote up its 28th year in 2022, which in a tourist town is the most useful fact on this page. The menu is regional and seasonal rather than fixed, built on local produce and meat, with a proper wine list beside it.

It is the place locals book when they want a real dinner without the steakhouse bill. Order confidently off the specials board, because that is where the kitchen does its actual thinking.

Gene Krause opened Gene's Place on Main Plaza in 1938 and moved it to Castell Avenue as Krause's Cafe in 1948. His son Kermit ran it from 1959 until the place closed in the late 1990s. Ron Snider reopened it in 2016 after renovating the original dining room and adding a German beer hall and biergarten, a project covered at the time by Texas Highways and CultureMap San Antonio.

The food is German classics with Texas plates alongside, and the bierhalle tap wall is the draw, counted at seventy-plus in some accounts and eighty in others, weighted to Texas craft and German imports. Live music runs in the biergarten.

The building went up in 1915 and served as the New Braunfels post office until 1985, then sat empty for close to twenty-five years. Pat and Becky Wiggins reopened it as McAdoo's in May 2009, a restoration the National Trust for Historic Preservation has since used as an example of the type.

Gulf seafood, an oyster bar and a Cajun lean to the menu, served across several dining rooms, a small bar built into the old lobby and a covered courtyard. In a town this far inland it has no real competition for what it does.

A family run dining room in a restored historic building a few blocks south of Main Plaza, cooking Bavarian food with Austrian and Swiss influence. The family ran a German restaurant in Corpus Christi before opening here, and KENS 5 covered the kitchen in its Neighborhood Eats segment.

Where Krause's is a beer hall that serves German food, this is a restaurant that happens to be German. Wiener schnitzel, rinder rouladen, sausage plates and potato dumplings, made in house, with a small wine and beer garden outside.

Opened in June 2019 by Becky Wiggins with Caroline and Turner Wiggins, the same family behind McAdoo's. Community Impact covered it in 2023 as the upscale Mexican room in town, and that is still the right description. Sauces and tortillas are made in house and the menu reads closer to central Mexico than to a combo plate.

Prices sit above the taquerias on Walnut Avenue, and the trade is a dining room you can book for a group. If you want a plain enchilada plate, this is not the place to spend the money.

Open since 2004 on the same short stretch of Gruene Road as the Gristmill, with a patio on the bluff above the river. The kitchen is scratch American with Gulf seafood, steaks and a few Hill Country plates, and it runs quieter and more composed than its famous neighbour.

The practical difference matters on a Saturday in July. This is the Gruene restaurant where you can hold a table in advance instead of standing in a line with a pager, which is worth a great deal when the district is full.

The downtown burger and craft beer room, with a menu that goes past the usual patty into bison and wagyu, scratch seasonal specials and a real set of vegetarian and vegan options. The house tap system is advertised at twenty-nine degrees, which is colder than most bars pour and noticeable on a Texas afternoon.

Taps rotate through Texas breweries rather than sitting on national brands. It is counter-serve casual in feel and has a sister location in San Antonio.

Built in 1889 and a community meeting place ever since, which in Comal County means a wooden room, a big patio, a short menu and a stage. The food is burgers, fries and bar plates, cooked without ambition and priced accordingly, and that is the entire point.

Visit New Braunfels lists it among the town's live music venues rather than its restaurants, and both are right. On a Sunday afternoon with a band playing under the trees it is the most New Braunfels place on this list.