The Best Restaurants in Palestine, Texas

This is the meal people drive from Dallas and Houston for, and it is the one Palestine restaurant a statewide magazine has gone out of its way to write about. Texas Highways ran a feature on the wood-fired pizza here. The menu changes weekly around what the garden and neighboring farms are producing, and the pasta, bread and desserts are made on site.

Friday is the wood-fired pizza night, built as a set run of salad, handmade pasta, pizza and dessert. Other nights are a three-course dinner with choices at each course. It sits on a working estate that also runs a bed and breakfast and an event venue, so the dining room is genuinely rural and genuinely small.

The details here are the ones a serious pizzeria gets right and a casual one does not. Double zero flour imported from Italy, San Marzano tomatoes, mozzarella made daily in house, and a Wood Stone deck oven run hot enough to do a proper Neapolitan bake. The rest of the menu runs to regional Italian plates rather than Italian-American red sauce.

The wine list is the other reason to come. It is deeper than anything else in Anderson County, which matters if you have been trying to find a bottle worth ordering anywhere between Athens and Lufkin. The building sits up on a terraced hill south of downtown, which is not the setting Royall Street leads you to expect.

A drive-through taqueria run by Laura Limon and her sister-in-law Rocio Limon-Galvan, built onto the front of the house they live in. Texas Monthly reviewed it and singled out the taco salad, calling it a happy mess to eat and putting it in the conversation for the best taco salad anywhere in Texas Mexican cooking.

Laura describes the cooking as rancho, a rustic take on comida casera that leans on fresher ingredients rather than a longer menu. If you only stop at one place on this list, and you want the plate you will still be thinking about in a month, this is the stop.

The room is the pitch. Queen St. Grille occupies the ground floor of the Redlands Hotel, built in 1915 and later leased by the International and Great Northern Railroad, and the historic interior does more for a dinner than most East Texas dining rooms manage. The kitchen runs an American menu with mostly scratch-made sauces.

Look for the Gulf leaning plates: pecan smoked salmon, bronzed redfish, stuffed flounder, shrimp and grits, and a Creole fettuccine. Lunch is casual enough for a weekday stop, dinner is the version worth planning around.

The best all-purpose room in Old Town. Burgers, pulled pork, fish and chips, meatloaf and a corned beef reuben, plus fried okra and spinach artichoke dip, next to a tap list that runs past the obvious into sours and ciders. The owner will pair a beer to what you ordered if you ask.

Seating runs from tables and couches inside to benches around an open fire outside, which makes it the rare Palestine spot that works for a quick lunch, a long evening, or a group that cannot agree on anything.

Cajun food this far from Louisiana is usually a gimmick. Hambone's is the exception locals actually name when you ask. It is veteran owned, the menu stays on Cajun comfort cooking rather than wandering, and there is a full bar and outdoor seating on the same block as Pint and Barrel.

The short four-day week is the thing to plan around. Wednesday closes earlier than the rest, and the kitchen is not open at all at the start of the week.

Palestine went a long time without a proper sit-down steak place, and Home Grill filled the gap. It is not white tablecloth, but it is the room you pick when the occasion needs to feel like something and you do not want to drive to Tyler.

It is the most forgiving option on this list for schedules. Six days a week, open from lunch straight through dinner, and the only one of the downtown places serving on Sunday.

An independent barbecue joint working the plate format rather than the tray: rib plate, beef plate, hot link and sausage plate. This is East Texas barbecue in the older sense, sauced and served fast, not the Central Texas post-oak pilgrimage you drive to Lockhart for.

Dine in or pick up. The catering side of the business is the reason the kitchen can turn out volume, and it is why locals name it first when the question is who feeds a crowd.

A small weekday-morning cafe that does one thing: breakfast, cooked properly. Eggs, hash browns and biscuits, in a room where most of the tables know each other. It is the answer to the question every visitor to Palestine asks on their first morning.

The window is narrow. It opens very early and it is done by late morning, and it does not open at the weekend, which is exactly when most visitors are in town. Plan a weekday morning around it or you will miss it.