The Best Restaurants in Texarkana

This is the one full-service restaurant on the Texas side that a visitor and a local will both name. It opened in the fall of 2005 and changed hands in September 2015, when a partner group led by majority owner Craig McDuffie bought it from the founders. Four States Living Magazine profiled the operation in 2023, which is more independent local coverage than any other kitchen here has.

The kitchen is built around a wood fire, and it uses it for more than steaks. Hand-tossed pizzas come off the same heat, and the menu runs from fried green tomatoes and onion rings through bang bang shrimp tacos and a steak salad. It is a wide menu executed consistently, which is the whole argument for it.

Big Jake's started in Texarkana in 1998, in a converted Dairy Queen building on Highway 82, and Matthew Palmer bought it in 2001 at twenty-one years old. It grew from there into stores on Arkansas Boulevard, in Hope and Ashdown, and a fifth location on Richmond Road here in 2012. Texas Monthly carries it in its restaurant directory.

What earns it the number two spot is that it is the barbecue that actually began in this city rather than arriving from somewhere else. The New Boston Road store keeps a drive-thru running later than the dining room, which makes it the practical answer on a weeknight.

Established in 2014, Twisted Fork is the Texas side's evening room. It does not open for lunch at all, which is unusual here and tells you what it is for. The menu is deliberately broad, covering pizzas, burgers and steaks, and there is a private dining option for groups.

It is one of the few places in town where the bar and the kitchen are both taken seriously, and it draws a mixed crowd of couples and larger tables rather than a single demographic.

Owner Hector Leal built this into a two-location operation on the Texas side, adding the West 7th Street store after the Moores Lane original. KTAL, the local NBC affiliate, put it among the highest-rated Mexican restaurants in Texarkana in its review-data roundup, alongside Taco Trip and Tacos Mi Pueblo.

It is a sit-down Tex-Mex restaurant rather than a taqueria, so the draw is fajitas, margaritas and dishes like Shrimp Caribe and Cabo tacos. If you want one Mexican dinner in Texarkana with table service, this is it.

Roger and Debbie Sheppard opened Redbone in 2018, and it is the only brewery on the Texas side making its own beer and running a kitchen with it. The name comes from Debbie's father, Buck Lindsey, who went by Redbone, and from Roger's long-running practice of stage magic.

The food is pub food done properly, built around wood-fired pizza, and the room works as a music venue several nights a week. With Pecan Point gone, this is the closest thing Texarkana has to a Texas-side craft beer destination.

Locally owned Southern country cooking, and the most reliable cheap sit-down meal on the Texas side. The menu is chicken fried steak, chicken fried chicken, steak fingers, meatloaf, okra and mac and cheese, served in a room with red booths and retro fittings.

It is worth knowing that the old Dixie Diner at 3200 N State Line Avenue on the Arkansas side is closed. The Kings Highway location is the one operating, and it runs its own site at dixiedinertxk.com.

Silver Star is a Bossier City, Louisiana group rather than a Texarkana original, and we are saying that plainly rather than passing it off as local. It earns a place here anyway because the Texarkana building is genuinely useful. It houses three concepts at once, the smokehouse, Monjunis for Italian, and Buttercups, so a table that cannot agree on barbecue or pasta does not have to.

The barbecue runs off an offset smoker with hickory, covering brisket, ribs, chicken and sausage with the standard sides. It sits below Big Jake's here because Big Jake's is the one that started in this city.

A family-run fixture on Richmond Road since 2008, and the same ownership has held it that whole time. The menu is sushi plus Korean cooking rather than sushi alone, which makes it the most distinct kitchen on this list.

Texarkana has several sushi options now, including Hokkaido Ramen and Sushi over on Richmond Ranch Road, but Fuji Kim's has the longest track record of any of them.

The taqueria answer, and the cheapest good food in this guide. It runs a weekend-only schedule, which is why it is last here despite the strength of the cooking. Every source we checked agrees it is shut Monday through Friday.

KTAL's review-data roundup of Texarkana Mexican restaurants named it alongside Taco Trip and Loca Luna. The menu is the traditional side of the trade, sopes, gorditas, tamales and tacos, rather than a Tex-Mex plate.