The Best Restaurants in Waco, Texas

Chef Corey McEntyre moved to Waco from Nashville in 2014 and spent four years feeding people out of Milo Biscuit Co. trucks before opening this brick and mortar in May 2018 inside the old Big Green automotive shop at South 11th and Franklin. The menu is Southern cooking built on what Texas farms are actually sending that month, so it moves. Biscuits, smoked gouda grits and Nashville style hot chicken are the through lines.

It is also the Waco kitchen that treats reservations as a real system rather than an afterthought, which matters on a football Saturday. McEntyre went on to become a partner in the Hotel Herringbone project two blocks away, which tells you how much of the current downtown food scene traces back to this one room.

This is the dining room Waco did not have five years ago. The kitchen runs a coastal Mediterranean menu in tapas format, oysters on the half shell, house made sourdough focaccia, confit potatoes, wood fired meats and house pasta, with a wine list and a cocktail program to match. Soaring ceilings, exposed historic brick and a piano going in the lounge.

The setting has a good story behind it. Hotel Herringbone held its grand opening on April 27, 2024 on the site of The Containery, a shipping container development that foreclosed in 2021 and then sat empty. Rad Lab out of San Diego rebuilt it with FreeForm Development, Lucky Find Hospitality and Milo's Corey McEntyre.

Opened on May 17, 2024 by Matt and Tiffany Fatheree, working with chefs Alejandro Najar and Alyssa Osinga, both from season 21 of Hell's Kitchen. The format is small plates, seafood and steak in a genuinely polished room, which is a rarer thing in Central Texas than the steakhouse count suggests.

One honest note on geography. This address is in Woodway, not inside the Waco city limits, roughly a ten to fifteen minute drive southwest of downtown. We include it because it is one of the best meals in the Waco area, not because it is technically in Waco.

The building is the point. This is the old Elite Cafe, the Colias brothers' second location, which opened on the traffic circle in 1941 after the original Elite opened downtown in 1919. Chip and Joanna Gaines bought it in 2016, restored the Spanish style exterior and reopened it as Magnolia Table in 2018.

The food is straight breakfast and lunch done carefully, eggs, biscuits, a rotating butter flight and pastries baked by Silos Baking Co. It is the most visited restaurant in Waco by a wide margin, which means the wait is the main variable in whether you enjoy it.

Vitek's dates to 1915 and the family is on its fourth generation. The current building went up on Speight Avenue in 1958, the same year Interstate 35 construction started in Waco, and it has been a Baylor fixture ever since.

The Gut Pak is the reason to come. Bill Vitek, grandson of founder William Frank Vitek, built it in 1983 by taking a Frito pie and putting chopped barbecued brisket on it, then adding sausage, beans and cheese. It has been the best selling item on the menu for most of the four decades since, and the Cooking Channel named it the best college eats in the country.

Harry Burmeister opened Harry B's at this address in 1930. George Betros bought it in 1966, renamed it George's and put chicken fried steak on the menu, and that dish is still the reason most of Waco walks through the door. The room is loud, casual and full of Baylor people on a game weekend.

The Big O is the other institution, an 18 ounce goblet of very cold beer that locals order by name without explaining it to anybody. There is a second, newer George's on Hewitt Drive, but the Speight Avenue original is the one with the history in it.

The Castillo family has been feeding Waco since 1920, when Antonio P. Castillo Sr. bought the Old Texas Cafe downtown, then closed it in 1926 to open the Aztec Cafe on Austin Avenue. Sam Castillo Sr. opened La Fiesta in 1963. It is one of the longest running restaurant families in Central Texas, and the place is still run by family, currently Sam Castillo Jr., Vicki Castillo and their mother Wanda Patlis.

The kitchen still works from the original recipes for chile con queso, chili con carne and the hot sauce, which customers have it ship to them once they move away. This is old school Tex-Mex, not a modern interior Mexican menu, and it is not pretending otherwise.

Kitok Moore opened this as a diner in 1975 and then quietly folded Korean cooking into the menu, which is how you end up with a place where people order bulgogi and a cheeseburger at the same counter. Kyong Dehnert, the fourth owner, took over in 2018.

The oriental fries are the thing people drive hours for. They are closer to a vegetable tempura than a french fry, shredded potato, carrot, onion and parsley bound in batter and fried crisp. The local order is the Lip Locker burger with cheese and a side of them.

Jack Schaevitz and Lou Stein started with a mobile canteen at James Connally Air Force Base in 1948 and put up the permanent building on the traffic circle in 1949. It is still there, still selling burgers, onion rings and frozen custard, across the circle from Magnolia Table.

Trent Neumann, longtime owner of Whizzbang's, bought it in January 2023 and kept the name and nearly the entire menu. That was the outcome Waco was hoping for. Places like this usually get replaced, not preserved.

Open since 1994 on the grounds of Homestead Heritage, a faith based farming community north of the city. The kitchen cooks pasture raised beef, bakes its own bread and uses cheese and condiments made on site, which makes this the least abstract farm to table claim in the area.

You are not just going to eat. The same visit gets you the working craft shops, the gardens and a hayride out to a vista over the Brazos. Budget two hours minimum or you have wasted the drive.