The Best Restaurants in Waxahachie, Texas

The Dove's Nest started in 1992 as a thirty seat tearoom in the back of a family gift shop on the square, cooking lunch on household appliances. It outgrew that room and bought the hardware store the Moore family built in 1913, which is the building you eat in now, brick and tall windows and rooms of gifts and antiques behind the dining room.

The kitchen calls it New Southern, which in practice means gourmet sandwiches, the white chili people order without looking at the menu, chicken apricot salad, chocolate bourbon pecan pie and orange spice iced tea. It is the one Waxahachie restaurant that visitors and locals name without hesitating, and it is the reason a lot of day trips from Dallas get planned around lunch instead of dinner.

In 2023 KERA ran a public bracket to find the best burger joint in North Texas, starting with 32 restaurants and cutting the field in half each week. Pop's, a counter stand in a town of 45,000, beat Grease Monkey Burger Shop of Arlington in the final. The field it came through included Twisted Root, Kincaid's, Rodeo Goat and Maple and Motor, which is the part that makes the win worth repeating.

The burgers are angus patties dressed how you ask, ordered at the counter and eaten at picnic tables. The Waxahachie Daily Light covered the win and the Dallas Observer drove down to argue about whether it deserved it. Go decide for yourself.

Prime 115 is the answer when the occasion needs a reservation, a wine list and a steak cut to order. It is the one Waxahachie restaurant that takes bookings through both Tock and OpenTable, which tells you how it thinks of itself, and it carries the anniversary and birthday traffic that used to drive to Dallas.

Expect steakhouse pricing rather than small town pricing. That is the trade for not driving 30 miles north on I-35E.

Tammy Strickland walked her husband Wayne through a derelict 1920 building on College Street in January 2003 and told him it would make a pub. The two of them had spent years visiting Wayne's family in England, and what they built is a British room with a Texas menu attached, which the Waxahachie Sun wrote up when the pub turned 20.

There are nine taps, a fish and chips plate that holds up, and a patio and back porch where local bands play. It is the most reliable weeknight dinner downtown, and one of the few places in Waxahachie where the room stays busy after nine.

Brian Panza opened the 500 Cafe in Deep Ellum in the mid 1980s and went on to Nero's Italian and the Prospect Grille on Lower Greenville before he and his wife Teri put a small Italian shop into a 19th century Waxahachie building that began life as a funeral parlor. Fort Worth Magazine has covered it.

Half specialty store, half kitchen. The menu runs to bruschetta, salads, pizzettas, Roman style taglio bread stuffed and cut to order, Italian sandwiches and light pasta dinners, with handmade noodles and infused oils on the shelves.

The Emory occupies the ground floor of the Rogers Hotel at the corner of Main and College, which is the best address downtown and hard to spend an evening in without enjoying it. The kitchen works from scratch, the bar is a real bar, and weekend nights have historically carried live music.

Be aware that it changed hands recently. Abel and Misty Trevino announced the closing in December 2025 and served their last dinner on 27 December. Heidi Dubose and Alexis West reopened the restaurant on 3 February 2026 with the same menu. We rank it here rather than higher because the new kitchen has a short track record, not because the room is any less good.

Two Amigos ran 16 years in its original downtown spot before moving across town into a building put up from the ground for it, which Fort Worth Magazine noted when it happened. The food did not change with the address. Tortillas are made in house, the red and green salsas both get argued over, and the breakfast burritos are the size people complain about in a good way.

It opens early and serves through dinner, which makes it the most useful restaurant on this list if your day does not run on a normal schedule.

Atkins is family owned and operates as both a restaurant and a retail seafood counter. The family says it has run its own boats out of Galveston since 2004, which is an unusual thing for a place 250 miles inland to be able to claim and the reason the fried and grilled plates taste like they do.

It is closed at the two ends of the week, so check the day before you drive over. In a town where seafood otherwise means a chain, this is the one worth planning around.

The Waxahachie Sun wrote Oma's up in 2020 under the line "serving up tradition for 50 years," which is the short version of why it is on this list. It is a griddle, a counter, a few booths and barstools, and a town that has been coming in since before most of the other restaurants here existed.

KERA's burger bracket had Oma's in the field alongside Pop's, which makes Waxahachie one of the few towns its size with two burger counters worth arguing about. Oma's opens at 7 a.m., so it is also breakfast.

A family owned breakfast, brunch and lunch kitchen on the highway north of downtown, cooking Southern plates with homemade biscuits and gravy and pies made in house. Friday night is the exception to the daytime schedule, when the kitchen runs hand breaded catfish.

They also run a smaller second room downtown called The Mini at 109 W Franklin St, which is the one to use if you are already walking the square.