The Complete Texas Travel Guide
- The Anonymous Hungry Hippopotamus
- Jul 8
- 5 min read
Updated: Jul 12
Three cities, three completely different versions of what "Texas" means. Austin insists it's weird and mostly earns it. Dallas holds a presidential assassination and a prime-time soap opera in the same hand without apparent strain. Houston is so large and so quietly diverse that Anthony Bourdain called it the most diverse city in America, and most people outside the state have never once heard that sentence. None of them taste or feel like each other, and none of them taste or feel like the Texas of the popular imagination. That's the whole reason to visit all three.
Austin
Franklin Barbecue sells out every single day and still lives up to the wait once you catch it before close. Quality Seafood, technically a wholesale shop, once produced a literal pearl from inside an oyster shell. And Diner Bar, chef Mashama Bailey's newest restaurant, puts West African and Southern cooking on the same plate and actually pulls it off. Not everything here earned its reputation — this is also the honest verdict on Nixta and Foreign & Domestic, and on how Uchi and Uchiko have fared since expanding into a national chain.
A mural that got erased in 2017 and fought its way back onto the wall, with the neighborhood's own input this time. A bar built in 1945 because segregation gave Black World War II veterans nowhere else in Austin to go, and where Etta James and Ike and Tina Turner once played. Two million bats that didn't show up the night I asked them to, and a sunset over Lady Bird Lake that made up for it anyway.
A 300-year-old mission that became the site of a thirteen-day siege and the rallying cry for an entire revolution. A river that exists today only because one architect refused to let his own city pave over it. And a wine tasting in the second-largest AVA in the country that, despite the impressive statistic, was genuinely not very good — worth reading for why, and for where to find the real thing instead.
Dallas
Dallas Fort Worth Airport is large enough to fit the island of Manhattan inside it. A Pegasus has glowed over the Dallas skyline since 1934. And Thanks-Giving Square, a quiet spiral tucked into downtown, turned out to hold some of the most unexpectedly moving writing and moments I found anywhere in the city.
A Naples-born pizzaiolo building verace pizza Napoletana in the middle of barbecue country. A Michelin-recommended Mexican kitchen serving caviar tacos next to a masa program built on heirloom corn. And Petra and the Beast, which turned discarded cuts of meat into the best dish on the table before closing its doors entirely — this post covers what came next.
A speakeasy that makes you dial a rotary phone behind an unmarked door just to get a drink. A taqueria named for a gunsmith's etching work. And a diner in Bishop Arts reinventing a childhood snack cake into something genuinely worth ordering.
On November 22, 1963, JFK was shot in Dealey Plaza. On March 21, 1980, roughly 76 percent of American television sets tuned in to watch a different, fictional Dallas shooting. This post visits both crime scenes — one real, one soundstage — and the city that somehow holds both at once.
Houston
Anthony Bourdain called Houston the most diverse city in America, and one afternoon of eating through it is enough to believe him: West African at ChòpnBlọk, Viet-Cajun crawfish, Tex-Mex fajitas at the original Ninfa's, and a speakeasy hidden behind a fake law office door.
Houston has more than 650 green spaces scattered across a city large enough to swallow Miami, New York, Seattle, Boston, San Francisco, and Minneapolis combined. Hermann Park at dusk and the roar of the Gerald D. Hines Waterwall are two of the better arguments against the city's reputation as nothing but oil and freeways.
A text to my family declaring I'd just eaten the best Indian food in the country, followed a month later by Michelin agreeing and awarding Musaafer a star in its first-ever Texas guide. Jūn, its lesser-known neighbor in fine dining, turned out to be just as worth the reservation.
A deeper dive into the restaurant already covered above, and one that earned its own spot in the Greatest Hits series. Executive Chef Mayank Istwal built his menu around a 100-day journey across the Indian subcontinent, region by region — Kashmir's high-altitude restraint, Nagaland's ghost-pepper heat, Goa's 451 years of Portuguese influence folded into a single dish. When I mentioned I was short on time before a flight, he built me a custom tasting menu on the spot and sent me off with a container of 72-hour daal I thought about for days afterward. This is the full review behind the Michelin star.
The most ambitious meal I ate anywhere in the state, thirty miles outside Houston in Kemah, Texas — and one that's since earned its own spot in my Greatest Hits series which catalogues the best restaurants I have ever eaten at.
Mission Control, the actual room where "Houston, we've had a problem" was first heard, the world's largest collection of moon rocks, and the Artemis program's first crewed lunar flyby in over fifty years — all under one roof.
Planning Your Trip
Austin, Dallas, and Houston form a rough triangle, each about three hours apart by car, with San Antonio adding a fourth point about ninety minutes south of Austin. Flying between them is fast and cheap enough that a one-week trip touching all three cities is entirely reasonable, though driving the Austin–San Antonio leg specifically is worth doing by car rather than air, given how much of that route's value is the stops along the way. Barbecue, Tex-Mex, and Gulf seafood run through all three cities, but don't expect much overlap otherwise — Austin trades on live music and street art, Dallas on its uneasy mix of real and fictional history, and Houston on a diversity of people and cuisine that rivals any city in the country.
Everything is bigger in Texas — that's the cliché, and the door hinges at the Texas State Capitol genuinely do weigh seven pounds, so it's not altogether wrong. But size was never the most interesting thing about any of these three cities. What stayed with me was smaller and stranger: a pearl in an oyster shell, a mural fighting its way back onto a wall, a bridge that opened the same year as an independence, a jazz bar built over mastodon bones, a fake law office hiding a bar. Texas is big enough to hold all of it.
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