Houston's Best Restaurants | Houston, TX

After years of being known as a culinary wasteland built on chain restaurants and steakhouses, the biggest city in Texas is climbing to the top of everyone's eating list.

One distinguishing characteristic about the lay of this city's food land: its interconnectedness. There are individual talents, to be sure—chefs and bartenders who merit a visit on their own rights. But the restaurant industry operates as a collective here, giving the town's establishments a neighborly, "everyone's a regular" kind of feel.

Houston's location, too, is a rich springboard for chefs' creativity: Its status as a port city, as a Southern city, as a city of immigrants, is a font of flavorful influence.

Recently, we ate our way through Houston and put together three different itineraries. Each one is tailored to a different type of experience: A tour of Houston's multicultural terroir includes a stop for beef fajitas and a late night bowl of pho, while a crawl among the city's up-and-comers yields housemade pasta in aerated Parmesan cream.

But all of them are alike in one way: They promise to be delicious.