Nancy’s Hustle is the cool restaurant that gets better with every visit. The music is effortlessly curated and the lighting is set to the perfect hue of date-night amber. It's one of the hardest reservations to book, but Nancy's is worth the effort. The menu rotates with the seasons, but count on the mainstays like the fluffy Nancy Cakes, double-patty topped with briny pickles, and the delicate lamb tartare to be on the menu (which means they should also be on your table).
Houston (and Texas in general) is synonymous with beef, and no place epitomizes the final, heavenly form of a hunk of beef better than Pappas Bros. Steakhouse. Every cut gets dry-aged in-house for a minimum of 28 days, seared to form a crispy, salt-flecked crust, and served solo on a hot plate like a sizzling jewel. This is the best steakhouse in town, so expect perfectly butchered petite filets and prehistoric-looking tomahawks carved tableside on one of those fancy carts.
Dinner at Jūn is all hits, no misses. The Heights restaurant does the whole small plates thing better than the rest. Flavors and textures so blissfully fade one into the next—carrots with salsa macha and Salvadoran cheese leading into a bowl of savory grits with carne seca and tomato—that once dessert hits the table, the meal becomes personal, as though Jūn reached into your soul and created food meant solely for you.
The food at Katami is so good that we would voluntarily embarrass ourselves by wearing a Rangers t-shirt to every Astros game if that were the only way to eat there. If you’re looking for a high-end sushi experience, this is the one. Order a chef’s selection of sashimi and what arrives is a mountain of ice and glass dripping in flowers nestled around glistening cuts of silver-skinned gizzard shad, intense but sweet barracuda, and perfectly pink hamachi.
The tasting menu here changes every six months, and is a dissertation on the season’s Mediterranean region. Devote the first half hour to taking in the glow of Montrose restaurant’s sun-soaked lounge, housemade aperitif in hand, while servers wax poetic about silky uni tomaquets. After a round of bar snacks, the rest of the meal is spent in the main dining room—complete with front-row views of the kitchen—for a $185 six or $250 nine-course dinner.
Sheba could be named, “The Restaurant That Makes The Best Lamb Dishes You Will Ever Eat.” But we get that might have been difficult for the Yemeni spot in Gulton to squeeze onto a sign. When the roast lamb and saffron rice arrive, dump each onto the plastic tablecloth. Then, shove fistfuls into your mouth with your hands, as is both customary and irresistible. It’s fun. The Hanith lamb, slow-roasted on the bone, arrives so tender it falls apart at the slightest quiver.
At night, the dining room at Tatemó looks near pitch black, with only flickering candles and faint wall sconces to illuminate the corn-packed seven-course tasting menu. This tiny Mexican restaurant in a nondescript Spring Branch strip center is a temple of tortillas—or, more specifically, masa. The focus is on heirloom Mexican corn, nixtamalized in-house, the smell of which floats around the room like a faint puff of perfume.
This East End Thai restaurant’s crisp papaya salad gets crunchier and spicier with each bite and the acidic tom yum soup laced with shrimp and mushrooms only intensifies the burn. But the heat is all part of the experience and makes leaning in with a date over mango sticky rice for dessert sweeter. Mix in the neon signs, music that encourages seat shimmying, and the most serious Thai food in town and we’ve got one the best restaurants for a romantic night out, or a spot to catch up with friends.
Late August masters the art of subtlety. This Midtown spot is the restaurant version of a friend who doesn’t wear flashy labels, but everyone knows their entire closet is designer. Dishes at the Southern-leaning restaurant are a bit dressed up— like the statuesque arrangement of mole-covered chicken wings—but still feel familiar. Masa cakes taste like something you’d eat to bring in good luck for a new year, and the gumbo resembles something you’d find at a potluck.
At Afrikiko, each dish tastes like it was made for you because you have an in with the cooks in the back. In other words, this is Houston’s best Ghanaian food. The tiny Westwood joint’s jollof rice is slightly sweet with a little acidity from the tomato base, the mounds of waakye have been smoked to high heaven, and the flaky, fried tilapia dissolves into fluffy, house-made banku. Afrikiko is for a relaxed weeknight when you’re in the mood for jollof rice or to make friends with the regulars.