Austin vs. Dallas: Two Texas Mexican Food Scenes Compared

Texas carries 111 active Mexican restaurants and 67 Mexican and Latin stores in our directory — more than any other state. Two of its metros sit close together in our data and look very different inside it: Austin, with 22 restaurants and 9 stores, and Dallas, with 20 restaurants and 12 stores.

This is a comparison of what our columns hold, not a verdict on either city. Every rating below is Google's, with its own review count, and we have not eaten in either place.

The headline numbers

What the split by type says

Dallas is the taquería city in our data and Austin is not: 14 of Dallas's 20 entries are counters, against 9 of Austin's 22. Austin's remainder is weighted toward full-service restaurants and the Tex-Mex institutions, several of which have been open for decades and carry Google review counts in the thousands.

That difference is a demographic and geographic one before it is a culinary one. Dallas has older, larger and more spread-out Mexican neighborhoods, and the counter format follows the neighborhood. Austin grew faster and later, and much of its Mexican food economy grew with the restaurant scene rather than alongside a settled community — which is also why Austin has more trailers and trucks than our directory can reasonably capture.

Austin

Dallas

The grocery side reverses the picture

Dallas has more stores in our data than Austin — 12 against 9 — and a different mix. Dallas carries chain locations from El Rancho Supermercado, La Michoacana Meat Market and Fiesta Mart; Austin's entries are mostly independents plus a Fiesta Mart and two JD's Supermarket locations. For a cook, that means Dallas is the easier city to find a full-line Mexican supermarket in, and Austin is the better one for a specific neighborhood store.

What neither table captures

Trucks and trailers, which in Austin are a large share of the Mexican food economy and in our data are barely present. A mobile business is hard to verify and harder to keep current, and listing one at an address it left last spring is worse than listing nothing. Read the Austin numbers above as a count of fixed addresses, not of places to eat.

Neither table captures the suburbs either. Fort Worth, Irving, Garland and Grand Prairie sit inside the Dallas metro and are recorded under their own city names in our data, so the Dallas row understates the metro — the same is true of Round Rock and Pflugerville around Austin. If you are comparing cities rather than metros, these are the numbers; if you are comparing metros, both are floors.

Tex-Mex is a real cuisine, and both cities have it

Worth separating from the comparison, because the word gets used as an insult. Tex-Mex is a Mexican-American regional cuisine with a documented history on both sides of the border: chile con carne, enchiladas with chili gravy, fajitas, puffy tacos, the combination plate. Several of the restaurants in the tables above are institutions of it, some of them family-run for three generations.

Our directory types 19 US restaurants as Tex-Mex, and 14 of them are in Texas. The border cities are the other half of the story: we have written separately about the corridor from Laredo to Brownsville, which is where the cuisine actually starts.

Using the directory

Both cities are filterable in our US restaurant directory and store directory. Our page on hours covers which of these places are open late, and the taquería guide explains the format that dominates the Dallas list.

To cook the Texas end of this at home, our Beef Birria and Mexican Chorizo Tacos are the two that travel best to a backyard grill and a stack of flour tortillas.