Where I Take Out-of-Town Folks to Eat in Spring Branch

Where I Take Out-of-Town Folks to Eat in Spring Branch

When people fly into Houston, they expect to get dragged to the Heights or Montrose. I live in Spring Branch, I eat here, and the truth is the neighborhood has most of what I actually want without the drive.

The Long Point corridor has quietly become one of the more interesting stretches of food in the city. Houston’s largest Koreatown runs through here, and the Vietnamese presence is deep enough that you could spend a year eating pho in Spring Branch without repeating yourself. None of that is new. What’s new is that the rest of the city is starting to catch up to what has been on Long Point for three decades. As Houston keeps expanding west and north, Spring Branch is increasingly in the conversation alongside the Heights, Montrose, and Rice Village as a neighborhood where people actually want to go eat.

Below is my current rotation. Some of these spots have been around for ages and some just opened, and these are the ones that resonate most with me right now. They’re also the ones I’m proud to represent the neighborhood with when someone’s in town.

Korea Garden

  • Cuisine: Korean BBQ
  • Best for: Big group dinners, anniversary nights, showing an out-of-towner what Spring Branch has been doing for thirty years
  • Address: 9501 Long Point Rd, Houston, TX 77055
  • Google Maps: Click here for the link

Long Point and Blalock. I can remember this place being packed in the early ’90s when my family went to the old Spring Branch Community Church down the street.

Three decades later, it’s still the Korean BBQ night I go out of my way for. Chris Shepherd recently featured Korea Garden on his Eat Like a Local show, which felt like a long-overdue acknowledgment of what this place has been doing since the ’80s as one of the original Korean BBQ spots in the city.

Nothing on the menu is flashier than what you’d find at other serious Korean restaurants, but everything is consistently very good, and they’re generous with the banchan and the lettuce.

Go early on a weekend or be prepared to wait. I always get the galbi, usually the bulgogi, sometimes the dwaeji gui, and the spicy samgyupsal is underrated. We build bites at the table with lettuce and sides, which is the whole point.

Pho Luc Lac

  • Cuisine: Vietnamese
  • Best for: A quick lunch, a cold-day pho craving, any night you want real food without the scene
  • Address: 9457 Kempwood Dr, Houston, TX 77080
  • Google Maps: Click here for the link

My down-the-street pick, and the place I keep coming back to after trying probably ten Vietnamese spots in Spring Branch.

The broth is one of the best I can find, and it doesn’t go too salty, which is where most pho in the neighborhood loses me. This is a hole in the wall in the true sense. If you know, you know. I’m usually one of the few white people in the room when I’m there, which I generally take as a good sign about a place. They have bánh bột lọc on the menu and I haven’t seen it done well anywhere else.

My regular order is the spring rolls and a P1 basic beef pho.

Las Tortas Perronas

  • Cuisine: Mexican, tortas
  • Best for: A hangry lunch, a takeout run, a taste of what the neighborhood used to be
  • Address: 1837 Bingle Rd, Suite A, Houston, TX 77055
  • Google Maps: Click here for the link

The sign out front says “I love tortas.” The shop sits in a strip center on Bingle and has held down that block as the neighborhood has churned around it. Tortas originated in Mexico City in the late 1800s, when street vendors started stuffing baguette-style bolillo and telera bread with the fillings that had been going into tacos, and they’re still one of the most distinctive street foods in Mexico.

Spring Branch was a deeply Hispanic neighborhood through the ’90s and early 2000s, with a wave of Central American immigration reshaping whole pockets of it, and a lot of that character has been sanded down by the last decade of gentrification and new construction. Places like this are where you can still taste what the neighborhood used to be.

My regular is the Ingrata, which is jamón, chorizo, queso amarillo, and quesillo. I’ll venture around the menu sometimes, although honestly I mostly get it when I’m hangry, because a whole one is a real commitment and I’ll need a nap after finishing it.

Chavez Mexican Cafe

  • Address: 2557 Gessner Rd, Suite E, Houston, TX 77080
  • Cuisine: Tex-Mex
  • Best for: A family dinner, a weeknight with friends, a round of margaritas that will sneak up on you
  • Google Maps: Click here for the link

The number one spot you’ll find my family. We’re there a couple of times a month, easy. It’s not the most premium Tex-Mex in Houston, but the bang-for-buck is hard to beat, and the owner is a Pappasito’s alum, which shows up in the food.

Chavez Mexican Cafe has been around more than a decade and got popular enough on weekends that they had to expand into the lease next door. I’m on a first-name basis with a few of the waiters at this point, and the service is genuinely great every time we walk in.

The green salsa reminds me of what Ninfa’s used to do back in the day, which is about the highest compliment I know how to give a Tex-Mex place.

The margaritas are dangerous, which is both the warning and the recommendation.

Feges BBQ

  • Address: 8217 Long Point Rd, Houston, TX 77055
  • Cuisine: Texas BBQ with a chef-driven edge
  • Best for: Weeknight family dinners (kids eat free on Wednesdays), a serious BBQ fix, impressing a visitor
  • Google Maps: Click here for the link

I was excited when Feges opened in Spring Branch because the owners lived on Kempwood for a while and still live in the general area.

It’s elevated BBQ, and the sides lean near-gourmet compared to most places, which is unusual for Texas BBQ and part of what sets them apart. What surprises me is how often I end up ordering the non-traditional stuff here.

The Feges bowl is in my regular rotation, and the peanut butter wings and Thai wings are both excellent. Brussels sprouts are probably my favorite side, with the Money Cat potatoes a close second. Patrick has bought a few cuts of beef from us at our farmers market, and we’d love to source them regularly, but they do too much volume for a small ranch.

This place is extremely kid-friendly, and we’re there often on Wednesday nights for kids-eat-free.

Murray’s Pizza & Wine

  • Address: 9655 Katy Fwy, Suite 3110, Houston, TX 77024 (Memorial City)
  • Cuisine: Pizza, small plates, natural wine
  • Best for: Date night, a church group that needs a patio, a frozen negroni on a hot day
  • Google Maps: Click here for the link

The newest addition to the list, and the one we’ve been to most often this year.

From the owners of Leaf & Grain next door, it’s their first venture into full-service dining, and they nailed it. Talking to the GM, the owner has been deeply involved in the dough process, at least for the first stretch after opening, and you can taste it. Multi-day fermentation, Texas-milled flour, toppings that don’t try to do too much. The small menu is small on purpose. The pizza and appetizers rival most of the really good spots in the area, but what makes Murray’s the move is the combination of a solid bar program with some original cocktail ideas, and a real green space outside. The frozen negroni is really great on a hot day.

When the weather is good, this is about as ideal a patio restaurant as you can get. We’ve been five times and four of those we’ve sat outside. Our church group has ended up there more than a few times for the same reason.

Cambrian Coffee

  • Address: 9461 Hammerly Blvd E, Houston, TX 77055
  • Cuisine: Coffee, British pastries, sausage rolls
  • Best for: Morning pour over, a quiet work session, meeting someone for coffee when you actually want good coffee
  • Google Maps: Click here for the link

Brian and Gemma opened Cambrian a few years back, and it was the first time Spring Branch had a legitimate homegrown coffee shop that felt like it belonged here. There’s a wild T-rex on the wall and fossils scattered around, which traces back to Gemma’s geology background. She’s Welsh, which explains the British pastries and the sausage roll collaborations with other local restaurants. They run a Seraphim brewer and have dialed in the drip program with single-origin coffee they rotate regularly. I’m typically a flat white guy, although a well-made pour over will get me every time. Brian tries to remember customers by name, and that kind of thing matters in a city that doesn’t always reward it.

A couple years back, a stolen car in a police chase jumped the curb on Hammerly and went through the front of the building. Nobody was hurt because the shop was closed at the time, and the community rallied fast. A GoFundMe from a regular customer pulled in more than seventeen thousand dollars in days. While they rebuilt, Brian and Gemma got creative with cold-brew-to-go and a few other workarounds to keep serving regulars. That kind of mutual loyalty is how you know a place actually belongs to its neighborhood. I don’t know another coffee shop like it in the area.

Final Thoughts

That’s the rotation as it stands. I’d put any of them in front of a visitor without a second thought, and there are plenty I didn’t include.

Here’s a Google List of all my recommendation.

The neighborhood has gotten genuinely good to eat in, and the longer I live here the more convinced I am that the rest of the city is going to catch on.

Thanks for reading!