On the steps of McAdoo’s Seafood Co. outside the old post office, a young man in a white tuxedo and a silver-belly cowboy hat walks a few steps ahead of his date. You can tell she’s his date because his seafoam satin bowtie matches her ruffled seafoam dress.
It’s prom night in New Braunfels, and the peacock pageantry of young love is making it hard to get a table anywhere on the restaurant promenade that is Castell Avenue. A handful of New Braunfels’ best restaurants, doing everything from steaks and fresh oysters to handmade pasta and shrimp and grits with a little German in the mix, lie on that street within a five-minute walk of each other.
A little German. That’s the key here. The restaurant scenes in New Braunfels and San Antonio share the same pigeonholing problem. When nobody’s around, they both get that dismissive hand wave thing: Everything in San Antonio is Mexican food, and everything in New Braunfels is German food.
The locals in both cities know that’s not true. Hasn’t been true for a while, given the kind of explosive growth along the Interstate 35 corridor that inevitably fuels a more diverse food culture. It’s the kind of growth that inspired this New York Times headline about New Braunfels last year: “How a remote town in Texas became one of America’s fastest-growing.”
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Lucy Cooper’s Ice House is one of the Top 10 restaurants in New Braunfels.
Boodreaux’s Clothesline Bacon is candied with brown sugar and whiskey and hung on a tabletop clothesline at Lucy Cooper’s Ice House in New Braunfels.
The menu at Lucy Cooper’s Ice House in New Braunfels includes Tin Can Nachos, chicken wings with a spicy Dr Pepper glaze, Boodreaux’s Clothesline Bacon, a margarita with a sangria popsicle and draft beers such as Bucket Brigade cream ale from Faust Brewing Co. in New Braunfels.
Lucy Cooper’s Ice House is one of the Top 10 restaurants in New Braunfels.
The German restaurant Alpine Haus is one of the Top 10 restaurants in New Braunfels.
A sampler of housemade German sausages is part of the menu at the German restaurant Alpine Haus in New Braunfels.
The German restaurant Alpine Haus is one of the Top 10 restaurants in New Braunfels.
The burger and beer joint Muck & Fuss is one of the Top 10 restaurants in New Braunfels.
The menu at Muck & Fuss in New Braunfels includes, clockwise from front, a pulled pork taco, a fried chicken taco, a side of Asian slaw, a burger called the Great Southern, a flight of draft beers, a boozy bourbon milkshake, a tempura-fried shrimp salad and a flight of specialty cocktails.
The burger and beer joint Muck & Fuss is one of the Top 10 restaurants in New Braunfels.
The Gruene Door is one of the Top 10 restaurants in New Braunfels.
The Gruene Door is one of the Top 10 restaurants in New Braunfels.
The Italian restaurant 188 South is one of the Top 10 restaurants in New Braunfels.
The menu at the Italian restaurant 188 South in New Braunfels includes, clockwise from top left, house-baked focaccia, veal chop marsala, pinot grigio wine, a whiskey cocktail called Fig & Thyme, mussels, handmade spaghetti with meatballs and a pizza with sausage and goat cheese.
The Italian restaurant 188 South is one of the Top 10 restaurants in New Braunfels.
The Downtowner is one of the Top 10 restaurants in New Braunfels.
Bar manager David Newman serves a mezcal old fashioned cocktail at The Downtowner restaurant in New Braunfels.
Beef tartare made with rib-eye and filet is part of the dinner and brunch menus at The Downtowner restaurant in New Braunfels.
The Downtowner is one of the Top 10 restaurants in New Braunfels.
Huisache Grill is one of the Top 10 restaurants in New Braunfels.
Huisache Grill is one of the Top 10 restaurants in New Braunfels.
McAdoo’s Seafood Co. is one of the Top 10 restaurants in New Braunfels.
The menu includes shrimp and grits at McAdoo’s Seafood Co. in New Braunfels.
Gulf oysters, left, and East Coast oysters are part of the fresh oyster experience at McAdoo’s Seafood Co.
A bloody mary cocktail includes pickled veggies and boiled shrimp at McAdoo’s Seafood Co. in New Braunfels.
McAdoo’s Seafood Co. is one of the Top10 restaurants in New Braunfels.
Myron’s Prime Steakhouse is one of the Top 10 restaurants in New Braunfels.
Classic cocktails include a bourbon old-fashioned, left, and a vodka martini with Gorgonzola-stuffed olives at Myron’s Prime Steakhouse in New Braunfels.
Myron’s Prime Steakhouse is one of the Top 10 restaurants in New Braunfels.
Krause’s Cafe is the best restaurant in New Braunfels.
The menu at Krause’s Cafe in New Braunfels includes, clockwise from top, a braised pork dish called schweinshaxe, German meatballs with spätzle and a spinach salad with bacon and blue cheese.
Krause’s Cafe is the best restaurant in New Braunfels.
We all had a laugh about the “remote” part — and The Times changed the headline as a result — but the growth part is real. And the most important thing the locals know about growth in New Braunfels is this: Prom night or not, it’s hard to get a restaurant table on a Friday night downtown. Or anywhere that’s worth going, really.
To help sort out the tables worth getting, here are my Top 10 restaurants in New Braunfels. With a little German in the mix.
On ExpressNews.com: Mike Sutter’s Top 10 San Antonio restaurants in 2022
The Donut Brunch Burger incorporates two beef patties, hash browns, a fried egg, bacon and cheese in between two doughnuts at Lucy Cooper’s Ice House in New Braunfels.
It’d be easy for a cynic to dismiss this San Antonio export that opened last year in the old River Hofbrau space as just bar food. Wrong. It’s hillbilly haute cuisine, courtesy of Braunda Smith, the chef who started Lucy Cooper’s in San Antonio in 2018 with her husband Jesse Smith.
There’s bacon glazed with whiskey and brown sugar hanging from a little clothesline. There’s a burger with glazed doughnuts for a bun, piled up like a diner flattop with hash browns, bacon and a fried egg. There’s spicy-hot Dr Pepper chicken wings, unless you want your wings dunked in Coca-Cola. Multilayer nachos come spilling from a stainless steel can like the Jolly Green Giant.
All this in a place that hosts Naughty Bingo and maintains a cornhole court. It’s fun that borders on the ridiculous, but Lucy Cooper’s is a serious Americana grill masquerading as a river bar. 1515 Kuehler Ave., New Braunfels, 830-837-5172, lucycoopers.com
The menu at the German restaurant Alpine Haus in New Braunfels includes, clockwise from left, German dry riesling wine, fried pork schnitzel with paprika and bell pepper gravy, German beer, a housemade sausage sampler and a stuffed beef dish called rinderrouladen.
It’s surprising that Alpine Haus has been open only since 2013, because it feels like it was born in the 150-year-old cottage where it resides, with sturdy wooden tables, white slat ceilings and banks of exposed blond brick in every room.
The menu’s an old-school starter kit for the kind of food and beer German immigrants introduced to Central and South Texas. Bratwurst, schnitzel, goulash, sauerbraten and strudel anchor the menu along with 25 hard-to-find German and European beer labels lined up in neat rows on shelves next to bottle after bottle of German riesling and piesporter and Austrian grüner veltliner.
Fried pork schnitzel with paprika and bell pepper gravy tastes like the things we watch on old Anthony Bourdain shows. Rinderrouladen brings the comfort of Sunday dinner, a roast rolled up and stuffed with bacon, pickles and onions, smothered in gravy. And then there’s the simple joy of housemade brats, smoked sausage and jalapeño sausage lined up on a sampler plate, each with its own toothpick, like not-so-delicate canapés at a dinner party. 251 S Seguin Ave., New Braunfels, 830-214-0205, alpine-haus.com
On ExpressNews.com: Your guide to New Braunfels’ German food and beer
The menu at Muck & Fuss in New Braunfels includes draft beer flights and a burger called the Great Southern that incorporates fried green tomato, pimento cheese, fried onions and Alabama white sauce, served with an upgraded side of poutine fries with gravy and cheese curds.
Terry and Celina Muckenfuss opened Muck & Fuss in 2018, tweaking their last name to create something easier to pronounce but harder to forget.
It starts with more than a dozen burgers that build momentum with extras like fried green tomatoes, Asian slaw, Mexican street corn, pulled pork, jalapeño fritters and housemade pimento cheese, piled on righteous buns from New Braunfels’ venerated Naegelin’s Bakery. Those same elements spawned a diaspora throughout a menu, finding new homes alongside sandwiches, tacos and loaded fries.
But the love doesn’t stop there. The menu’s backed up by creative appetizers like sweet-hot tempura shrimp, Maryland crab cakes and five-layer Mexican party dip. Load a four-beer flight paddle with one of more than two-dozen beers with Texas street cred or pair a burger with a boozy bourbon milkshake and enjoy it all in a light-filled indoor-outdoor space with a rollaway garage wall of windows and a towering gabled ceiling. 295 E. San Antonio St., New Braunfels, 830-255-7055, muckandfuss.com
The menu at The Gruene Door restaurant in New Braunfels includes a bourbon-and-brandy cocktail called The Gruene Side Door and a dinner entree of lamb chops with a crust of mesquite mustard and toasted pecans.
The New Braunfels enclave of Gruene is famous for its tuber-friendly restaurants that move people through with stunning efficiency. The Gruene Door isn’t that.
About a half-mile south of the madness, it’s like a country club in the little market township of Gruene Lake Village. By day, The Gruene Door is making burgers, sandwiches, salads and a few entrees. At night, it shifts into overdrive with specialties like an aromatic and tender five-spice duck and a picturesque rack of lamb chops crusted with mesquite mustard and toasted pecans.
Chef Koury Kahler and his wife Kelsee bought The Gruene Door in 2016 from Kelsee’s parents Michael and Debbie Flume, who started the restaurant in 2009. With smart cocktails and a wine list more than 50 bottles long, it’s one of only a handful of restaurants in New Braunfels where you feel comfortable dressing up. 2360 Gruene Lake Drive, New Braunfels, 830-629-2600, thegruenedoor.com
Veal chop marsala is served with grilled broccolini and mashed potatoes at the Italian restaurant 188 South in New Braunfels.
Carol Snider and her late husband Ron Snider started this Italian cafe in 2019, firing up the pizza oven and revving up the craft cocktail bar in a former newspaper office next door to their flagship restaurant, Krause’s Cafe. Overseen by chef Diego Obando Sancho, it’s evolved since then, with pizza taking a supporting role to a broader menu of handmade pastas, chops, salads and appetizers like mussels, arancini and tempura shrimp.
Veal marsala takes the Italian standard a step further with a rustic, long-bone chop with character from the grill. And no machine-milled pasta can match the bouncy panache of 188’s bowl of spaghetti, finished with meatballs and sauce as thick as memories of home.
The dining room is like an Austin nostalgia tour, with ceiling-mounted paintings of Johnny Winter and Linda Ronstadt from the old “Austin City Limits” studio, panning down to a more traditional trattoria landscape of exposed brick, wooden blinds and a long bank of booths along the tall windows facing the street. 188 S. Castell Ave., New Braunfels, 830-609-9194, 188southnbtx.com
New Orleans barbecue shrimp and grits is part of the dinner and brunch menus at The Downtowner restaurant in New Braunfels.
It’s hard to pin down The Downtowner. Is it a craft beer and cocktail bar? A brunch-and-dinner hybrid experiment? An art gallery disguised as a minimalist diner? It’s all of those things, plus one more: a survivor.
The pandemic took The Downtowner out of the game for a year as chef and owner Chad Niland figured out the next phase for the restaurant he started in 2016 in the former Ol’ Bossy Milk Co. building. He reopened last April, bringing on Jason Sublett as co-owner and charging full speed into an eclectic menu that ranges from French toast, biscuits and gravy and chilaquiles to silky steak tartare, robust tomato-gravy meatloaf and shrimp and grits with a New Orleans barbecue twist.
Most of the menu, which also includes steaks, burgers, sliders and some of the best mac and cheese in the city, is available for both brunch and dinner. 208 S Castell Ave., New Braunfels, 830-627-9080, downtownernb.com
The menu at Huisache Grill in New Braunfels includes, clockwise from top left, tortilla soup, roasted duck salad, hot-and-crunchy trout, seafood bisque, a mixed-grill plate, a side salad and pinot noir wine.
The Huisache Grill is not exactly the hot new place everybody’s Instagramming. Not after more than 25 years across the railroad tracks from the downtown whirlwind.
And that’s OK, because sometimes it’s nice to order food you know from people who know food in a place that’s nice enough for an anniversary dinner but casual enough for a girl’s night out.
Owners Don and Lynn Forres have built — and rebuilt and built on — an operation where the sesame-almond-crusted trout is just as good as it was 10 years ago. Where everything on the mixed grill plate could stand on its own, where tortilla soup is still good for the soul and where the waiter will have ideas on which wine goes with each of them. 303 W. San Antonio St., New Braunfels, 830-620-9001, huisachegrill.com
On ExpressNews.com: Review: McAdoo’s Seafood rides a strong wave in New Braunfels
Chilean sea bass comes with crab fried rice and soy-glazed carrots at McAdoo’s Seafood Co. in New Braunfels.
McAdoo’s is comfortable with the low, middle and high ends of the spectrum of the seafood experience, channeling the egalitarian, can-do spirit of the old post office that used to inhabit this majestic old building.
For the fast-lunch crowd on a budget, there’s fried catfish with the proper low-pile shag of cornmeal breading. For the brunch-casual bunch, there’s a bloody mary with shrimp and a cheesy fondue with a serious combination of shrimp and crawfish and all the reckless joy of queso. And for those prom nights and other moments of pomp and circumstance, McAdoo’s is shucking the city’s freshest array of East Coast oysters and putting Chilean sea bass through a master class in pan-roasting.
With wood floors, red brick walls, a marble oyster bar and a patio with the feel of a botanical conservatory, McAdoo’s deftly straddles that New Braunfels line between dress-up and dress-down. 196 N. Castell Ave., New Braunfels, 830-629-3474, mcadoos.com
The menu includes a 24-ounce bone-in rib-eye, a loaded baked potato and Alaskan king crab legs at Myron’s Prime Steakhouse in New Braunfels.
For almost 20 years, in an old downtown movie theater, Myron’s has held court as the fanciest restaurant in New Braunfels, with white tablecloths, dirty martinis, a wine list more than 150 labels deep and a sommelier to back it up. The formula worked so well the Been family opened a second Myron’s in San Antonio at Alon Town Centre in 2011.
What makes Myron’s special in New Braunfels is that the theater building is by design a refuge from the light and noise outside, a refuge where a perfectly seared 24-ounce bone-in rib-eye and a pair of sweet Alaskan king crab legs can get the moment of reverent silence they deserve.
Myron’s can splash your bank account with a $400 Napa cab or expand your palate with a French Châteauneuf-du-Pape for a quarter of that, all with service that’s formal without being stuffy. 136 N. Castell Ave, New Braunfels, 830-624-1024, myronsprime.com
Breakfast options at Krause's Cafe in New Braunfels include, clockwise from top left, pork schnitzel and eggs, apple fritters, pancakes, oatmeal, a hash-style Holzmacher Skillet and biscuits with sausage gravy.
Krause’s Cafe is my No. 1 pick for so many reasons. I like Krause’s for the German heritage of the cafe, which opened in 1938 and closed in 1985 before being brought back by new owners Ron and Carol Snider in 2017. Ron died last year, and his son Chris Snider took over the business with his mother and his sister, Megan Lowe.
I like Krause’s for the food, of course. The breakfast menu comes out of the gate with fill-you-up skillet hash, apple fritters and schnitzel with eggs. Then chef Jeremy “Boomer” Acuña leans into the German zeitgeist with humble standards like brats and red cabbage and Jägerschnitzel with mushroom gravy. And he goes big with an aromatic braised hamhock called schweinshaxe that’s both primal and sophisticated and a bowl of robust German meatballs with spring-loaded spätzle, draped in shimmering brown gravy.
And I like Krause’s for it’s Munich-style biergarten, big enough to accommodate a blimp, or 70 beer taps, whichever is more handy.
But I love Krause’s for its community spirit, for being the Friday night gathering place for live music and for hosting the New Braunfels Farmers Market on Saturdays. And for keeping alive the spirit of the late Ron Snider, whose momentum helped make New Braunfels a Top 10 restaurant kind of town. 148 S. Castell Ave., New Braunfels, 830-625-2807, krausescafe.com
msutter@express-news.net | Twitter: @fedmanwalking | Instagram: @fedmanwalking
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Mike Sutter is the Express-News restaurant critic. Before joining the Taste Team in 2016, he served as restaurant critic for the Austin American-Statesman and editor of FedManWalking.com. He's appeared on NPR's "All Things Considered," ABC's "To Tell the Truth" and written for The Guardian, Bon Appetit and The Wall Street Journal.