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Chili con carne
Before there was a Tex-Mex restaurant, there was a chili stand. From about 1870 to 1930, the women known as the Chili Queens cooked and served in San Antonio's open-air plazas, Military Plaza chief among them, and their spicy beef stew is where this whole cuisine starts.
A proper bowl is all about the meat and the red chile, rich enough to need nothing on the side but crackers or a tortilla. It also turns up again further down this list as the backbone of Frito pie, so it pays to know the original first.
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Tex-Mex
The combination plate
That crowded oval plate with an enchilada, a taco, rice and refried beans is a Texas invention, not an accident. Otis Farnsworth, owner of San Antonio's Original Mexican Restaurant, which opened in 1900, is credited with putting rice and beans alongside the main dish, though some accounts give the idea to Miguel Martinez of El Fenix in Dallas. Either way, customers liked the value, and other restaurants copied it until it became the Tex-Mex default.
Order one when you want the whole cuisine in a single sitting, or when the table cannot agree.
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Chile con queso
Queso is the dish people mock until the bowl arrives. Chile con queso was on Texas menus as early as 1910, at San Antonio's Gunter Hotel and the Original Mexican Restaurant, and a 1939 church cookbook from Lubbock already made it with Velveeta.
That processed-cheese version is the point, not a shortcut: it melts into a smooth, pourable dip instead of a stringy, greasy one. Warm chips, a molten bowl and some chopped chiles or tomatoes are the whole appeal, and any Tex-Mex meal that skips it is missing its opening act.
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Enchilada
Cheese enchiladas with chili gravy
If you order one plate to understand Tex-Mex, make it this. Chili gravy is a mash-up of flour-based gravy and Mexican chile sauce, usually meatless, built from fat, flour, broth, chili powder and cumin, and food writer Robb Walsh calls it the essence of the cuisine.
Rolled around plain melting cheese, then smothered in that gravy, the enchiladas taste earthy and mellow rather than fiery. Houston's Felix Mexican Restaurant was best known for exactly this plate. It is comfort food with no apology needed.
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Frito pie
Chili poured over corn chips sounds like a dare, and that is half its charm. Fritos were created in San Antonio in 1932 by Charles Doolin, and Texans credit his family kitchen with the first chili pie. New Mexico points instead to the Woolworth counter in Santa Fe, where Teresa Hernandez sold thousands in the 1960s, though a 1949 company record already lists a "Fritos chili pie."
Whoever got there first, the dish belongs to Texas Friday nights, sold at football games as a fundraiser. Add cheese and raw onion, eat it straight from the bag, and enjoy the crunch before it softens.
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Nachos
Nachos are a border dish in the truest sense. The original combination of chips, cheese and jalapeño peppers was first served in 1943 in Piedras Negras, just across the river from Eagle Pass, Texas, reportedly for a group of American military wives from the Texas side. Then Texas made them famous: Frank Liberto's ballpark nachos were first served at Arlington Stadium during the 1976 season, and Howard Cosell marveled at them on national television during a Dallas Cowboys broadcast.
Skip the overloaded platter now and then and order a simple plate of chips, melted cheese and jalapeños, the way the dish began.
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King Ranch chicken
This is Tex-Mex from the casserole dish rather than the restaurant: layers of tortillas, shredded chicken, cheese and canned soup, baked until bubbling. Nobody really knows where it came from, and the famous ranch in its name is known for its beef, not chicken.
What it lacks in pedigree it makes up for in ease. It is the most forgiving dish on this list for a home cook, assembled from pantry staples and a store-bought chicken, and it feeds a crowd from one pan.
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Taco
Puffy taco, San Antonio
San Antonio's signature taco starts as a flattened ball of masa fried until it puffs into a light, airy shell. Arturo Lopez is generally credited with making it famous at Ray's Drive Inn, serving the West Side since 1956, though his brother Henry disputes the claim and runs his own puffy taco shops.
Eat it fast and over a plate: the shell shatters, the filling escapes, and that mess is exactly why it beats any pre-made hard shell.
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Taco
Breakfast tacos
Egg, potato, bacon, chorizo or beans and cheese in a warm flour tortilla: the most useful food in Texas. The earliest stateside mention found in print is a 1959 San Antonio newspaper story about a taco vendor who started on the West Side and sold bean and egg tacos downtown.
San Antonio and Austin both claim the dish, and in 2016 the rivalry got so heated that Austin's mayor declared war on San Antonio, later settled at a treaty summit with San Antonio's mayor. Pick two fillings, add salsa, and you have a cheap, portable breakfast that beats any drive-through.
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Fajita
Fajitas began as ranch-hand food: skirt steak, once a throwaway cut, grilled by Mexican ranch workers in Texas in the 1930s and 1940s. Sonny Falcon ran the first commercial fajita taco stand at a Diez y Seis celebration in Kyle in 1969, Ninfa Laurenzo sold them as tacos al carbon at her Houston restaurant, opened in 1973, and in 1982 the opening chef of Austin's Hyatt Regency put sizzling fajitas on the menu.
Order beef, insist on fresh flour tortillas, and build each one yourself. The sizzle is theater; the charred skirt steak is the real reason to come.
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Chile con queso
Bob Armstrong dip, Matt's El Rancho, Austin
Queso, but loaded. Named for Bob Armstrong, who served 12 years as Texas land commissioner, it began with his suggestion to Matt Martinez Jr. at Matt's El Rancho, and the kitchen combined its chile con queso with taco meat and guacamole. Servers and regulars simply call it "a Bob."
It is a meal disguised as a dip, best shared by a table that has given up pretending to save room. Matt's has been open since 1952 and still serves the original in Austin.
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