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From king cake beignets to ballpark nachos, Texas Monthly counts down the state's best new restaurant dishes

a plate containing a cooked Peking duck
Jessica and Lon binder /Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/

From Texas Standard:

The pandemic has proved challenging for all kinds of businesses, including restaurants, which either closed or shifted to take-out and delivery offerings during lockdowns.

With the landscape for restaurants dramatically different during the past year, Texas Monthly decided to take a different approach to its annual Best New Restaurants survey. Pat Sharpe is food critic for Texas Monthly. She told Texas Standard that the magazine decided to forgo the usual top-10 list in favor of highlighting the best dishes offered by restaurants around the state.

Highlights from Texas Monthly's roundup of best restaurant dishes:

- Desserts: King cake beignet, The Dusty Biscuit (Fort Worth)

- Cocktails: Slurping Bastard, Tiki Tatsu-Ya (Austin)

- Small plates: Roasted beet salad, Bar Loretta (San Antonio)

- Large plates: Peking duck, Duck N Bao (Houston)

- Outdoor dining: Ballpark nachos, Desert Racer(Dallas)

- Pet-friendly restaurants: The Friendly Spot, (San Antonio)

Kristen Cabrera is a graduate of the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies in Portland, Maine, where she saw snow for the first time and walked a mile through a blizzard. A native of the Rio Grande Valley, she graduated from the University of Texas-Pan American (now UTRGV) and is a former KUT News intern. She has been working as a freelance audio producer, writer and podcaster. Email her: kcabrera@kut.org