Every New Austin Restaurant Worth a Reservation This Fall
Austin Life · August 2026
The short answer: book The Driskill Grill, Kinsho and Oria now. Walk into Konbini late. Watch for The Butcher's Daughter, Austin Sports Club and Alteño before the end of the year. And if you only make one new reservation this fall, make it Fish Shop — the only Austin restaurant on Texas Monthly's most recent best-new list.
Austin opened a lot of restaurants in 2026 and closed a lot of them too, which makes a list like this more useful than it sounds. The openings worth your time this fall cluster in three places — East Austin, Rainey Street, and a downtown that is quietly getting more serious than it has been in a decade. Here's what's actually open, what's still coming, and which ones justify planning an evening around.
Explore Austin NeighborhoodsCall (512) 608-8811
9 Open Now Book or walk in this week | 5 Still Coming Announced for later in 2026 | 3 Neighborhood Clusters East Austin, Rainey, downtown | NO. 4 Fish Shop Texas Monthly's best new list, 2026 |
Open Now, and Worth the Trip
Restaurant | Where | What It Is |
|---|---|---|
The Driskill Grill | Downtown | The hotel restaurant returns as an American steakhouse under McGuire Moorman Lambert. The most consequential reopening of the year — the room carries real history and MML knows what to do with it. |
Kinsho | Rainey Street | Rainey's first proper sushi restaurant, from the Rocco's Italian team with chef Victor Gonzalez, formerly of Uchiko. Eighteen-seat sushi bar, nigiri and open-flame kushiyaki. |
Konbini | East Austin | A late-night walk-in sushi counter tucked behind papercut, from the Tare chefs. Rotating nigiri and crudo with Texan and coastal Mexican influence. No reservations, which is the point. |
Oria | East Austin | Mediterranean built around charcoal and wood fire, from the Space Cowboy team, in the former Austin Eastciders space. Big room, big flavors, easy to bring six people to. |
Austin Oyster Co. | E. Cesar Chavez | East Coast oysters flown in from Maine, cold martinis, indoor-outdoor seating built for a long lunch that turns into an evening. |
Tzintzuntzan | North Loop | Contemporary Mexican café and panadería from the Fonda San Miguel family, next door to the original. Regional breakfast dishes from Mérida, Oaxaca and Mexico City. Space designed by Miró Rivera Architects. |
Howdy's Pizza and Pasta | East MLK | Chef Emily Rayburn doing Italian with Central Texas produce — fresh pastas, seasonal pizzas, Texas wine and local beer. The neighborhood-restaurant model done properly. |
Big Al's Pizza | Next to Hank's | New York-style by the slice or the pie, from the Hank's team, with a kids' play area. The most genuinely useful opening on this list if you have a seven-year-old. |
Fish Shop | Central | Not new anymore — opened July 2025 — but the only Austin restaurant on Texas Monthly's most recent ten best new restaurants list. See below. |
Restaurant openings, closures and hours change constantly in this market. Confirm directly before planning around any listing here.
The One That Won the List
Texas Monthly publishes ten best new restaurants each year. In the most recent edition — the first written by Paula Forbes, who took over from Pat Sharpe — exactly one Austin restaurant made it. Fish Shop landed at No. 4.
It's a seafood restaurant that splits the difference between West Coast and Gulf Coast: Dungeness crab cocktail and halibut crudo alongside carefully sourced oysters. Chef Justin Huffman and Nicole Rossi ran a series of pop-ups before opening in July 2025, which meant they had an audience on day one. It is not cheap. It is also, by the assessment of the state's most-read food critic, the best thing Austin produced in that window.
Worth noting what else was in that assessment: Forbes described 2025 as a lackluster year for Texas restaurants generally, and Houston took four of the ten spots to Austin's one. That's a useful corrective to the idea that Austin is running away with the state's food scene. We have the barbecue, three Michelin stars' worth of it. The rest of the field is more competitive than the local narrative suggests.
Still Coming
The Butcher's Daughter — the all-day vegetarian café out of New York and Los Angeles, with a fully plant-based menu. Announced for late summer, which means it could open any week now.
Austin Sports Club — an elevated take on the sports bar from Kevin Durant and Rich Kleiman's Boardroom, Joe Gebbia, and Austin-based Lobos Hospitality. The concept is the interesting part: sports bars have historically been the one dining category Austin does no better than anywhere else.
Alteño — a Michelin-recognized Mexican restaurant coming to the Rainey district, which continues its transformation from bungalow bar strip into an actual dining destination.
Texas French Bread — the bistro and bakery returning after the fire. This is the reopening Austin has been waiting longest for, and the one that will generate the most emotion when it happens.
Ramen del Barrio — a brick-and-mortar for the Michelin-recognized Japanese-Mexican ramen operation. Date still open.
A word on timing: restaurant opening dates slip, routinely and by months. Every date above reflects what operators had announced at the time of writing. Before you plan an evening around any of them, check the restaurant's own channels — that is where the real date lives.
Where the Openings Cluster, and Why It Matters
Sort this list by geography and the pattern is hard to miss. East Austin has Konbini, Oria, Austin Oyster Co. and Howdy's. Rainey has Kinsho and Alteño coming. Downtown has the Driskill and the Sports Club. North Austin has Tzintzuntzan and the Burnet Road corridor continuing to fill in.
New restaurant openings are one of the more reliable leading indicators of where a neighborhood is heading, and Austin has demonstrated this repeatedly. East Austin's dining boom preceded its real estate run by several years. South Congress went from a quirky strip to a destination on the back of restaurants opening, not the other way around. When chefs with real resumes start signing leases in a particular six-block radius, the residential market tends to follow.
Which is why the counter-story matters just as much. Austin also lost Olamaie, Vespaio, El Naranjo, Yard Bar and Lammes Candies this year, and Hoover's scaled back. Rent, labor costs, and a dining public that goes out earlier and less often are all real. The openings and the closures are happening in the same city at the same time, and reading only one half of that gives you a distorted picture — of the food scene and of the neighborhoods.
Trying to figure out which Austin neighborhood actually fits you?
Walkability to dinner is one of the few neighborhood factors that shows up in daily life every single week. The Davis Agency knows central Austin block by block — not just what a house costs, but what's within a fifteen-minute walk of the front door.
How to Actually Get a Table
The Driskill Grill and Kinsho are the two hardest reservations on this list right now, and both follow the same rule: weeknights are dramatically easier than weekends, and the kitchen doesn't know what day it is. A Tuesday at 7:00 is the same meal as a Saturday at 7:00, minus three weeks of waiting.
Konbini is walk-in only, which means the strategy is simply going late. Oria and Austin Oyster Co. take groups comfortably, which makes them the right call when you're hosting out-of-town guests and don't want to split the table. Big Al's and Howdy's are neighborhood restaurants in the truest sense — go on a whim, bring the kids, don't overthink it.
One habit worth adopting in this market: when a restaurant you love is quiet on a Tuesday in August, go anyway. The closures this year weren't about food quality. They were about slow months. The places that survive the summer are the ones with regulars who show up in it.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the best new restaurants in Austin right now?
Among 2026 openings, The Driskill Grill downtown, Kinsho on Rainey Street, and Oria and Konbini in East Austin have drawn the most attention. Fish Shop, which opened in July 2025, is the only Austin restaurant on Texas Monthly's most recent ten best new restaurants list, where it placed fourth.
What restaurants are opening in Austin later in 2026?
Announced openings include The Butcher's Daughter, an all-day vegetarian café; Austin Sports Club, backed by Kevin Durant's Boardroom and Lobos Hospitality; Alteño in the Rainey district; the return of Texas French Bread after its fire; and a brick-and-mortar for Ramen del Barrio. Opening dates in this market slip frequently — confirm with each restaurant directly.
Which Austin neighborhood has the best new restaurants?
East Austin has the highest concentration of notable 2026 openings, followed by the Rainey Street district and downtown. North Austin's Burnet Road corridor and the North Loop area have also added significant new spots. Historically, restaurant activity in an Austin neighborhood has tended to precede rising residential demand by several years.
Why did so many Austin restaurants close in 2026?
Operators who closed this year cited a consistent set of pressures: commercial rent, labor costs, unusually slow summer months, and a smaller late-night dining crowd than the city had pre-pandemic. Olamaie, Vespaio, El Naranjo, Yard Bar and Lammes Candies all closed or announced closures, and several other longstanding operations scaled back.
Related Reading from The Davis Agency
→ Austin's Michelin Stars in 2026: What's Left After Olamaie
→ The Lockhart BBQ Run: A Half-Day Itinerary from 78704
→ Austin's Annual Events Calendar: The Cultural Moments That Define Life in the City
Weighing Neighborhoods in Central Austin?
The Davis Agency works across Barton Hills, Zilker, Bouldin Creek, Travis Heights and the wider central Austin market. If you're deciding where to land, the question of what's walkable from your front door is worth as much attention as the floor plan.
Explore NeighborhoodsCall (512) 608-8811
Derrik Davis · Broker/Owner, The Davis Agency · CLHMS Certified · TREC License #558841 · Serving 78704 and the greater Austin luxury market since 2006.
