Rock Your Taco

Top chefs battle for the Rock Your Taco title — and the results are delicious

Saturday's Rock Your Taco battle at the Austin Food & Wine Festival was a full on food fight. The smack talk started days before with participating chefs vowing to take down two-time champion, Chef Tyson Cole.

The 14 chefs competing for the title brought their best to the game, elevating the humble street food to new heights with unusual proteins and ingredient combinations that you aren’t likely to find at your local taqueria.

The Texas crew served some of the most flavorful tacos of the night. Chef David Bull of Congress and Second Bar + Kitchen had a clear crowd favorite with his Black Heart Taco. It looked more like a hotdog, but had all the right components — rich goat heart morcilla sausage with chicken liver mousse, with a bright parsley salad and lemon crema on perfectly cooked corn tortillas.

Returning champion Chef Tyson Cole of Uchi and Uchiko served a Kiiro Meshi taco, a San Antonio-style puffy taco topped with tender sea bass and a crunchy corn salad. The seafood taco was a refreshing bite in a crowd of rich, meaty tacos. Chef Bryce Gilmore of Odd Duck and Barley Swine dished up a “Goat Revolution” taco, featuring roasted goat served on a fluffy goat fat tortilla topped with goat cheese. It might seem like a small touch, but Gilmore’s tortilla was the best taco wrapper of the night, and when you eat 14 tacos, you notice the tortilla.

Houston Chef Chris Shepherd of Underbelly stirred up a bit of controversy with his smoky Korean braised beef taco about whether lettuce counted as a taco shell (the Twitter crowd said no). Regardless, the rich, spicy beef was delicious. Chef John Currence flexed some serious taco muscle with his crowd pleaser. The Mississippi Red Neck taco featured braised lamb neck on a soft corn tortilla with a sprinkling of corn, cotija cheese and a smoky red salsa.

At the end of the night, the chef’s lined up on stage to find out who the judges deemed the taco master. Top Chef All-Stars winner Richad Blais unseated Cole as reigning Rock Your Taco champion. His octopus and lamb picadillo taco, a flavorful meat and seafood fusion taco, earned one of the longest lines of the night.

Chef Bryce Gilmore serves up a taco at the event.

Bryce Gilmore Rock Your Taco Austin Food Wine Festival

Photo courtesy of Austin Food & Wine Festival

Chef Bryce Gilmore serves up a taco at the event.

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Peak Plates

7 Austin restaurants make OpenTable's top 100 for 2024

Jeffrey's Restaurant/Instagram

Jeffrey's Restaurant is a great example of the type of fancy, well-established restaurant that made the list.

Restaurant reservation website OpenTable has issued its new list of the top 100 restaurants in America for 2024, and seven Austin restaurants have made the list. That's already impressive at a glance — 7 percent of the entire national list in just one city — but compared to other Texas cities, it's huge. Austin is the only Texas city to have more than one restaurant on the list.

The "2024's Top 100 Restaurants" list is a compilation of the most sought-after and top-ranked restaurants in the U.S. based on 14 million verified reviews on OpenTable from October 1, 2023, to September 30, 2024. Restaurants are not ranked, but arranged in alphabetical order by state.

Austin's seven restaurants (including several repeats from OpenTable's 2023 list) are:

Aba: Known for its laid-back, yet fancy patio and being a popular spot for visiting celebrities
J Carver's: Known for a commitment to the classic steakhouse experience and legitimately fancy dining
Jeffrey's Restaurant: Known for fine dining, a connection to Austin before its boom, and a fantastic wine program
Red Ash Italia: Known for approachable, yet high-quality Italian food with rustic touches
Sammie's Italian: Known for its romantic take on the archetype of an East Coast Italian joint
Uchi: Known for bringing Austin into the national sushi conversation and defining the scene
Uchiko: Known for a cool atmosphere and getting creative with sushi and other small plates

Austinites will probably not be surprised by this list, which names some very well-established restaurants that are all upscale. These qualities tend to appeal to similar lists, regardless of who's curating them.

It is interesting, given that the list was democratically based on user ratings, that there were not more beloved food trailers or casual spots. However, other factors that led to high rankings included alerts set and reservations made ahead — things that don't really apply to even the most awesome taco truck.

Mediterranean food was a trend among the Austin picks. Red Ash Italia and Sammie's Italian are, as the names would imply, completely dedicated to Italian food, while Aba covers a wider swath of the Mediterranean. There were also two steakhouses: J Carver's and Jeffrey's Restaurant.

As list-perusers may have guessed, Uchi and Uchiko are in the same family of restaurants, with Uchi being the more formal and Uchiko being a bit more accessible for drop-in meals and cocktails. But are two more incognito duos of sibling restaurants on the list: J Carver's and Red Ash, and Jeffrey's Restaurant and Sammie's Italian.

That could be a coincidence. It could also be a reflection of the utility of money and experience in opening a good restaurant, or a lesson about the effects of good (and expensive) marketing. Whatever it is, it doesn't sound like hospitality groups had any direct sway on how OpenTable made its choices.

This list was different from the inaugural list of OpenTable Icons, which launched in 2024. The "Icons" list chose restaurants that are getting a lot of buzz, which ended up being more subjective. It also seemed to let in — as a side effect of the process, rather than a hard eligibility rule — more new and Mexican restaurants. Two restaurants are on both lists: Red Ash and Jeffrey's.

Restaurants outside of Austin that made the Top 100 list, organized alphabetically, are:

Hudson House — Dallas
Steak 48 — Houston
Signature — San Antonio

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