Eat on, Lubbock

Eating well is easy when you're in Buddy Holly's hometown, thanks to a new generation of chefs bringing high cuisine to the High Plains.

Oct 20, 2022

Lubbock has a lot to love, including this lemon curd from a restaurant called The Nicolett, which was named one of the top 50 restaurants in the country by Bon Appetit magazine.

I’d drive all the way to Lubbock for that lemon curd dessert at The Nicolett.

It was the very last thing I ate in the Hub City last Thursday night, surrounded by fellow travel writers, editors and our hosts from Visit Lubbock and Geiger PR.

These media trips are like summer camps for writers, where we immerse ourselves in a new subject — this time, a panhandle city that, despite its storied history, is often overlooked as a tourist destination — and in the process, get to know fellow creators with vastly different perspectives and experience.

The Nicolett is a lauded restaurant in Lubbock that opened in fall of 2020 and includes an outdoor dining area that was formerly a greenhouse.

I didn’t love everything I tasted, saw, learned (and didn’t learn) in Lubbock. I had to look up the history of the cotton industry even though I stayed at a place meticulously crafted to look like an old cotton gin. While having breakfast at a center celebrating the history of ranching, I googled the history of branding — Egyptian origins, dating back many thousands of years — because otherwise I’d have thought that white cowboys in the West invented it.

While I work on a couple of stories about what is and isn’t changing about Lubbock — one for the newsletter, another for Texas Coop Power — I wanted to share a slew of recommendations for your next trip to or through Lubbock.

Because there are plenty of reasons to stop and stay for a bit in this college town on the prairie.

I had to start with that lemon curd, a tangy, salty, sweet and sour delicacy topped with a matcha crust and served in a mint-olive oil sauce that is a clear example of why people are raving about this restaurant that recently landed on Bon Appetit’s Best New Restaurant list.

The rest of the meal was fine, but that lemon curd with its perfect salt flakes, a hint of herbaceous olive oil and an ever-so-delicate matcha crunch almost had me in tears.

Chef/owner Finn Walter, a 2022 semifinalist for James Beard Best Chef: Texas, cut his chops at a Michelin-starred restaurant in California before working at the now-closed restaurants Olivia and Mettle in Austin and then returning to his hometown of Lubbock just before the pandemic started.

Walter opened The Nicolett in fall of 2020, and the restaurant is part of a cultural revitalization sweeping through this little pocket of the panhandle.

Driven in part by deep pocketed oil-and-ranching diners and a steady flow of creative professionals graduating from Texas Texas, this progressive approach to making money — highlighting small producers over the big ones, celebrating unique ideas rather than the same old comforting ones — might be more of a revolution than renaissance, but that’s for someone with deeper ties to Lubbock to decide.

Dirk’s, named for former Lubbock mayor and cartoonist Dirk West, is a new Lubbock restaurant that serves fried chicken and fresh Gulf oysters.

Another culinary highlight was The West Table, a fine dining establishment located on the first floor of the historic Pioneer Hotel, which is perhaps the only place to get frog legs within a few hundred miles. (And they were delicious.)

The West family, which opened The West Table in 2014, also runs an excellent fried chicken-and-oyster restaurant called Dirk’s, named for Cameron West’s grandfather, the noted cartoonist and former mayor Dirk West, and a buzzy brewpub called The Brewery LBK.

These fancy meals downtown provided a nice change of pace from the meat-and-two-sides comfort food that has long been a staple of Texas towns like Lubbock, but there’s also a reason why people all across the state know that is you want a plate special, there’s few better plates in Texas than Evie Mae’s BBQ, which landed on Texas Monthly’s top 10 barbecue restaurants last year, and rightly so.

I think all barbecue is generally pretty good, but the sides and desserts usually leave me focused on the meats. But not at Evie Mae’s, where there isn’t a bad bite on the menu, which is almost entirely gluten free because the husband of the couple who runs it has celiac. (That’s what got them making barbecue in the first place about a decade ago.)

When they first opened as a food truck, Lubbock had too many restrictions on mobile eateries, so they opened in the small town of Wolfforth, just southeast of Lubbock.

Put this restaurant on your map the next time you’re driving through around lunchtime. (If you’re from Austin, it will make you question everything you thought you knew about who makes the best barbecue around.)

For cocktails, hit up the New Mexican-inspired La Sirena, and for a French pastry, swing by Ninety Two, a European-inspired cafe in a strip center that’s also on the southeast side of town.

One of the highlights of the trip was a wine tasting at McPherson Cellars, which has had a tasting room in downtown Lubbock since 2008. Winemaker Kim McPherson’s wife runs a tapas bar called La Diosa Cellars that is apparently out of this world, but we didn’t get to go, so you’ll have to trust their word on it.

I’ll include more about our conversation with the second-generation winemaker behind McPherson in my next story. He straddles the line between old and new Lubbock and talks about it more frankly than anyone else I encountered during our visit.

To bring it full circle to that lemon curd, McPherson makes the house wine for chef Walter at The Nicolett.

“When he came to town, I asked him, ‘What can I do to make you stay here?’ So, I started making his wine.”

The Feminist Kitchen

Eat on, Lubbock

Eating well is easy when you're in Buddy Holly's hometown, thanks to a new generation of chefs bringing high cuisine to the High Plains.