Hoover's Cooking

Chicken-fried steak is pretty much the national dish of Texas, and Hoover Alexander makes one of the city's best, with beef the size of a high-five pounded flat, dredged in flour and fried a knobby golden brown before it's smothered in black pepper cream gravy. For $9.79, it comes with three sides, among them Southern staples such as syrupy candied yams, a witches' brew of okra and tomatoes and stemmy mustard greens with the aggressive twang of vinegar and cross-sectioned tabs of smoked ham. Hoover also draws fried catfish, barbecued ribs, meatloaf and fried pork chops from the Southern pantry, along with gumbo in a swampy roux with chicken and coarse, spicy sausage.
• 2002 Manor Road, +1 512 479 5006, hooverscooking.com, plates $10-$14.Open Mon-Fri 11am-10pm, Sat-Sun 8am-10pm

Black Star Co-op

Austin's youth culture draws craft brewers the same way it lures indie rock bands, attracting a dozen breweries in the past five years. Black Star is a member-owned co-operative that welcomes all comers with the eccentrically named styles: Vulcan is an explosively hoppy rye ale, the porter category is represented by the Recalcitrant Dockhand and Waterloo picks its identity from Austin's original name and its flavour from wheat and Texas peaches. Pints start at $4.75. The kitchen responds with well-turned pub classics such as English-style chips and a fortifying cheeseburger, plus unexpected dishes like shrimp and grits, and a variety of daily "Irrational" specials.
• 7020 Easy Wind Drive, +1 512 452 2337, blackstar.coop, plates from around $8. Open Mon-Thu 4pm-midnight, Fri-Sat 11am-1am, Sun 11am-midnight, kitchen closes daily at 11pm

East Side King

Rolling with the trailer-food zeitgeist, three cooks from Austin's premiere Asian fusion restaurant Uchi – including Top Chef TV competition winner Paul Qui – started East Side King as a side venture behind the down-market Liberty bar two years ago. Their kingdom has grown to three trailers. The Liberty trailer specialises in sweet-hot fried chicken, pork belly steam buns and radiant fried beets. At Shangri La, they fill sticky steam buns with crisp chicken skin and Chinese sausage and pack tempura shrimp into corn tortillas with jalapeño and sweet kewpie mayo. The Grackle trailer rolls out with a Japanese punk-rock paint job and a menu with foie gras, beef rib and quail for street-savvy gourmands.
• At the Liberty bar, 1618 E 6th St, and Shangri La, 1016 E 6th St, no phone, eskaustin.com, most main dishes $7-$8. Open daily 5pm-1.45am. Grackle trailer , 1700 East 6th Street, open Tue-Sat 6pm-2:30am

Franklin Barbecue

The line starts forming around 9am – call it the barbe-queue – and when the doors open at 11am, Aaron Franklin's smoked brisket, pork ribs, sausage and pulled pork are guaranteed to sell out. "We make as much food as I can fit on the smoker," he says. The brisket ripples with velvet elasticity beneath a crust like salted volcanic rubble. The shaggy-textured pork ribs sport a finish like maple syrup, and you know how good syrup tastes with pork. Franklin's smoky-sweet espresso barbecue sauce was born when his business was just a trailer sitting next to a coffee trader, before he moved into a legendary barbecue building on Austin's East Side – a building not quite big enough to hold Franklin's growing acclaim.
• 900 E 11th St, +1 512 653 1187, franklinbarbecue.com, brisket $16 a pound, plates start at $8. Open Tue-Sun 11am until they sell out (usually about 1.30pm)

Joe's Bakery & Mexican Food

Political fortunes have been made and broken over tacos and coffee at Joe's, where for 50 years Latino activists have measured a candidate's worth by how he handles himself here. The fourth generation of the extended Avila family still runs the business, laying down breakfast plates of migas and tacos in handmade flour tortillas filled with mahogany-fibred barbacoa or tender pork carne guisada. Lunch includes a combination plate with Tex-Mex all-stars: a crispy beef taco, refried pinto beans, Mexican rice and a deep brown layer of chilli gravy over a beef enchilada and corn-jacketed tamale. In front, bakery cases glow with pastel-frosted pan dulce pastries. And for the stout of heart or the merely hungover, there's always menudo, a dragon's breath soup of beef tripe and hominy.
• 2305 E 7th St, +1 512 472 0017, joesbakery.com, tacos $1.79, breakfast plates $6-$8, lunch from $6. Open Tue-Sun 6.30am-3pm

JMueller BBQ

Three generations of barbecuing blood run through John Mueller, and the brisket he pulls from the smoker behind his trailer carries with it "all my love, all my anger, all my history". That web of emotion and technique produces brisket with the fat in a pearled state between liquid and solid, held together by a crusted layer of salt and black pepper like beef candy. Mueller makes his own sausage, all soft peppery shag in a sturdy casing. The beef rib ripples like cowboy steak with a built-in handle. All of it stands tall without sauce, but because he'd rather not fight about it – most of the time – Mueller makes a brilliant sauce like peppered onion stew.
• 1502 S 1st St, +1 512 948 8935, jmuellerbbq.com, sold by weight – brisket, beef ribs and pork ribs $6.99 per half-pound. Open Tue-Sun 10.30am until they sell out (about 2pm)

Nau's Enfield Drug

The American tradition of the soda fountain lives on in this old-school drugstore in Clarksville. Buy fake moustaches, real aspirin and baby powder in the front, but in the back is a lunch-counter and a few tables with the finish worn off by generations of elbows. It starts with a hamburger moulded by hand and seared on a flat-top grill, tucked inside a thin white bun hanging on for dear life. With cheese and bacon, it's enough to bring on the maladies the store around it is built to cure. Finish with a chocolate soda made by fizzing ice cream and chocolate with carbonated water.
• 1115 W Lynn St, +1 512 476 3663, nausdrug.com, hamburgers start at around $5, shakes and ice-creams from $3. Soda Fountain & Grill open Mon-Fri 7.30am-4.15pm, Sat 8am-4.15pm, Sun 10.30am-3.30pm

The Original Hoffbrau Steaks

These are the T-bone steaks from cartoons, comically wide and flat and shaped like a heart with a dagger through the middle. The Hoffbrau sears them on a flat-top grill with a shimmering drench of melted margarine the same way it's done for more than 75 years, with steak fries cut in fat, crunchy wedges and a lettuce salad saturated with a garlic dressing you'll wear the rest of the day. People don't come here so much for the steaks as they do for the orange-formica atmosphere of a country diner where the waitresses can recite the menu from memory and still bother to learn their customers' names.
• 613 W 6th St, +1 512 472 0822, originalhoffbrausteaks.com, steaks $10-$19. Open Tue-Sat 11am-2pm and 5pm-9pm

Sazón

Chef Margarito Aranda translates the name of the pickled onion relish called "xni pec" that comes with his cochinita pibil as "nose of the dog", because its heat can make the nose run. Between xni pec, white rice, black beans and pork braised in a banana leaf, cochinita pibil is a signal this isn't Tex-Mex, but the food of Mexico's interior. More proof: empanadas filled with a poor-man's truffle called huitlacoche, a ceviche of fleshy white fish with onion and tomato, or a roasted chicken quarter with mole Oaxaqueño, a smoke-red sauce infused with red chillis, chocolate, cinnamon and a fall pantry of aromatic spices.
• 1816 S Lamar Blvd, +1 512 326 4395, sazonaustin.com, breakfast, lunch and dinner dishes from $6-$16. Open Mon-Fri 9.30am-10pm, Sat 8am-10pm, Sun 9am-3pm

Texas Chili Parlor

"Chili" is a dish that can divide its followers the way sauce/no sauce divides barbecue people. Beans or no beans? The Chili Parlor votes no for its three signature bowls of red, graded X, XX and XXX according to their heat profiles. The XXX is cowboy-style chili: beef in big, slow-cooked pieces, no beans, in a mahogany swirl of thick chili broth that's all smoky heat and no tomato-sweetened tang. Dry heat, like a Texas Hill Country summer. There are plenty of Tex-Mex alternatives for non-chili lovers. It's dark in here, illuminated mostly by vintage neon beer signs and Christmas lights on the horns of a mounted deer's head. Dark enough to savour a $2 Miller High Life without shame, to scratch initials into the beat-down tabletops, dark enough for Texas lawmakers to make policy decisions over chili with cheese and onions.
• 1409 Lavaca St, +1 512 472 2828, txchiliparlor.com, taster bowl of chili $3.75, small $5.95 and large $6.95. Open every day 11am-2am, kitchen until midnight

• Mike Sutter is a restaurant critic and Austin food journalist at fedmanwalking.com