The Best Restaurants in Paris, Texas

107 does the thing a small-town restaurant most often fails to do, which is take the food as seriously as the atmosphere. The kitchen cooks from scratch, the beer list has actual range rather than four domestics and a seasonal, and the open-air beer garden is where most of Paris ends up on a decent evening.

It is the default answer when somebody visiting town asks where to go for dinner, and it holds up to that. Live music on the patio on the right night makes it the closest thing Paris has to a night out.

Corner Cafe sits right on the historic plaza and cooks genuinely farm-to-table, which in a town surrounded by working farmland means shorter supply lines than most city restaurants making the same claim. Everything is made in house.

It is the best lunch on the square, and it is the place to take somebody who assumes a town of 25,000 cannot cook. The room is bright, the service is unhurried in the good way, and you are a two-minute walk from the rest of downtown afterward.

The morning pick. That Place Downtown is a small breakfast-and-brunch room a block off the plaza that does the classics without reinventing anything, and does them the same way every time.

If you are in Paris for a weekend and need somewhere to start Saturday before the antique stores open, this is it.

Scratch-cooked soul food, and the name is not decoration. Meatloaf, fried chicken, and the sides that go with them, made properly rather than pulled from a freezer bag.

It is also one of the few places in Paris with a real cocktail program, which makes it the pick when you want dinner and a drink somewhere that is not a beer garden.

A small burger stand on North Main that has won the local best burger and best fries poll eight years running. That is a long enough streak to be a verdict rather than a fluke.

It is not trying to be anything other than what it is. Little place, big taste, per their own slogan, and it is the correct answer when somebody in the car says they just want a burger.

Family-run Italian on Clarksville Street doing hand-tossed pizza and the red-sauce standards. Lasagna, fettuccine Alfredo, the things you want from a neighborhood Italian place.

It fills the gap every small town needs filled, which is somewhere the whole family will agree on without anybody settling for a chain.