Don't leave without these.

Eight seats in a Spring Branch strip mall, one star, and a tasting menu built entirely on heirloom Mexican corn nixtamalized that morning — tortillas, tetelas, atoles, tamales. Emmanuel Chavez treats masa the way a French kitchen treats stock, and nothing else in Texas tastes like it.

OrderThe tasting — there is only one. The tortilla course with the season's salsa is the point; take the agave pairing.

Goodnight Hospitality's tasting room changes its region twice a year — Andalusia, the Levant, the Maghreb — and cooks each with the precision of a starred kitchen and one of the best wine programs in the state. The one splurge on this roll that earns its price.

OrderThe full tasting with the wine pairing; ask the somm for the older bottles on the pairing's second half.

Benchawan Painter won the Beard award for Best Chef: Texas cooking Thai food at Bangkok strength in a tiny East End room — no toning down, no substitutions, a Bib every year. The most important restaurant of the last five years in Houston.

OrderThe crispy pork belly, the green curry, the crab fried rice and the pad kra pao at full heat. Reserve; there are twenty seats.

Jason Vaughan's EaDo bistro is the room Houston's cooks eat in on their nights off: the Hustle Bread with cultured butter, a tartare that's become a civic dish, natural wine and a Bib every year since the Guide arrived.

OrderThe Hustle Bread, the beef tartare, the mussels, and whatever pasta is on. Sit at the bar.

Leonard Botello's Heights smokehouse is Texas Monthly's top-five barbecue and Michelin's Bib for a reason: brisket with a black crust and a fat cap that gives, beef ribs the size of a forearm, and cakes made by his mother. The line is the price.

OrderBrisket, moist, by the half-pound; a beef rib; the corn pudding; a slice of the tres leches or the carrot cake. In line by 10:30.

Three friends from Alief put Vietnamese and Chinese flavors on a Texas smoker — brisket fried rice, Thai green curry boudin, gochujang beef ribs, char siu pork belly — and Texas Monthly, Michelin and the neighborhood all agreed it works. The most Houston restaurant in Houston.

OrderBrisket fried rice, the char siu pork belly burnt ends, a Thai green curry boudin link, and whatever the Saturday special is. Sells out by mid-afternoon.

Trong Nguyen's Bellaire room is where Viet-Cajun crawfish — boiled, then tossed in garlic butter and Vietnamese spice — went from a Houston secret to a national dish. A Beard semifinalist for Best Chef: Texas, repeatedly, from a strip mall.

OrderFive pounds of crawfish, garlic butter, medium spice, in season (February to June); the salt-and-pepper blue crab and the garlic noodles otherwise.

Kaiser Lashkari cooks Pakistani and Indian food with a chef's precision on Hillcroft, and the Beard Foundation has named him a semifinalist for Best Chef: Texas more often than anyone in the city. The biryani is the standard; the specials are why the regulars come.

OrderChicken hara masala, the biryani, the karahi gosht, and the Hunter's beef sandwich if it's on. Ask what he cooked that morning.

A family taquería on Navigation Boulevard that has pressed flour tortillas every morning since 1977, filled with eggs, potato, chorizo and carne guisada at a price that hasn't caught up with the city. The breakfast taco every Houstonian measures the others against.

OrderA carne guisada taco and a chorizo-and-egg taco, both on flour, salsa verde; a third if you're driving. Cash, and go before nine on weekends.

Central Vietnamese cooking — the food of Hue — in a Bellaire strip mall, at prices that make its Bib the best value in the Texas guide: bánh bèo, bánh khọt, a bún bò Huế with real depth. The kind of restaurant Houston has by the hundred and nowhere else has at all.

OrderBánh bèo (the steamed rice cakes), the bánh khọt, and the bún bò Huế. Two people can eat for thirty dollars.