Esquire’s best new restaurants list includes just one Dallas spot

In Esquire magazine’s list of the 40 best new restaurants in America in 2021, just one Dallas-Fort Worth place made the list: Chef Tiffany Derry’s restaurant Roots Southern Table in Farmers Branch.

It’s the same restaurant lauded by the New York Times in October 2021 — the only Dallas-area spot on the NYT’s list of “50 most vibrant and delicious restaurants in 2021.”

That’s two major accolades in two months, which surely is welcome news to Derry, who spent seven years making the restaurant a reality. She’s proud that Roots shows off the diversity of Southern cuisine.

Her restaurant is prized for its gumbo, cornbread, shrimp and grits, and fried chicken. She told The Dallas Morning News in June 2021 that Southern food is complex and personal — and that Roots is her ode to some of her family’s favorite dishes.

Esquire saw that effort: “Roots is plangent proof that Black southern cooking from the Creole coast, incorporating as it does elements of French, Spanish, African, and Caribbean traditions, alchemizing as it does migrations forced and otherwise, is both the country’s greatest culinary patrimony and its path ahead,” the article says.

Derry is a former Top Chef contestant who was named the Fan Favorite in 2010.

We’ve said it before, we’ll say it again: Make a reservation at Roots if you want a seat at one of the best new restaurants in the country.

Esquire’s list includes four Texas restaurants:

• No. 4: Hestia in Austin
• No. 6: March in Houston
• No. 17: Degust in Houston
• No. 19: Roots Southern Table in Farmers Branch

Roots Southern Table is at 13050 Bee St., Farmers Branch. It’s dinner only.

For more food news, follow Sarah Blaskovich on Twitter at @sblaskovich.