Austin, TXSeafood

Quality Seafood combines a fish market with a restaurant on Airport Boulevard, with a bar down the middle of the store. Order oysters and peel-and-eat shrimp, then choose a fried seafood basket. The Go Fish plate lets diners pick three items, and portions are generous.

Chef Fermin Nunez's Este is a coastal Mexican seafood restaurant in East Austin built around a raw bar and live-fire cooking. The tuna tiradito, aguachiles, and shell-on grilled shrimp show off the Sinaloa and Baja influences, with a masa program running underneath. Bright, buzzy, and ambitious, it reads as one of the city's most exciting seafood tables.

Garbo's is a Maine-style seafood spot in North Austin known for lobster rolls served warm with butter or chilled with mayo. Clam chowder, fried clams, and shrimp baskets round out a menu that started as a food truck. It brings the familiar choices of a New England seafood shack to Central Texas.

The Boat serves boiled crawfish by the pound from its Stonelake Boulevard restaurant. Crawfish po' boys, shrimp and crawfish étouffée, and fried crawfish tails broaden the menu. Indoor and outdoor tables offer a place to sit with a seasonal boil or pick up seafood to take home.

Mongers Market + Kitchen is a neighborhood seafood restaurant, market, and raw bar on Guadalupe in North Loop. The kitchen serves Gulf oysters, crudos, whole grilled fish, and a rotating catch, and you can buy the same fish to cook at home. Its market-driven, of-the-moment menu makes it a reliable pick for anyone chasing what is freshest that week.