Dallas–Fort Worth, TXSeafood

Opened in 1989 as a neighborhood fish market and run since 2009 by Jon and Natalie Alexis, TJ's has grown for three decades on mussels, oysters, salmon, crab cakes, and fish tacos. When the 2019 tornado tore through Preston Hollow, regulars came back almost immediately, treating the restaurant as a piece of normal life worth returning to.

Herb and Mary Kay Story opened this Gulf Coast seafood spot in 1976 after Herb's Navy years on the coast. It runs out of a brick building on McKinney Avenue with bow-tied waiters, checkered tablecloths, a dark-roux gumbo, and fried oysters whose approach has barely changed across fifty years.

Rex Bellomy started this as a seafood market on Lovers Lane in 2006 before demand pushed it into a full restaurant, with a location at the Dallas Farmers Market and one on Northwest Highway. The Cajun-leaning menu runs from fried oysters and crab cakes to lobster rolls, built around keeping genuinely fresh seafood affordable and casual.

Chef Jon Bonnell built this upscale seafood dining room into a Sundance Square fixture, bringing high-end coastal cooking to landlocked Fort Worth. The lobster mac and cheese, arctic char, and lump crab salad are the dishes regulars keep coming back for, and it has held its ground through years of turnover around it.

Chef Juan Ramon Cardenas, of the steakhouse Don Artemio next door, opened this coastal Mexican seafood spot with his son Rodrigo as culinary director. The menu of some 32 dishes draws on Veracruz, Oaxaca, and Acapulco traditions, with broiled oysters and octopus cooked in its own ink, served in a room strung with fishing nets.