Up to now, our Top 10 restaurant rankings have focused mainly on food groups: Italian, Mexican, steakhouses, barbecue and breakfast, to name a few. Plus a few side trips to points on the map including New Braunfels, Boerne, Fredericksburg and the River Walk.

Today, we’re trying something new: spiraling in on the neighborhoods that give San Antonio its character in all four directions. And we’re starting with that manicured enclave to the north, the master-planned development we’ve come to know as Stone Oak. At 40 years old, it’s still young enough that even Gen-Xers remember a time when it wasn’t there at all, a time of pastures and ranches beyond the wagon wheel of Loop 1604, itself a relative newcomer to the city.

Let’s not shy away from the elephant in the room. There’s money here. When the visionary Stone Oak developer Dan Parman died in 2017, the area’s median household income was more than double the number for the rest of Bexar County. A drive down Stone Oak Parkway, with its medians manicured more like L.A. than S.A, reinforces that point as much as the gated communities on either side.

The restaurant scene here makes room for the high and the low, for the locals and the chains. There’s Taco Cabana and there’s Cuishe Cocina Mexicana with its gold-foil rib-eyes. There’s Chicago-style deep-dish pizza at Trilogy Pizza and whatever it is that Urban Bricks is pulling out of the oven.

And before we get into it, please understand something: I’m not a licensed land surveyor. And this is not a formal chalk-walk between the lines laid out by the Stone Oak Property Owners Association. This is the Stone Oak we’ve come to recognize in our collective civil consciousness, the ragged trapezoid bordered by Loop 1604 to the south, Blanco Road to the west, U.S. 281 to the east and an almost straight northern line that runs left to right between those two roads, a line situated just below the intersection of Wilderness Oak and Hardy Oak.

I visited more than 30 restaurants within that trapezoid to compile this ranking. You won’t see the national operations here; just the locals. On Friday, I’ll balance the equation with the Five Worst Things I Ate in Stone Oak. But today, welcome to our first-ever ranking of the Top 10 Stone Oak Restaurants.

Cuishe Cocina Mexicana

‍
115 N. Loop 1604 East, Suite 1108

‍
In this restaurant as stylish as a thumping Mexican nightclub, I’ve seen gold-leaf steaks and big-money bottles of tequila hit the tables while Ricky Martin and Shakira shimmered across the video screens. And I’ve seen tacos al pastor and clay cazuelas of lengua guisada hit the tables for a fraction of the cost. It’s a choose-your-own adventure of Mexican cooking up and down the ladder of adventure, complexity and price from chef Juan Carlos Bazan, a former UNESCO San Antonio food ambassadors on this list. At the high end, there’s octopus al pastor. At the more modest end, there’s flautas and a cazuela of rajas con crema for less than a salad at Applebee’s. The bar’s done a solid job cultivating the agave plants and spirits that inspired Cuishe’s name.

‍