Brave New Restaurant on Summerhill Road does not look like a place that serves Korean barbecue tacos. It looks like a place that might serve club sandwiches. The low brick exterior, the modest signage, the strip-mall adjacency — none of it prepares you for a menu that swings between smoked brisket, bulgogi, and house-made kimchi slaw on the same card.
That gap between expectation and reality is kind of the whole point. Texarkana does not have a shortage of solid Southern comfort food, and Brave New isn’t trying to replace any of it. What it’s doing is something a bit harder to explain: it takes familiar regional ingredients and applies techniques and flavor profiles you’d expect to find in a larger city — Austin, maybe, or Dallas on a good block — without being weird about it. The staff doesn’t explain the concept to you. The food just arrives, and you figure it out.
The Korean taco situation is worth dwelling on. The bulgogi version uses thin-sliced beef that’s been marinated long enough to actually mean something, crisped slightly on the flat-top, and landed in a flour tortilla with the aforementioned kimchi slaw and a smear of gochujang mayo. It runs around four dollars a taco, which is not highway robbery. Order three. The brisket taco, meanwhile, pulls from a more local tradition — slow-smoked, fatty enough, shredded — and the two versions sitting next to each other on your tray make a strange kind of sense once you’re eating them.
The menu rotates often enough that regulars have developed opinions about what disappears. Former regulars who moved away have been known to plan visits around specific dishes. That’s a little extreme, but not entirely irrational. The banh mi has shown up and vanished and reappeared. The smoked chicken sandwich is a fixture and earns its place. The sides change, but if the roasted corn with cotija is listed, get it.
Lunch is the main event. The place fills up fast on weekdays — service industry workers, courthouse staff, people who work nearby and have figured out the schedule. By 12:30 on a Thursday it’s standing room if you’re not careful. Dinner exists and is quieter, which some people prefer. The room itself is casual enough that you won’t feel underdressed arriving in a work shirt with a rolled-up sleeve, and you won’t feel overdressed arriving in anything short of a tuxedo.
Expect to spend somewhere between ten and fifteen dollars per person for a full meal. It’s not the cheapest lunch in Texarkana, but you’re not eating a plain burger either. The iced tea is good and refillable, which matters.
What Brave New actually does well, beyond any individual dish, is resist the pressure to be one thing. Texarkana is a town where people have strong opinions about categories — barbecue, Mexican, soul food — and Brave New refuses to fit cleanly into any of them. That’s either annoying or interesting depending on your disposition. For a certain type of diner, the one who wants lunch to be slightly surprising without being a project, it has become a standing appointment.
