Yellow Rose – San Antonio comfort food behind a Bib Gourmand in the East Village

Yellow Rose is the East Village's standing appointment with South Texas, run since November 2020 by the husband-and-wife team Dave and Krystiana Rizo on Third Avenue, a short walk from Tompkins Square Park. The couple grew up in San Antonio, Krystiana on the North Side and Dave on the West Side, and had already spent years in that city's restaurants before making the move to New York. It holds a MICHELIN Bib Gourmand, the Guide's distinction for places that deliver genuinely good cooking at a moderate spend, earned on the back of daily handmade tortillas, scratch-made queso and the kind of Tex-Mex plates that are harder to find in Manhattan than almost anywhere outside Texas itself. The room is small, warm and unapologetically personal, and everything on the table, from the salsa to the sheet cake, is made in house with the Rizos' own history behind it.

01The room and the setting

Inside, Yellow Rose reads like a scrapbook of South Texas rather than a design statement. One visiting writer, a native Houstonian, described a dining room that was surprisingly spacious for New York, its floral wallpaper lined with uneven photographs of famous Texans and West Texas windmills, and Topo Chico bottles repurposed as vases for dried yellow roses on every table.

Other visitors have noted the same lived-in, slightly eccentric charm: an arcade machine by the entrance and walls papered in orange and yellow florals that feel pulled from a grandmother's dining room rather than a stylist's mood board. It is a look that has stayed consistent since opening, built in large part from the Rizos' own belongings.

02The chefs

Dave Rizo worked his way through San Antonio kitchens before New York, including stints at Bakery Lorraine, Kimura and The Cove, after an earlier job at Whataburger and at Karam's, a Mexican restaurant on the city's West Side. Krystiana Rizo came up on the bar side, working at Liberty Bar and bartending at Lowcountry, before the couple made their move east.

Insider tip

Dinner nightly 5–10pm; brunch weekends 11am–4pm; lunch Fridays only, noon–5pm.

Yellow Rose began life in February 2020 as a pop-up, carrying its tacos and frozen drinks through the city's bars and music venues, with Dave running the food and Krystiana the drinks list, before a residency that included a stand inside Superiority Burger. Opening a permanent address in the East Village that November, in the middle of the pandemic, was, by the Rizos' own account, a gamble that paid off as the city's Texan expatriates found their way to Third Avenue.

03The cooking

The kitchen presses its own tortillas to order from Sonoran flour, the base for a short, confident list of tacos: bean and cheese, chicken verde with avocado and spring onion, and a braised carne guisada that reads as the restaurant's most comforting dish. A beef chili and a chicken verde taco are regulars on the printed menu, alongside daily specials that run New York State produce through a Texan spin.

Queso comes two ways, a classic version and a vegan take made from cashews, both built to be gooey and thick and both finished with pickled peppers for acid against the richness, served with extra-crunchy tortilla chips. Breakfast brings migas tacos and a chorizo-and-egg version, while weekends add doughnuts to the line-up.

04What to order

The Texas sheet cake is the dish regulars return for, a thin, dense layer cake that has appeared in both chocolate-pecan and strawberry versions, each one, by one reviewer's account, inducing the feeling of eating an entire birthday party in a single slice. It is one of the few proper versions of the cake in New York.

On the savoury side, the bean and cheese taco and the carne guisada taco are the dishes most often singled out, alongside the beef chili and the vegan cashew queso. Order the weekend doughnuts if they are running; they do not appear every day.

05When to go and booking

Dinner runs from 5pm to 10pm every day of the week, with lunch served Fridays only from noon to 5pm and brunch on Saturdays and Sundays from 11am to 4pm, according to the restaurant's own menu page. MICHELIN lists Yellow Rose as a moderate spend, in keeping with its Bib Gourmand remit of good food without a formal bill.

The Rizos have since extended the Yellow Rose name to Brooklyn, opening Yellow Rose Cafe and Bar on Lorimer Street in Williamsburg in June 2025 as a walk-in, all-day counter-service spin-off, but the East Village original on Third Avenue remains the reservation-taking flagship and the address that carries the Bib Gourmand.

For a weekend. For a lifetime.