One of Austin’s great culinary characters and the maker of some of the best seafood tacos, po’boys and simple grilled fish plates this city has known has packed his knives and fittingly left for the Texas coast.
Ralph Gilmore has closed his Turf N’ Surf seafood window inside Lavaca Street Bar in downtown Austin and moved to Rockport, where he plans to open Hook House Kitchen.
With shaggy hair and an unkempt visage that made him look like a line cook pirate, Gilmore helped spark the food truck craze in Austin when he opened the original Turf N’ Surf trailer on the dusty lot that is now the site of the JW Marriott. The rust-bucket truck, with a surfboard bolted to the front, looked like the former motorcycle collector had dragged it straight from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico to downtown Austin.
Gilmore won praise from the Austin American-Statesman and the public with his tacos, salads and po’boys made with fish sourced fresh from Gilmore’s friends on the coast.
“People say, ‘Why would you want to do seafood in a trailer?’ I say, ‘Why wouldn’t you want to?'” Gilmore said in David Gorvey’s mini-documentary “Is This The Best Taco in the World,” in which I appeared as a talking head.
The success of the trailer led Gilmore to open a spot inside the Lavaca Street Bar downtown, where he operated for 13 years before closing. Turf N’ Surf earned a spot on the Statesman’s 2026 list of the best seafood restaurants in Austin. Gilmore also ran Turf N’ Surf locations briefly at Lavaca Street Bar’s South Lamar and Rock Rose locations.
They share a name, but all three took different approaches to their cuisine and careers, as Jack notes in the documentary. For Ralph, it was simply grilled ahi tuna flecked with salt and pepper, blackened snapper, plump fried cod and a stout burger, first served from a truck and later from a sports bar.
“I think I’m just part of keeping Austin cool, just keeping Austin weird,” Gilmore said in the doc. “I do what I wanna do and people like it … I’m just not gonna change to be what somebody else wants me to be.”