Bud Kennedy
Bud Kennedy is a long-time columnist at the Star-Telegram whose food coverage treats restaurants as part of the region’s civic and cultural story. His work on the dining beat is anchored in decades of reporting on Texas politics, history and everyday life.
Bud Kennedy’s Eats Beat
Kennedy’s defining food coverage comes through his Eats Beat column, a dining franchise he has written in print since 1985 and online since 1992. Over more than 3,000 columns, he focuses on Texas cafes, barbecue joints, burger spots and other everyday restaurants, treating them as a running chronicle of how and where people eat.
The column has marked his 40th year writing about restaurants for the Star-Telegram, giving him an unusually long lens on the local dining scene.
Within Eats Beat he is described as the authoritative chronicler of the Tarrant County restaurant scene, using the column to break news about openings and closings and to flag the best deals on barbecue, tacos and other casual food. A recent column on a favorite restaurant in the Fort Worth Stockyards shutting down Sunday fits a recurring pattern in his work: timely coverage of notable local spots as they change hands, close or reinvent themselves, with clear attention to timing and impact on regulars. The emphasis is on service and specificity - names, dates, and what diners can expect next - rather than on trend pieces or chef profiles.
His food reporting is tightly local and highly practical, but it is colored by the broader perspective of a reporter who has spent decades covering sports, politics and major events across Texas. That background shows up in the way Eats Beat links restaurant news to neighborhood change, long-standing traditions and the political climate around issues like development and economic growth.
Opinion columns & blogs
Alongside Eats Beat, Kennedy writes regular opinion columns for the Star-Telegram, with his column running Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. His author biography notes a 54-year Texas newspaper career in which he has covered two Super Bowls, a presidential inauguration, seven national political conventions and 19 sessions of the Texas Legislature. That breadth of experience feeds into opinion writing that ranges from city growth and identity to state politics and national conflict.
His civic and historical pieces include a column on “10 reasons Fort Worth is the No. 11 largest city,” which breaks down how the city’s growth and demographics fit into the national landscape. He writes about how Fort Worth became “Where the West Begins,” tying the slogan to historical choices and cultural narratives around the city.
Other work revisits episodes such as the legacy of Lee Harvey Oswald in Fort Worth and the story of a lost gravestone, using specific local history to explore longer arcs of bitterness and memory.
Kennedy frequently returns to broadcast and media history, such as a column remembering 75 years of Fort Worth history as seen through a WFAA television special.
He also uses personal stories to frame sports and community life, including a piece remembering a father who loved basketball and revered Dunbar Coach Robert Hughes. On the political and social side, his columns address the country’s anger and divisions, as in a piece on Charlie Kirk’s death that uses that event to examine the depth of American anger.
Across these opinion pieces, Kennedy’s distinguishing trait is his habit of grounding big themes - growth, identity, politics, anger - in specific local stories and long memory. His opinions are built on decades of beat reporting and event coverage, giving his commentary a strong factual spine even when it is highly interpretive.
Inside Texas Politics
Kennedy’s written work is complemented by regular broadcast analysis. He appears weekly on “Inside Texas Politics” on WFAA-TV, and he is described as a frequent public speaker and guest on other broadcasts. This role keeps him in the center of ongoing conversations about Texas politics and policy, reinforcing his position as a commentator as well as a columnist.
His broadcast presence aligns with his long record of covering the Texas Legislature and national political conventions, providing context that he can carry back into his opinion columns and, at times, into the way he frames local restaurant stories. The result is a profile that combines three strands - restaurant news, civic and historical commentary, and live political analysis - into a single voice that treats food coverage as part of a larger narrative about how Texas communities live, argue and change.
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