Houston Entree

Man's Best Meal Companion

The heat and drought of this summer is making it hard for some of us to concentrate, but other citizens are made of sterner stuff. 

Two important advocacy groups of sprung up in the world of food and drink.  Open the Taps is a statewide group calling for the end, or at least the modification, of Texas’ current “3-tier” beer distribution system, which prevents brewing companies from selling their product directly to consumers.  The system forces brewers to choose between selling their product in their own brewpubs, or at the breweries, and selling it in retail stores.   It ain’t right; it’s un-American, and certainly un-Texan, if you believe all our “land-of-free” propaganda. 

 The movement, if that’s not too grand a term, started in Houston, we’re proud to say, with a July gathering at Moon Tower Inn.  The Dallas branch will have a launch party at The Common Table on August 27; the San Antonio branch will open with an October 22 meeting at Freetail Brewing, known in these parts as the brewpub that got away.

From beer we turn to pets.  Many a Houstonian, ourselves included, have returned from vacations, taken our dogs out of their lonely kennels, and wished we could take our best friends to restaurants with us, like they do in Paris, France.  It turns out that Houston regulations are strict (pets and food can’t be in the same space) and slow to change, which again belies our image of being unfettered, go-go capitalists. 

 Even other Texas cities have passed ordinance changes that allow patrons to bring their dogs with them onto patios.  Now the movement has reached Houston.  Even Mayor Parker, who presumably has some very important issues on her hands, has written a letter supporting city council passage of a “dogs on patios” ordinance. 

The ordinance is being pushed by the group Paws on Patios.

We Spoke Too Soon

It didn’t take long to tamp down our excitement over Trader Joe’s leasing of the Alabama Theater. 

Last week, when we wrote about the upscale food retailer’s upcoming move into the beloved art deco theater, the headline read, “Is the Alabama Theater Finally Safe?” But we thought that was a rhetorical question.  We didn’t mind that Trader Joe’s was going to alter the exterior a bit, but that surely they were going to take advantage of the old theater’s unique and beautiful interior.  This Chronicle editorial expressed essentially the same idea.  “You'll protect those murals, won't you? And those great Art Deco fixtures? Quirky, cool Trader Joe's, you won't let your landlord strip the quirk and cool out of your new space. Right? Right?”

So we read this Swamplot posting on the likely changes to the theater’s interior with dismay.  It isn’t exactly what we had in mind. 

Swamplot warns that we’ll be losing “the Shepherd-side entrance vestibule of the 1939 building, including original enameled panels and poster frames and the swirly-patterned terrazzo flooring — which is sloped too steeply to meet current ADA requirements, according to the city’s planning director. A Weingarten Realty spokesperson says current plans are to replace the terrazzo with concrete.” 

Replace the terrazzo with concrete?  That just sounds wrong, before you even attempt to visualize it.  Swamplot also reports that the deco mural “which formed the right cheek of the theater’s movie screen (later the magazine section of Bookstop) is slated for removal.”  We’re not sure how a mural gets in the way of anything.  And if it did, then we hope you would work around it. 

We feel very naïve now for having said that property owner Weingarten Realty “has taken a lot of criticism, for its perceived threats to shutter the River Oaks Theater, and for its bland alteration of the River Oaks Shopping Center.  But it appears, at least, that in this case they’ve done the right thing, and waited for the right tenant.”  

We don’t know about you, but if the Weingarten/Trader Joe’s remodel of the Alabama Theater destroys, or even seriously blemishes the building’s magic, we’ll take our business elsewhere.  It’s not like we’re hurting for food markets.

Looking Back at Houston Restaurant Weeks

We didn’t want to end this week’s musings without tipping our hats toward Houston Restaurant Weeks.  This year the event raised a whopping $800,000 for the Houston Food Bank.

As you know, during the month-long weeks, participating restaurants offered fixed-prices dinners, and in some cases lunches, and donated a portion of the bill to the worthy charity.  $5 from every dinner, $3 from every lunch.  As reported by Culturemap’s Sarah Rufca, that 800K is the result of 160,000 diners being served.  Participating restaurants got to keep $6.8 million for themselves.  Del Frisco’s served the most HRW meals, around 10,000.

The best account of restaurant weeks that we read came, once again, from Rufca, who interviewed Cathi Walsh, the diner who ate a HRW meal every day of the month in August.  With lunches, her meal tally came to 33.  She’s an inspiration to us all. 

The Reviews Are In. The Comments Are Way Out.

You hear that Americans are wildly overworked these days (those of us with jobs, that is).  Pulling a 12-hour shift at a white-collar sweatshop doesn’t qualify you for a badge of honor—it’s simply what’s expected.  So, we ask, where do people find the time—and energy—to comment, and recomment, on news stories and review?  Avid readers that we are, we have this thought every day of the week, as we see how real vitriol spews across our virtual landscape. 

We just had our daily reminder of the hate as we checked out this week’s restaurant reviews in the Press and the Chronicle.  

Katharine Shilcutt of the Press had the no doubt nerve-wracking test of reviewing El Real, the shrine to old-school Tex Mex partly owned by her predecessor at the Press, Robb Walsh. 

Is The Alabama Theater Finally Safe?

Food markets are much in the news these days.  Last week we commented on the happy announcement that Georgia’s Market is coming downtown in early November.  And Houston’s food world continues waiting not-so-patiently for the opening of Phoenicia across from Discovery Green downtown.  We’re getting a little nervous, seeing as how they were supposed to open last spring, but houston.eater reports that the space is coming along, and that the famed pita conveyor is on its way over from Lebanon.

But the big headline this week belongs to Trader Joe's.   The news, reported by Swamplot, among many others, is that the California-based chain will open in the long-vacated Alabama Theater, shielding the beautiful deco space from the specter of demolition.  

 We’re not yet a member of the Trader Joe’s cult, never having set foot in one, but we hear that it’s quite an operation.  CNN here repeats a quip that the ideal Trader Joe’s customer is the "Volvo-driving professor who could be CEO of a Fortune 100 company if he could get over his capitalist angst."  That worries us, because our personal capitalist angst mostly involves not having enough capital, but hopefully we can afford to nibble at the store’s edges.  

But, as groovy as the market will no doubt be, we’re mostly excited because it will give the old theater a new lease on life.  The old Bookstop had so much stuff in it that you couldn’t really appreciate the building.  We got a chance to visit the old theater after it had been cleared out, and were awed (really) by its beauty—the soaring ceiling, the deco touches, the murals.  Those old movie theaters really were palaces, if not cathedrals.  We’ve hated the idea that it could be demolished, or, more likely, drastically altered so that the space could be occupied.  

Weingarten Realty has taken a lot of criticism, as in this column by Lisa Gray, for its perceived threats to shutter the River Oaks Theater, and for its bland alteration of the River Oaks Shopping Center.  But it appears, at least, that in this case they’ve done the right thing, and waited for the right tenant.  Trader Joe’s has proposed only modest changes to the building’s exterior, and we feel reasonably sure that they’ll take advantage of the interior rather than screw with it.  

Very nice.

 

If It is September, It Must Be Oktoberfest

We can’t seem to get it through our heads that, in Bavaria, Oktoberfest actually starts in September.  But such is the case. The rules for determining when the world’s largest fair starts are both confusing and only slightly relevant in these parts, where we tend to celebrate Oktoberfest in Oktober, dammit. But our celebrations pale compared to the big daddy in Munich, which had over 6 million visitors last year, as opposed to the Texas State Fair’s 2.6 million.  Everything’s bigger in Germany.

 A few weeks back we bleated that, compared to Cinco de Mayo and St. Patrick’s Day, Oktoberfest was only lightly celebrated here.  But perhaps the action is picking up.  This Houston Press guide to area festivities seems a little longer than usual.  Perhaps that’s because of the addition of the relatively new Bar Munich and King's Biergarten.  We’re particularly interested in Bar Munich’s September 24^th event, which includes a Masskrugstemmen bout.  This competition appears to consist of seeing who can hold their beer stein in their extended arm the longest.  But why hold it when you could be draining it?  There’s evidently an attraction here we don’t understand, but we intend to watch and learn. 

We’ve enjoyed the Gingerman’s low-key fun in the past, and plan to enjoy it again this October 1.  St. Arnolds offers a two-night celebration, October 7 and 8^th, which includes beer, food and music, for $49.   Southern Star Brewing has a one-day foodless fete for $30 on October 22nd , by which time the real Oktoberfest will be a distant memory in Bavaria.  

Randy Rucker's Demons

Twitter meltdown leads to soul-searching

The other day we wrote about the erratic career of chef and restaurateur John Tesar, who not long ago had his own place in The Woodlands.  Tesar has had his ups and downs, the downs often being associated with alcohol abuse, as documented in a D Magazine article titled “The Most Hated Chef in Dallas.”  

Unfortunately (to put it mildly), the celebrated and controversial Randy Rucker took a big step toward being the most hated chef in Houston when he recently directed an astonishing tweet blast at the chefs and restaurant people who were doing a fund-raiser for area wildfire victims at El Real. 

After one participant tweeted that the group’s tweet campaign had garnered a $50,000 individual contribution, Rucker answered sarcastically y'all are so special.  Appallingly, Rucker went on to tweet that the fund-raising group represented “a bunch of houston’s biggest douche bags.”  

To which Anvil’s Bobby Heugel responded that Rucker is a "disgusting human being."  Other tweeters joined in the counterattack. And you really couldn’t blame them.  It’s unfortunate that Rucker didn’t stick by his early August resolution to stop tweeting.

It’s even more unfortunate that Rucker has alcohol issues of his own, as he forthrightly owned up to in this blog entry where he apologized for his insults—“My latest comments surrounding the group of hospitality professionals from the Houston area that donated their time, money & efforts to those in need from the recent wild fires throughout Texas is unexplainable to me. I don’t know why I chose the words I did. I can’t explain why I felt the way I did but I do know that the things I said did no one any good.”

Rucker attributed his destructive lashing out to his own personality — “All my life I have pushed people away” and to “my abuse of alcohol.” Rucker closed by vowing to “take charge” of his future and hoping “that one day I can be forgiven.”

We don’t know Rucker well, but have enjoyed our few dealings with him, and we wish him well as he attempts to pull himself out of a pretty deep hole.  He is one of the bright lights of the local food scene, but, as he acknowledges, he needs to confront his demons if that light is going to continue to shine.

Houston BBQ Sucks...

Or does it?

What is barbecue?  

This question is mostly rhetorical.  You can try to answer it, and invoke the various national barbecue styles as examples: east Carolina (they go “whole hog”); North Carolina; South Carolina (mustard flavored ‘cue); Kentucky (home of bbq-ed mutton); Tennessee (the pork ribs of Memphis that have helped keep the blues alive); Missouri, as in Arthur Bryant's of Kansas City; and Chicago, with its aquarium smokers.  

And then of course there’s Texas, which is like a whole other barbecue country.  Or two countries—Central Texas with its slowly smoked, beef-centric approach, and East Texas with its pork and sauce-friendly traditions. 

But you can’t prove that your definition of barbecue is the definition of barbecue.

As Robb Walsh once pointed out, if you want to pour “Kraft barbecue sauce over chipped ham and simmer it in a pan,” and call it barbecue, nobody can stop you.  “Nobody owns the word "barbecue," and nobody gets to dictate its definition,” Walsh wrote.

Estimable local food blogger J.C. Reid knows all this.  But, at the “risk of offending purists,” as he blogs in his recently launched Houston Barbecue Project, he writes that he’s going to try and define good barbecue—Houston style.

Reid begins his project with the blunt statement, “Houston barbecue sucks.” 

Those might sound like fighting words, but to a Houstonian who, like us, has just returned from the barbecue heaven of Central Texas, or from the pork pits of East Texas, that assessment rings true.  We’re not devoid of good barbecue—thank you, Gatlin's—but any pilgrim who comes here looking for smoked meat nirvana is going to be disappointed.  At least, he or she will be disappointed if they go, like most Houstonians, to the most highly recognized local chains, namely Goode Company and Pappas.

Will Phoenicia Be First?

Georgia's Market to Open Downtown

Houston is a big-box town.  We love our Spec's and our Central Market.  Even our in-town, mixed-use, semi-urban developments include the Greenway area Costco and the Heights Walmart (okay, this one is not so beloved).  We certainly love them too—Spec’s is a must stop on our impress-the-out-of-towners tour.  But we also long for commerce that doesn’t require enormous, in-front parking lots.  Stores that require a little walking.

 That’s why we applaud the recent local trend toward small food markets, such as  Relish on San Felipe and the still astonishing Revival, and so we are turned on by the news (reported on houston.eater) that Georgia's Market will soon be opening in the former Byrd's Market downtown.   Byrd’s was an okay, if pricey, place to eat, but a woeful market, full of dead space and pricey pasta.  It wasn’t long at all before Byrd’s became just another downtown restaurant, and had to compete as such.

But it seems like that Georgia’s will make a much better showing.  The Georgia's mothership is located on 1-10 near the Beltway, so not everyone will know it.  But Georgia’s is both a serious fresh food market, a vitamin/supplement store, and a very agreeable place to eat.  It feels like a less corporate, and more local, version of Whole Foods, with their exotic teas, grass-fed beefs, and organic produce.  They’re a great choice for bringing a boutique food market and healthy restaurant downtown.  

We’d love to see them bring their Sunday jazz brunch to Main Street with them.  It will be interesting to see if they will open before the highly touted Phoenicia Foods.

Of Banana Waxes and Burgers

Car washes combine pressure washes with...all kinds of stuff

The other day we complained that Lower Westheimer’s burgeoning restaurant row isn’t the pedestrian paradise that it could be.  The zone is an ugly, unfriendly mix of general urban coolness and broken sidewalks and strip centers.  Then we remembered that we live in Houston, and that we were looking for love in all the wrong places.

So instead of grousing about a given area’s lack of walkability, we turn to celebrating our unique combinations of car culture and good eats.  The Chronicle helpfully reminded us of fact that with two different stories this week.

The first was last Sunday’s Multitasking at the Carwash by Claudia Feldman.  She visited a few carwashes that aim to entertain their clients while they clean their cars.  Most notably, she profiled King’s Biergarten in Pearland, which we visited a couple of weeks ago.  Alas, we forgot to get our car washed while we drained our steins.  Feldman reports that owners Phillip and Johan Sitter opened the German restaurant and bar as a sideline to the car wash, and that now the restaurant has taken on a life of its own.  

She also described Facundo’s, which doubles as a carwash and purveyor of hamburgers.  Alison Cook, perhaps picking up on the clue, made Facundo’s the subject of this week’s Burger Friday column.  There, says Cook, while your car is being “banana washed” (not sure if that’s a food reference), you can “also get a haircut…get your shoes shined, have your car's oil changed, obtain an inspection sticker, plan an international vacation, purchase greeting cards, take a two-minute "Firearms Refresher Course", or post supplications to the Almighty on a prayer wall that can melt the heart of a grizzled cynic.”

How’s the burger?  Cook calls it “smashing” and gives it an “Enthusiastic A.”

So, if and when the city (and La Niña) decides we have to suck it up and ride in dirty cars, both King’s Biergarten and Facundo’s should still do just fine on the strength of their food. And bier.