Houston Entree

Looking Backwards and Forwards

We’ll close out the year by looking at some year-end lists.  The Press in particular ran a pair of lists that shows what a time of transition, and, if it’s not too grandiose a word, even growth, that we’re living through here in our food world. 

The first was Katharine Shilcutt’s blog on the “Biggest Grocery Store” openings of the year.  The list includes the remodeled Disco Kroger, the new HEB Mi Tienda, and the new HEB Montrose, which would have topped such lists in ordinary years.  The fact that the game-changing downtown Phoenicia only came in second shows what a year this has been in local food culture.

Shilcutt chose Revival Market as number one.  We suppose you can debate which is the “bigger” opening, Revival or Phoenicia.  What’s really remarkable is how different the two are, and how each represents a different branch of Houston food culture.  Phoenicia is international and cosmopolitan, while Revival is intensely local.  A year which saw either one of these places open would be a happy one. To have both open within a few months of each other (with Georgia's downtown waiting in the wings) is simply remarkable.  

But that’s only half of the good news locally.  Another Shilcutt blog lists the most anticipated restaurants of the upcoming year.  The names are already familiar.  The list includes Underbelly, Uchi, Conāt, Oxheart, along with other restaurants; coffee houses Blacksmith and Southside Espresso, and the craft beer nirvana that Hay Merchant promises to be.   This is without doubt the most exciting array of new restaurants that any single year has ever brought to the city.  

We have a lot to look forward to.  Happy New Year.

 

New Creole City

Is Houston the “new Creole city?” 

Robb Walsh, Texas food writer and now restaurateur believes that is.  But he only discovered this to be true after years about writing about Houston food for the Press.  When he was asked by Southern Foodways to give a talk on the subject at a symposium, he protested that he didn’t know what they were talking about.

It turned out that when Walsh had taken SF director John T. Edge of food tours of the city, Edge was stuck by the rampant hybridization of cuisines here.  This hybridization, this creolization, is in fact so embedded in the Houston food scene that we don’t really notice it, Walsh said.  We simply take food items like boudin kolaches—a hybrid of Cajun and Czech food cultures—for granted.  But they look pretty wild to other people.

When Walsh realized what Edge was talking about, he had little difficulty in working up a lecture.  In fact he was able to base his talk on the creolization of one Houston street—Long Point.

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Walsh made a local presentation on the subject not long ago, which we were fortunate enough to attend.  Walsh showed slides from Long Point as he spoke, including one of a bakery sign:  Kolaches  Donuts  Pan Dulce.  “We don’t even think about these words as being from different languages,” Walsh said.  

Walsh took us on a quick a/v tour of Long Point from Hempstead Road to Gessner.  He showed us the La Mexicana Coffee House with its two menus—one of Mexican breakfast items and one of traditional American coffee house breakfasts, served side by side.  He showed us images from inside a Korean food market that advertized items for sale “tous les jours.”  He explained how the area’s excellent Polish restaurant, Polonia, serves its sizzling kielbasa and sauerkraut platter on a Mexican comal.  Which, if you think about it, makes a lot of sense.  

That’s the deal about being hybrid, or, to be more elegant, creole.  When people from apparently wildly different cultures start living side-by-side, they find out they’re not so different after all.  That they can mesh pretty easily.  How much explaining does a boudin kolache take?  

Adios Fiesta

Well, that didn’t take long. 

About a week after the new HEB opened on Dunlavy at W. Alabama, Swamplot posted a story saying that survey stakes had seen around the strip center across the street—the one that contains the “Montrose Fiesta.”  The Fiesta that combines a great wine section and very danceable 60s music with an air of benign neglect.  Apparently the property owners had seen the writing on the wall—and how could they not, given the size of the HEB sign?—and were going to tear the strip down, presumably, and redevelop.

Or sell.  According to Nancy Sarnoff of the Chronicle, Marvy Finger, developer of downtown’s One Park Place, may be on the case.  Does this mean that a twenty-plus story apartment tower will soon rise in the middle of Montrose?  It seems very likely.  In which case, the neighborhood will soon be drastically different.  The Press’ John Lomax wrote in Facebook, “I’ve heard the “Death of Montrose” prematurely declared dozens of times over the years, same as I’ve heard ‘the death of the blues.’  This time it might just be true for Montrose.”

That is, the funky old charm of the neighborhood, long under townhouse siege, will pretty much have a twenty-story dagger through its heart.  We can only hope that a West Ave-style level of pretentiousness is not in the works for the former “strangest neighborhood east of the Pecos,” as declared by Texas Monthly lo these decades ago.   But it could definitely happen.

We do have to admit to some mixed feelings here.  We do in fact want to live in a denser, more urban city.  But we also want to live in a city that has at least a little bit of soul.  Will one immediately drive out the other?

But before we wring our hands right off our wrists, we should remember that Westheimer is the true heart of the neighborhood, and that that street is entering a period of intense liveliness and creativity.  Maybe we should just enjoy it while we can.

Coffee Is Good For You. And Easy To Find

We felt a healthy glow this morning as we sipped our Ruta Maya while reading Jennifer Walden’s Culturemap story on the health benefits of coffee.  The idea that coffee may help ward off certain kinds of cancer was not new, but it was nice to be reminded, especially when we remember how we constantly used to be warned that that caffeine was hard on your blood pressure.  

Walden writes “studies have linked coffee consumption to a lower risk of liver cancer and prostate cancer, as well as a lower risk of depression, type two diabetes, Parkinson's disease (mainly in men) and cirrhosis of the liver. Research in mice even suggests that coffee may help protect against some of the dementia-related brain changes associated with Alzheimer's disease.”  It’s enough to make you put on another pot.

 The article led us back to Katharine Shilcutt’s Press article of a few days ago in which she shared her "Top 10 Coffeehouses" list.  If we could just lay off the pastries once we got there, a trip to say, Cafe Luz (#9), would be downright therapeutic.  But we can’t.  

Anyway, the list is hard to argue with.  We were underwhelmed with Ben's Beans (#10) on our one visit there.  But that’s only by the high standards set by the rest of the list.  In the comments section, Shilcutt wrote (in reply to a complaint that the list ignored coffee houses outside downtown, Montrose, and the Heights/Washington), “When it comes down to it, Houston has an enormous concentration of coffeehouses, and a lot of really good ones. How lucky are we? Choosing just 10 for a list was incredibly tough, I promise you.”

The rest of the list goes as follows:  #8, Black Hole; #7 Petite Sweets (a place we haven’t tried); the impressively funky Antidote at #6; the semi-miraculous Agora (our very favorite on the basis of place, rather than coffee); at #5.  Revival earns its #4 on the basis of its coffee, certainly, but we’ve never enjoyed the breakfast tacos as much as we’ve expected.  Inversion rates its #3, both for its coffee, and for the memories it evokes of the “inverted” house created by Dan Havel and Dean Ruck (not the Art Guys as the link states).  That was probably the greatest temporary art work we’ve seen in this town.  

#2 goes to Greenway Coffee, whose star barista, David Buehrer, is about to open Blacksmith coffee house in the old Mary’s.  There’s little suspense regarding #1:  Catalina Coffee, whose owner Max Gonzales is “godfather” to the city’s young baristas, according to Shilcutt.

The articles comments section raised some interesting points.  Catalina’s coffee is unassailable, but, for one commentator, who was put off on their lofty attitude toward artificial sweeteners, the same couldn’t be said of their customer relations.  Others noted Catalina’s lack of Wi-Fi, or even electrical outlets.  

A few called for recognition of Meyerland’s Fioza.  We had to admit we had never heard of it; we’ll have to check it out.

So Far So Good for Liberty Kitchen

For a Houston restaurateur, what’s the second best thing to getting a glowing review from Alison Cook?  It might be putting a decal on your front door forbidding entry to that same Chronicle critic.  That’s the stunt (we’re guessing) pulled by Lance Fegen, owner and chef of the new Heights restaurant Liberty Kitchen.  

The decal (shown in the Culturemap story) features a circle with a red slash through Cook’s name.  Around that circle winds the cryptic message, “Warning:  We Use White Plates.”

The story was reported locally last week, and Cook herself commented on the unusual situation.  She reckoned that the ban is based on a rather scathing review she wrote of BRC, which is also owned by Fegen.  She said that is “nonplussed” by the action, and that she had been eager to check Liberty Kitchen out, in part for its oyster bar and in part for its all-Karbach beer selection.  

As is to be expected, many of the comments were hilariously over-the-top.  One commentator even mistook Cook for the tweeter who got kicked out of Down House for insulting a barkeep a few long months ago.  He or she got very blustery when the error was pointed out. 

Anyway, those same oyster and Karbach attractions had gotten our attention when we first read about Liberty Kitchen in Culturemap.  So we took the Cook-ban as an excuse to visit the restaurant for lunch.  Sure enough, the little decal is still there, albeit discreetly stuck near the bottom of the door.  Our curiosity satisfied, we tucked into an excellent lunch.  Six smallish but tasty Louisiana oysters, a bowl of delicious (but not traditional) gumbo, with onion rings and a Sympathy for the Lager for dessert.

It was all high class comfort food, and the restaurant’s interior, lined with brightly painted, recycled wood (taken from a Heights teardown) is unusually inviting.  And the wait staff is very friendly.  My waiter told me that the place had been jumping ever since it opened.  

On the down side, we were disappointed that, contrary to previous reports, Karbach hadn’t created a special brew just for them.  And we were taken aback by the $7 tab for our one pint.  Damn.

But what about the Cook ban?  Surely, we said to our waiter, it must be tongue in cheek.  Definitely, she answered.  Well, we asked, what would happen if Cook showed up?  At that she became a little more thoughtful, and admitted that she didn’t know.