Aquiles Chavez of La Fisheria

There are two very interesting chef/restaurateur interviews in the local blogosphere lately, thanks to the Press’ Mai Pham and Eater’s Amber Ambrose.

Pham interviewed La Fisheria's Aquiles Chavez, the Mexican celebrity chef whose restaurant opened last month.  Chavez has a fascinating story to tell, from how he got his trademark mustache to why he left Mexico for Houston.  “It was because of the violence. They tried to kidnap me. They weren't successful, but they tried. ..They robbed my house in Villahermosa one time. That was the key to say, ‘I'm going to move to the United States.’”  He chose Houston because one of his partners is married to a Houstonian.

Once here, Chavez felt like he needed to Mexify our city a little.  To brighten it up, in other words.  “Houston is not a cozy city. There's too much concrete, it's too tough. Do you remember the movie The Wizard of Oz? The beginning of the movie is black and white, and then they go to Oz and it's all in color. I wanted a splash of color in the city of concrete.”

Chavez also talks about how he combines the classical French techniques he learned back in ‘90s with a deep understanding of authentic Mexican food, in all its regional guises and glories.  He gained this knowledge in part by hosting a television show that took him all over Mexico in the search of the best dishes.  

How does Chavez want Houstonians to react to his restaurant?  He tells Pham a wonderful story.  “Three guys came in wearing suits, very formal. I thought they were bankers or CEOs or something. They came for lunch and drank magaritas de habanero. After the first margarita, they took off the jacket. And I said, "Oh, it's a good start." Until the first taco, they took off the shoes. These handsome guys took off the shoes. And I'm the happiest person in the world, because this is the best compliment for my restaurant.  Because I believe that cooking is a way to show your love.” 

You can keep your chips and salsa.  We’ll take the love.

Ambrose interviewed Anita Jaisinghani, the Beard-nominated owner of Indika and Pondicheri.  Jaisinghani presents a different side of the restaurateur coin, talking mostly about how hard the business is.  She had to become her own building contractor at Pondicheri when a partner dropped out.  “The project almost fell through. It was at a very delicate point at one time.”   

She also had the humbling experience of losing almost her entire crew in the first three months.  “That was a wake up call that maybe I'm not as good at picking out people as I thought I am.”  Why was it so much harder to keep people at Pondicheri, as opposed to Indika?  For starters, at Pondicheri she serves breakfast, so people have to get to work at 6 am.  “Everyone who has a drinking problem can not show up for work in the morning, and I figured that out. I never thought about that. It's just one of those aspects of business that you don't think about.”

 Jaisinghani also talked to Ambrose about her plans to spread the healing power of Indian food far beyond Houston.  "There's a healing power to spices that is just phenomenal. I'm a huge, huge believer in the culture that I come from. I want to cook the food that people love and enjoy and I feel like I'm doing that here. I do want to take this concept out of Houston. I'm not sure where or when, but I do.”

Reading these interviews you get a little taste for how the world is coming to Houston these days, and how very lucky we all are to be here.

We’ll admit to being pleasantly surprised that Triniti reopened today (Wednesday).  Yes, chef/owner Ryan Hildebrand had announced that he was only closing for a week so that he could work on a new spring menu, but other than Ferran Adria, who would do that, especially in a restaurant that only opened last December?  

We were afraid that Triniti had gotten swamped in the wash of so many other exciting restaurant openings.  Culturemap’s Sarah Rufca even began an article on Roost by stating, "I feel bad for Ryan Hildebrand."  She said that the under-the-radar Roost opening had stolen Triniti’s thunder.  The news that chef Daniela Soto-Innes had left Triniti for Underbelly also left us imagining that disaster had struck.  

Of course, Triniti had gotten its own excellent early reviews.  Texas Monthly’s Patricia Sharpe more-or-less raved about the restaurant in the magazine’s current issue.  She notes that “a lot of money has gone into Triniti,” and points to its “gorgeous” design by the local MC2 Architects.  As for the food, she applauds “the kitchen’s eagerness to take diners somewhere they haven’t been before.”

We haven’t been yet, and with so many restaurants opening at once we’re not sure when we will.  But we’ve been wowed by the building’s softly lit, corrugated iron “skin” as we drive by on Shepherd, and today we took our first online look at the menu, which is almost unreasonably seductive in its matter-of-fact simplicity. The “foie gras breakfast” of sausage, brioche, blueberry balsamic jam, and quail egg just sounds delicious.

So maybe we won’t wait so long after all.

Chef John Yu tours Houston for GQ

We haven’t tried to wedge our way into tiny Oxheart yet, but it’s not out of indifference:  we’re dying to go.  Alison Cook’s (congrats on the Beard nomination!) “first taste” piece, with its photos of the truly beautiful food, has us all het up.  Though maybe the food is really too beautiful to eat.  

In meantime we’re enjoying having chef/owner Justin Vu shows us around town.  After including Oxheart in its Hottest Restaurant Openings of 2012 list, GQ magazine asked Yu to present his “Short Order” tour of the city.  A couple of his recommendations are predictable, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t right.  And some of them surprise us, and remind us of how little of the city we actually know.

As in the first spot on his list:  Pho Binh, and Pho Binh By Night (love that name!),  a small Vietnamese chain where you can get a side of bone marrow with your Pho.  When Yu calls them “the best [Vietnamese] in town,” I’m tempted to listen.  Heading east along Bellaire, we come to his second spot, Fit, which Yu describes as like a “Japanese dollar store.”  According to their website, you can get everything from bento boxes to Japanese false eyelashes there.  And money cats, which Yu seems to have a real thing for.

We’re back to food with his third pick, the Indian restaurant Shri Balaji Bhavan at 5655 Hillcroft.  He recommends the masala dosa.  Next Yu leads us due north, to the Saturday Total Catch Market at Louisiana Foods.  Right now Yu is serving the Oyster Drill sea snail he got there.

Yu also introduces GQ readers to Greenway Coffee and Tea, then to the Tacos Tierra Caliente truck often stationed at the Alabama Ice House, Paulie's (his “favorite fast casual” place), the Menil for a little non-counter culture, and Anvil for a non-pretentious cocktail.  

Still eastward-bound, Yu gives the Bluebird Circle what must be its first GQ shoutout ever, and says that he went to the Bluebird right after he signed his Oxheart lease, looking for furnishings.  

Yu hits 13 Celsius, a “fearless wine bar,” and, last but not least, the glorious Emile St. Gardens, where he buys many of the vegetables for Oxheart.   All in all, this list makes us feel like we need to get out more.  And we will, as soon as it stops raining.

We hadn’t checked in on J.C. Reid’s Houston Barbecue Project in some time, so we were happy to be reminded of it by Eater.  Reid is attempting to rate all of Houston's barbecue, and also to shine a light on East Texas style ‘cue, which in Texas is generally overshadowed by the Central Texas style.  This may be making a virtue of necessity, as there isn’t much Lockhart-style smoked meat in town.  

What has Reid found so far?  If we read the map correctly, he’s visited about 30 places, out of what looks like 90-100.  (He wisely decided to limit his search to places inside the Beltway.)  In his original announcement, Reid said he was going to use a 1-5 star grading system, but so far his grades have topped out at 4 stars.  Since he’s already been to Gatlin's, we kinda doubt he’ll find a 5-star.  But we suppose that’s the point of a project like this—to find the hidden jewel.

We’re skeptical, but withhold final judgment.

Reid’s 4 star joints include Gatlin’s and Lenox inside the Loop, and Rudy's and Virgie's off of 290, near Jersey Village.  We haven’t tried the latter two, but are a little mystified at seeing the same grade given to Gatlin’s and Lenox.  If Gatlin’s was a close to our house as Lenox’s is, we’d have serious heart problems.   With Lenox to tempt us, we’re the picture of health.

The 3 star map is only slightly more populated, with 5 entries: Broussard's (East Texas style), The Brisket House (try the “Aggie Special), Fainmous (previously unknown-to-us), Blansky's (East Texas), and Triple J's (more East TX).  

We’re pleased to not find Goode Company among the starred.  We’ve never reconciled ourselves to the idea that this is where a lot of Houstonians take out-of-towners for a taste of Texas barbecue.  We can only imagine that they go back home wondering what the fuss is all about.

You have to really want to open a restaurant.  The basic drawbacks are well known.  Around 60 percent fail within the first three years.  (This is bad but not as bleak as the 90 percent number bandied about on NBC's The Restaurant.)  Margins are very thin.  Customers and employees alike will rob you blind.

Eater has been documenting restaurant theft in its eye-opening "Shit People Steal" series.  The “shit” includes ATM machines, booze, table clothes, art, and more.  

Then there’s the random, one-off problems restaurateurs face, such as in the case of  Oxheart where newly bought equipment wouldn't fit through the doors.

Haven has really seen some problems lately.  First chef/owner Randy Evans had to deal with the little-anticipated opening of Twin Peaks, the “breastaurant” that gives Hooters a good name.  Twin Peaks is wedged into the same tight area as Haven, Japon, and other businesses, and their customers have been ignoring basic parking decorum.  They’ve taken over the limited parking, invading other restaurants’ spaces (as reported by the Press) to the point that Evans has been selling “chicken-to-go” from Kirby itself, so that customers who don’t have to deal with the badly parked cars of those who were apparently weaned too soon as infants.

And now this: thieves stole Haven’s bee hives, from which the restaurant harvested its own honey.  Twin Peaks figures into the crime.  Unlike Haven, they don’t chain up their parking lot after hours, and the thieves’ truck came in through their lot, as shown on the Haven security camera.

It was a professional job, apparently.  Evans said, “Somebody that does bees stole these bees.”  Apparently “bee rustling” is a growing crime.  400 hives, worth $100,000 have been stolen in California. 

Must make it hard to want to go on serving people.

Now that cooking has been raised to the level of art, more or less, it’s not surprising that food writing has a greater claim on our collective attention. Long form, deeply felt food writing at that.  Where Rolling Stone  long ago used to publish 6,000-word articles on the lives of the musicians, Texas Monthly now publishes long features dealing with foodstuffs and cooks.

Texas Monthly has often run pictures of food on its covers, typically of The Best Hamburger or The Best Brisket in Texas.  But last month’s cover showed the men who make the brisket: Aaron Franklin and John Mueller, both of Austin.  The feature inside was not (available only to subscribers) a guide to barbecue trucks, but a long, absorbing feature that combines the stories of a Texas barbecue dynasty, the Muellers of Taylor, with that of an upstart who has taken the brisket world by storm, Aaron Franklin, of Franklin’s.  

The story, written by Kathy Vine, both makes your mouth water and your heart ache.  And soar.  Ache for Mueller, a gloomy, tormented, almost Old Testament soul who threw his heritage away by refusing to carry on the family name in Taylor, and who is now trying to win it back in a South Austin trailer.  Aaron Franklin, on the other hand, is a sunny young who seems blessed by the barbecue gods.  He simply has the knack for brisket, and the press and long lines that go with it.  It’s an article that reads like a Steinbeck novel.

That was strong enough, but this month’s Proustian essay by Stephen Harrigan detailing his quest for the lost kolache of his childhood might even be better.  The piece describes the very specific type of kolache his grandmother used to make, which Harrigan has spent years trying to recreate in his own kitchen, and to find in the bakeries of Czech Texas.  The quest leads him finally the Czech Republic, where he appears to find his own true self along with that elusive kolache.  It’s a very moving piece, one that will probably turn up in a Best Food Writing of 2012 collection. 

For that matter, both pieces deserve to be anthologized.  But why wait?  Go ahead and read them now/

 

 

Can you guess where this picture was taken?

Guess right and you might win a $50 gift certiifcate to Sorrel Urban Bistro.

Robb Walsh has become the bard of Texas food.  His new book, Texas Eats, makes it official.  Here he draws on, and pulls together, the knowledge he accumulated while writing 5 books about Texas food:  The Tex-Mex Cookbook: a History in Recipes and Photos, Legends of Texas Barbecue Cookbook:  Recipes and Recollections from the Pit Bosses, The Tex-Mex Grill and Backyard Barbacoa Cookbook, The Cowboy Cookbook:  a History in Recipes and Photos, and Nuevo Tex-Mex: Festive New Recipes from Just North of the Border. 

The result is a book that is both encyclopedic and personal; his first-person culinary investigations cover (without exhausting) the entire state.  The Coastal Bend gets a section on seafood: Fried Oyster Nachos, Shrimp and Grits, Stingaree Barbecued Crabs.  East Texas gets a chapter on its Southern-style cooking: corn dodgers (described by none other than Frederick Law Olmstead as “the universal food of the people of Texas” back in 1857), Herb Grits, and Pearl’s Chicken and Fluffy Dumplings.  South Texas is home to “Vintage Tex-Mex,” a subject very near to Walsh’s heart, as he’s co-owner of El Real.  Not surprisingly Walsh includes recipes for Felix’s Chile con Queso and Puffy Tacos.

Central/West Texas is home to “Old World Flavors:”  German (Hill Country Goulash, Panfish Soup with Mustard and Bacon); Czech (Poppy Seed Kolaches, Pork Ribs in Sauerkraut).  Even Fancy French (Pompano en Papillote, Steak au Poivre).

“Country and Western” covers the Texas classics of “Chicken Fried Steak” and “Black Pepper Gravy.”  Finally, “New Texas Creole” looks at how the state’s various traditions are starting to come together in surprising but delicious combinations:  Spicy Viet-Tex Mayo.  Banh Mi Sliders.  Gulf Cioppino.  (For Walsh’s thoughts on how Houston is becoming “the New Creole City” read here.)

But the stories, and the history, are even better than the recipes.  Walsh manages to explain how hurricanes have shaped development along the Texas coast, why the years 1880-1915 may have been the “heyday of great ingredients in Texas,” and how Texas oyster reefs lost their appellations, and why they might slowly be getting them back.

There’s much more, of course.  All this packed into 280 or so pages, costing $25.  Not bad for what must be the Texas food book of the year.

Revival Market's pork sandwich is home grown

We went on a little Revival Market jag over the last couple of weeks.  We hadn’t been there in a few months, since we’d sprung for some slices of their most basic, but still quite profound deli ham last fall.  But one day we pulled in for a cup of their excellent coffee, served with all of the flavor of Catalina, but quite a bit less of the attitude, and were overcome with the desire for a pulled pork sandwich with a side of ginger slaw.  

One bite later and we stunned with pleasure.  Why was it so—words fail—good?  

(We wish we had Alison Cook’s almost uncanny ability to render flavor in words.  This is her Cookness on Revival’s heirloom bean salad: 

“Texas olive oil binds the flavors, smoked paprika adds a warm reddish tinge, and fresh herbs in season (tarragon and parsley of late) contribute an edgy twinge.”) 

The lion’s share of the flavor comes from the pork, of course.  The pigs, that is, that Revival co-owner Morgan Weber so lovingly raises on his Yoakum farm, and butchers in Revival. (Revival has just been placed in the artisanal butchery pantheon by Bon Appetite.) In her recent piece on shopping at Revival, Cook described the Revival BLT sandwich as benefitting from “meaty bacon rashers from those pampered South Texas hogs.”

We bumped into Cook on a return trip to Revival a few days later, when we came back for more pig.  It seems strange to say that we hadn’t seen each other in almost 18 years, since we both worked at the Press.  How impressed we were back then at the energy she brought to her food writing; how much more impressed we are today that she’s been able to maintain it.

Anyway.  This time we gave in to temptation and had Revival’s truly spectacular looking hot dog, made from Mangalitsa hogs, the kinda wooly and intensely succulent pigs that the New York Times declared “the next ‘it’ Hog in the great American pig-out.”  Cue the wow.  The oversized frank really is unctuous, and the crusty Slow Dough pretzel bun really does crunch into the tender meat just so.  But here’s where we fail as describers and parsers of flavor.  No sooner do we get our teeth into the dog than words begin to fail us, replaced by warming waves of pleasure.  Cook is disciplined enough to get the details right.  About the hot dog:

“The subliminal pop of the whole seeds in the housemade mustard; the juiciness and spice of the dog itself; the nip of house-made green tomato relish and the mysterious textures of the chicharrones on top, flash-fried from the belly fat of those Mangalitsa pigs.”  

We, in the meantime, were reduced to animal grunts.

That’s fine.  We’ll take our lower place in the food writing pecking order.  And we’ll take another Revival dog.

 

Richmond Arms loves football

We hadn’t made it back to Richmond Arms, the city’s, the state’s, and possibly the country’s greatest soccer bar, in some time.  But the first half of today’s UEFA League match between Arsenal and AC Milan was so exciting that we dashed over to the pub to catch Act 2.

We’ll spare you intricacies of Arsenal’s situation.  Well, if you insist, they had their arses handed to them by Milan in the first of the home-and-home series.  4-0.  Wow.  To advance in the tournament they would have to beat the Italian side by at least 4-0 today, and then win in overtime.  This was an apparently hopeless task, except that at halftime Arsenal was leading 3-0.  A tie, to be settled by overtime, if not an outright win, seemed at hand. 

The crowd at Richmond Arms was slightly smaller than we’d expected, though of course Arsenal has fewer supporters here than, say, Manchester United or Barcelona.  But they were enthusiastic.  And ultimately disappointed, as the Arse failed to score in the second half, and had to suck on a 4-3 loss in the aggregate.  (Both goalkeepers had some spectacular 2^nd half saves.)

As long as we were there, we thought we might as well console ourselves with a beer.  We hadn’t yet tried the St. Arnold’s Endeavor, a double IPA whose hops bear traces of peach.  It sounds good, and it tastes good and malty.   But we were taken aback by having it served to us in a half-pint mug, rather than the Richmond Arms’ traditional Imperial Pint glass.   Why the Bennigan’s style mug? 

It’s because Endeavor is so stout.  As in 10 percent alcohol, that is.  People were getting wasted on it, according to my barkeep, so they had to cut the serving in half.  (But not the price, duly noted.)

Between the brilliant taste and the half-pint glass, I finished my Endeavor long before all hope for Arsenal was lost.  So I had time for another St. Arnold’s we’d been meaning to try—the St. Arnold’s Bitter Belgian.   It brought mind Southern Star’s fabulous Mort Vivant with its yeasty Frenchy Belgian-ness, and it took our mind off our soccer sorrows.

Arsenal lost, but life goes on.