Variety and creativity thrive in Houston’s cuisine scene
A few minutes from Nam Giao is Crawfish & Noodles, another Chang favourite. It’s also the foremost example of his proposition that Houston’s dining scene has been especially energized by the influx and mingling of immigrants and their cuisines.
Crawfish & Noodles’s chef-owner Trong Nguyen is the man behind the made-in-Houston boom in Viet-Cajun cuisine. His specialty for the last decade — crawfish, boiled with spices as per the Cajun way, but then tossed with butter and garlic according to the French culinary thinking that infused the cooking in his homeland, a former French colony — has spawned scores of imitators in Asiatown and beyond. But local fans say none can top what Nguyen serves.
“At the beginning, they rejected it. They say what the hell is that?” Nguyen told me. Now, he says his dish, more than just popular, is regarded as an upscale version of a more casual backyard crawfish boil. “You eat this, it’s more like a delicacy,” Nguyen said.
And so it is. But during this most visceral of meals, it’s also worth getting your hands slicked in butter and spices as you tear crustacean after crustacean apart in search of sweet, seasoned meat. It’s even worth giving a slow suck on the head of the torn-apart crawfish to relish its hepatopancreas, the delectable organ known euphemistically as “crawfish butter.”
In Houston’s funkier Montrose neighbourhood, we enjoyed a walk with a Taste of Houston Food Tours guide who made several stops.
One was BB’s Café, where I had my first taste of traditional crawfish, served without the Vietnamese flavour boost but still very tasty. The New Orleans-themed restaurant, of which there are eight locations in Houston, also serves a killer bread pudding with warm rum sauce.
Nearby is El Real Tex-Mex Café, in what was a movie theatre in the 1930s, where renditions of TexMex dishes put to shame similar dishes I’ve eaten outside of Texas. Here, everything down to the chili powder was made from scratch, just-made salsa verde was still warm and the specialty of nearby San Antonio, the puffy taco, enjoyed pride of place on the menu.
Our walking tour also took us to Hugo’s, Ortega’s namesake restaurant which he opened in 2002, where red snapper ceviche, exquisite tacos and the best churros that I’ve so far tasted were delights.
Also in Montrose is Doris Metropolitan, a high-end steak house. Many dishes here are Israeli-inspired, since the business is owned by four Israelis who began in the butcher-shop business in Israel.
My favourite plate at Doris Metropolitan was my Jerusalem salad, an appetizer that starred roasted cauliflower and baby shallots but teemed with rich, saucy, spicy flavours thanks to tahini, yogurt, tomato salsa and schug, a potently hot herbal condiment. The salad even topped the restaurant’s vaunted dry-aged USDA Prime “classified cut” steak. A nine-layer chocolate hazelnut crepe with caramelized banana and coconut ice cream was a spot-on meal-ender.
Even if I wasn’t homesick, the visit to Winnipeg-raised chef Ryan Lachaine’s restaurant Riel was worth another trip from downtown to Montrose.
While Lachaine says Riel serves “modern American” fare, and while it’s fiercely local in its advocacy of Texas beef and Gulf of Mexico fish and seafood, Lachaine also puts idealized takes on perogies and borscht on his menu. He is, after all, Ukrainian on his mother’s side. At Riel, there’s also re-imagined Montreal smoked meat and, in winter, tourtière, as Lachaine is FrancoManitoban on his father’s side.
“We do a lot of explaining,” Lachaine says of his exotic-in-Texas Canadian fare. However, his dishes, like all of Houston’s other dining discoveries, were easily and appealingly understood from the first bite.