Hungry in H-town
Houston woos visitors with vibrant restaurant scene
You’d think that TV super-chef and international restaurateur David Chang would have some good suggestions regarding cities that a foodie should visit. Chang, the man behind the renowned Momofuku empire of restaurants, has haute-cuisine outposts and more wallet-friendly eateries in New York, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Toronto and Sydney. On his trending Netflix show Ugly Delicious, he’s a globetrotter in search of great eats. What’s one of Chang’s hottest destinations?
“I love Houston,” Chang says in an episode of Ugly Delicious. “Is Houston the most exciting food city in America right now? The world, maybe?”
Those questions were making my stomach rumble this spring as I winged my way to Texas’s biggest city, a sprawling and diverse metropolis of more than 2.3 million people, for a few days of dining, sightseeing and balmy weather while my home in southern Ontario was hit by an ice storm. On my culinary checklist were some time-honoured specialties of Texas and its neighbour, Louisiana — steak, Tex-Mex, Cajun food. But I was also keen to sample some of the more recent culinary arrivals to H-town that have Chang and other knowledgeable eaters very excited — high-end Mexican food, top-tier Japanese and the intriguing but winning fusion fare called Viet-Cajun.
I even found a Canadian expat chef putting fancy spins on perogies, borscht and tourtière on Houston’s food map.
These days, the city’s most buzzed-about restaurant is Xochi, which serves flavour-packed and eye-catching dishes inspired by the Mexican state of Oaxaca, regarded as its own paradise by food lovers.
This spring, GQ picked Xochi, the sleek but unfussy restaurant in the Marriott Marquis Houston, as one of this year’s dozen best new American restaurants. Also this spring, Texas Monthly magazine called Xochi the state’s top new restaurant. Xochi’s Mexico City-born chef and co-owner Hugo Ortega, who rose from a young dishwasher in Houston three decades ago to own four acclaimed restaurants in the city, was named 2017’s best chef in the Southwest U.S. by the James Beard Foundation. Xochi knocked me out at every turn. House-made queso de rancho cheese was an addictive starter, eaten with massive, perfect chicharrones and a refined green sauce garnished with fried crickets, ants and mealworms. Masa cakes stuffed with potato and chorizo simultaneously dazzled and comforted. There were thrilling, novel flavours from a tasting of four of Xochi’s seven mole sauces, made with everything from chilhuacle peppers to tomatoes and almonds to chocolate and sesame to salty flying ants, and then savoured on house-made tortillas. While many mains at Xochi tempted, I went with red snapper from the nearby Gulf of Mexico, in a luxurious red chili sauce with an array of top-tier vegetables. Fortunately, I had room for show-stopping desserts, including the gigantic faux cocoa pod made of painted white chocolate that hid variations on chocolate inside, and the trio of refreshing Oaxacan sorbet-like nieves, served with olive oil cake, pumpkin seeds and even some candied ants.
But if Xochi provided my best and most memorable meals in Houston, others eateries were not far behind.
The consensus is that Kata Robata serves Houston’s best sushi, and the alluring, modern restaurant in an Upper Kirby district strip mall certainly wowed me. There, we feasted on impeccably fresh fish and seafood, including chu toro (medium fatty bluefin tuna), sea urchin from Santa Barbara, katsuo (hay-smoked Japanese skipjack), and seared kamasu (Japanese red barracuda). From executive chef Horiuchi Manabu, a James Beard Award finalist, came a wealth of cooked treats too, such as chawanmushi (a silky, savoury egg custard), fortified with foie gras and duck breast, skewered cubes of slow-cooked Texas Kobe beef, dumplings made with shrimp and Iberico pork, and even crisply fried shrimp heads that brought soft-shell crab to mind.
But the Asian cuisine that has most permeated Houston is Vietnamese, particularly in Houston’s 16-square-kilometre Bellaire Asiatown, southwest of downtown. Several of Chang ’s picks are here. One is the modest strip-mall restaurant Nam Giao Restaurant and Bakery, where owner Ai Le serves pristine versions of street snacks and dishes from Hue, his home city in central Vietnam.
Bánh Bèo Chén, steamed mini rice-flour pancakes perked with minced shrimp and carrot, bits of fried pork skin and scallion, were revelatory. Crystal dumplings made with tapioca starch enticed with their chewiness and calibrated stuffings of pork and shrimp. Bánh Ram Ít was a little wonder that stacked a sticky rice dumpling on a crisp rice cake. A visibly proud Le attributed his mastery of textures to the fact that he was trained as a chemical engineer.
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.