As Oxheart winds down, co-founder records her restaurant memories
Don’t think for a minute that Karen Man’s soon-to-be-selfpublished “The Art of Baking: Oxheart” is a conventional cookbook.
Sure, the talented baker who co-founded the much lauded Oxheart restaurant with her then-husband, Justin Yu, included some recipes in the volume. Thirty-nine, to be precise, many of them guides to the mousses, jellies, glazes and parfaits that made up some of Man’s pristine Oxheart desserts and breads. They’re set out in metric quantities meant for serious cooks.
There’s even a formula for the banana bread that was a feature at some of Oxheart’s always interesting staff meals. But the amusing banana graphic Man uses to illustrate the recipe — a photo montage of a single bunch shot in the same position every day, until it reaches a blowsy 20-day perfection — hints at the book’s real purpose.
Man wanted to create nothing less than a highly visual memoir of Oxheart’s five-year history at its home in Houston’s warehouse district. With the restaurant set to close in mid-March as its founders move on to new projects, the time seemed right for her to try to capture “what went on in the restaurant that you don’t necessarily see as a diner but that meant a lot to us.”
She’s thrown little stories into the mix: details about choosing the furniture and ceramics, or how the staff would reuse the stellar local ingredients for which it was known in order to minimize waste. When lots of Meyer lemons came in, Man would spend a day juicing, salting, zesting or candying the citrus fruits.
Laboring long hours to make a success of the restaurant, she recalls, made it hard to focus on the sensory impressions of such days: “Everything happened so fast. We couldn’t record it the way we would now.” Instagram, which Man uses as a tool now (her account handle is @mskarenman), had barely launched in the spring of 2012. The book became a way to fix that time in memory. Man used her own art and that of a few collaborators in the project, choosing to self-publish to have creative control over everything from the paper weight to the graphics. “It turned out to be shockingly beautiful,” she reports, laughing a little, as if slightly astonished. Oxheart regulars will remember Man created the striking vegetable prints (made with pig’s blood!) that hung over the big circular table at the restaurant’s entrance, linking animal and vegetable worlds.
The book is available in a limited edition of 300 for $68 presale at Man’s website, bread.blog. Purchasers get free admission to the private launch party to be held March 5 at Public Services Wine & Whisky, the downtown bar that’s an Oxheart offshoot. Man is promising jazz; light bites, including some Oxheart staff favorites; a viewing of her recent art installations inspired by the book; and specially made ceramics by local artists Ellen Cline and Sierra Estes.
So what’s next for Man? Her fans have long hoped for a Hous- ton bakery from her, and she says it will happen —“one day.” She promises that when it does, she’ll be baking that Shaker lemon pie with the many-layered crust I’ve been coveting on her Instagram feed and a Roman-style pizza made with serious dough, with a real crumb to it, the kind a baker can appreciate.