Houston continues to inspire Ford Fry’s culinary stamp
Chef/restaurateur seasons new dining concepts with flavors from his childhood
Ford Fry’s childhood memories are probably more brightly painted and vividly drawn than most people’s nostalgic recollections. They might even taste spicy and employ some SmellO-Vision.
The Atlanta-based chef/restaurateur has built restaurants from lavishly appointed food memories of his Houston childhood. His first Houston restaurant, State of Grace, opened in 2015 as a personal valentine to old-school haunts such as Felix Mexican Restaurant, Hofbrau Steaks and Tinsley’s Chicken.
Now another one-off restaurant, La Lucha, is Fry’s tribute to his family’s visits to the San Jacinto Inn for Gulf seafood extravaganzas and fried-chicken feasts. Dressy servers, he recalls, tended to patrons who came spilling in after church on Sunday for epic, family-style, all-you-can eat dinners.
“I don’t even remember if it was good. I was a kid,” Fry concedes. But that didn’t stop him from larding La Lucha’s menu with San Jacinto Inn-ish boiled-to-order peel ’n’ eat shrimp, fried chicken and biscuits, roasted oysters and a mess of Texas blue crabs — just the way he remembers them. Or not.
That’s the convenient thing about memories: they can be molded to fit the occasion. And Fry has been doing a lot of reflective molding while preparing for La Lucha, which recently opened along with an outpost of his Atlanta-born Superica, a Tex-Mex joint. The two restaurants operate side by side in the former Hunky Dory and Bernadine’s spaces in the Heights.
While he and chef Kevin Maxey, an East Texas native who is the restaurant company’s vice president, collaborated on Tex-Mex staples at Superica (collective celebrations of memories of their favorite nachos, fajitas, enchiladas and tacos), La Lucha is almost entirely Fry inspired. The restaurant’s burger, called a “pharmacy burger,” is best described as a mashup between two traditions Fry admires: Whataburger and Avalon Diner. The ground shrimp tacos have been engineered to taste and sport the textures of the deep-fried, cheese- and lettuce-stuffed crispy tacos he loved as a teenager — yep, from Jack in the Box. He currently is working on perfecting a tamale based on the spicy cornmeal tubes he remembers from a tamale truck that canvassed his neighborhood as a kid.
Even the design of La Lucha — a chic mishmash of ’50s-era middle-class Texas suburbia — was something Fry agonized over. “I just wanted it really vibe-y,” he said. “Like your grandmother’s living room.” Perhaps, if your grandmother was the type who lounged around in Norell pajamas with marabou slippers in her Hill Country weekend home decorated with tufted leather couches and Oriental rugs.
The 49-year-old Fry’s parents live in Bellaire and his sister and brother-in-law are River Oaks residents. A student at Lamar High School, he called that immediate River Oaks neighborhood his “old stomping grounds” and likes to crack wise that he grew up on “the other side of the tracks River Oaks” on Stanmore Drive. It’s from this comfortable milieu that he continues to draw inspiration. For example, one of his Atlanta concepts, BeetleCat, sports a retro ’70s and ’80s vibe with low ceilings, shag carpeting and Farrah Fawcett posters on the walls — something a teenage Fry must have appreciated as rumpus room grandeur at the time.
“I get satisfaction when I hear people who don’t know me say it reminds them of their den,” he said. “I want to strike a memory of how an experience speaks to them.”
The dual, simultaneous openings of Superica and La Lucha — restaurants number 14 and 15 in his growing portfolio — spell a new chapter for Fry. In one swoop, he’s tripled his Houston footprint and already has signed a lease for another restaurant endeavor in the Heights, signaling a greater presence for the man whose Houston boyhood weighs so heavily on his creative conscience.
So what is the upcoming Heights restaurant project? Ford’s not saying. But it could be wherever his memory takes him.