Chris Shepherd has fun at his new steakhouse
At One Fifth Steak, Chris Shepherd is having fun — and you can taste it
On a Wednesday in mid-April, early in One Fifth’s dinner service, chef Chris Shepherd stood behind the shellfish cold bar cutting slices of Texas Redneck Cheddar into matching triangles.
He strewed the triangles with raw sugar, applied flame from a hand torch and kept at it until the surfaces browned and bubbled to a crackle. Then he stacked the bruléed slices two by two, piled shavings of 18-month country ham at one end, and added a ribbon of mustard seeds goosed with a tart shiver of pickle juice. This wonderfully demented little sandwich was a voluptuous explosion of salt and sour and sweet, softness and crunch, and it’s an index to the fun Shepherd is having at his very clever take on the all-American
steakhouse. The project is temporary, running from January to July 31 in the renovated church nave that once housed Mark’s.
After a one month makeover, the restaurant will switch concepts to One Fifth Romance Languages (as in French, Spanish and Italian); and so on, for the five years of the lease. It’s a daring idea seldom attempted in American dining, where concept-swappers like Chicago’s Next or Park Avenue Spring/Summer/Fall/Winter in New York City are few and far between.
I will admit that my heart sank a little when Shepherd announced last fall that his first incarnation of One Fifth would be a steakhouse.
Houston is overrun with high-end beef palaces. Few stray far from the familiar steakhouse canon of crab cakes, chops, Caesars and towering hunks of cheesecake. Despite interesting recent developments at spots like Ritual and Killen’s STQ, the steakhouse genre was low on my list of formats I’d care to see reimagined.
Yet One Fifth Steak grabbed me from my first visit. I exulted in that crazy ham-and-cheese. “I had an idea for something like this way back at Brennan’s,” said Shepherd, who worked there from 1997 to 2006, before he won a James Beard award for Best Chef Southwest and got famous. “But nobody would ever let me do it.”
Now there is nobody to tell him no. I chortled over a “candle” of beef tallow that was set before me with a burning wick, which had to be extinguished before I could dip in chunks of Kraftsmen sourdough loaf. Was that garlic and herbs in the clear, beefy liquid? Why, yes.
More significantly, I reveled in the unexpected gravitas of a 100-day wetaged hanger steak, a relatively inexpensive cut that does not generally receive such loving attention. The modest half-pound slab had been grilled to a resolutely underdone degree of medium rare — the house style here, and very much to my particular carnivorous tastes.
Sliced on a plate, it looked humble but tasted magisterial. A gratifying, resilient texture girded the expansive beefiness and tang that extended aging can confer.
I am fairly confident that is the best hanger steak I will ever eat. And at $35, it’s one of the more gently priced main courses on this notably expensive menu. Like many high-end steakhouses, One Fifth is a temple of conspicuous consumption, populated by attorneys, sports stars — Houston Texans linebacker Whitney Mercilus is an investor — and assorted high-rolling dudebros out for a big time.
At the cold bar, with a view of three-tiered seafood towers under construction (sized “big” and “bigger”) my neighbor was a young gentleman who polished off an entire $100 36-ounce porterhouse by himself. Behind us, with careful ceremony, long wooden Viking troughs of foodstuffs were borne through the dining room on their way to one party and then another, and another, as if the ritual were contagious.
These so-called Baller Boards are the ultimate trust-the-chef deal: the pricing is flexible rather than set, and you get whatever Shepherd or his lieutenants see fit to place upon them. A recent lineup, for a table of five: Wagyu strip with chimichurri, crispy potatoes with roasted garlic aioli, hearth-roasted lobster Rockefeller, porterhouse, dry-aged tomahawk, maque choux, sweet potato gratin, braised greens, pork belly and grilled peaches, Lamburger Helper.
If you have to ask what all that costs, you can’t afford it. It’s amusing to see such bacchanalian excess in a former church that has lost the faux-medieval trappings of the Mark’s era, emerging as a sleeker space done up in contemporary grays, blacks and reds. The sweeping staircase and private balcony remain, but with thrash metal and post-punk on the sound system, the atmosphere is less churchy than head shop — which is exactly what occupied this space a few decades back.
One of the best investments at One Fifth is any of the steaks cooked in cast-iron pans, the way Shepherd does them at home, with garlic-and-thyme-laced butter spooned over them ceaselessly, until they acquire dark and unusually savory crusts. Both a rib-eye and a bone-in strip were magnificent specimens, cooked to specs, the sort of distinctively textured steaks you don’t forget.
The wet-aged 44 Farms ribe-eye had nice, tender give to it without any of the loosy-goosiness rib-eyes can exhibit. At $55 for 16 ounces, it seemed a fair price. And the dry-aged 44 Farms bone-in strip showed a concentrated density and flavor, along with a shareable, 32-ounce heft that made its $80 price tag slightly less terrifying.
Shepherd’s takes on steakhouse potatoes fascinate. His pommes aligote, a smooth, stretchy pool of potatoes whipped with tomme and gruyere cheese and a tinge of garlic, are too delicious to share. Sweet potatoes and cheddar molded into a black-peppery, thin-layered gratin seem both disciplined and extravagant. A casserole of twice-baked potatoes (now no longer on the menu, alas) got shattery-crisp shards of potato skin for extra texture.
From the very busy wood-fired hearth, in full view of the cold bar, come heaps of clams in their shells jumped up with bits of country ham, citrus and plenty of Calabrian chile. They represent Shepherd set free from the self-imposed box that confines his cooking at his flagship, Underbelly, where only ingredients grown or sourced in our region make it onto the menu, and only in season.
“I want to cook with olives,” Shepherd said longingly back when he announced One Fifth. And so he has. Fat, bright-green Castelvetranos give a briny boost to lamb neck braised as tenderly as you please. It may sound exotic, but with the familiar flavors of tomato and shallot binding it up, the dish tastes like home. More than once, I felt as if I were eating Shepherd’s own personal soul food.
There are blips here and there: a block of finespun chicken liver pâté overwhelmed by way too much sweet/tart strawberry purée; shrimp remoulade packed into an awkward, squat glass jar, their slight gloss of sauce no match for the clash of iodine that was exaggerated even for our brown Gulf shrimp on the night I tasted them. At 20 bucks, I wanted pleasure.
An “Airman salad” is really a Caesar, based on the original recipe of the Cardini family, whose heirs live here in Houston. They came in to consult on the salad’s tableside construction, and it’s great fun to watch, right down to the spritzes of fresh lime juice which give the dressing its unique cast. Yet the big, rough croutons on a recent evening had been so mercilessly grilled that they were impervious to the tooth. I tried biting two of them before I had to give up.
I encountered a strangely characterless chocolate layer cake that was not helped by its chocolate-covered Chex gimmick; and, on another dessert, a nubbly cheddar ice cream that still needs work.
But mostly all is well from this humming kitchen, which is under the daily direction of Nick Fine, an alumnus of Brennan’s, The Little Nell in Aspen and The Mansion on Turtle Creek. The service under general manager Jeff Buhrer, an Underbelly veteran, is both enthusiastic and well-informed. Matthew Pridgen has put together his usual interesting, small-production wine and beer lists, together with an impressive roster of whiskeys.
Shepherd himself pops in and out, looking joyfully engaged. (He’s been there on two of my three impromptu visits, for which I did not book a table.) He can’t restrain his enthusiasm as he begs a guest to try the unusual corn bread pudding with its bath of corn cream and its molasses bourbon ice cream; or the festive caviar treat modeled on the one from his friends at Blackberry Farm in Tennessee, in which house-fried potato chips meet creme fraiche, wispy laser-cut chives and a sumptuous blob of Midwestern hackleback sturgeon eggs.
And don’t get him started on that $20 pound-and-a-half whole apple pie, scorched in the wood oven to an outrageous — and to my mind, alluring — char. Tart fruit, glazed cinnamon pastry and the bitter tang of blackening make the pie stand out in sharp relief.
“People keep sending it back, saying it’s burned,” Shepherd said.
But he hasn’t backed off. It’s personal. And that’s what makes this slightly improbable enterprise so interesting.