Worth the trip to get a taste of Houston cuisine
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.
JULIE SOEFAR PHOTOGRAPHY
Tip: Travellers taking in several of the attractions below can enjoy significant savings by using a Houston CityPASS (citypass. com).
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston mfah.org
One of the gems of Houston’s walkable museum district (a cluster of 19 museums, galleries and cultural centres), the MFAH contains more than 62,000 works of art. Its strengths are Italian Renaissance painting, French Impressionism, photography, American and European decorative arts, African and pre-Columbian gold, American art, and post-1945 European and American painting and sculpture. Other facets of the collection include African-American art and Texas painting.
Houston Museum of Natural Science hmns.org
The four-storey museum is filled with impressive and even eye-popping exhibits, including permanent showcases dedicated to dinosaurs and other prehistoric denizens, fantastic gems and minerals, ancient Egypt, Texas wildlife and the state’s energy sector. If you’re able to book a tour with museum staffer (Jurassic) James Washington III, he will make the place come alive with his lore and enthusiasm.
Space Center Houston spacecenter.org
This massive educational complex a half-hour drive south of downtown draws a million visitors annually to view its exhibits, films and more than 400 space artifacts that tell the story of America’s human space-flight program. Visitors can also tour the NASA Johnson Space Center, view NASA Mission Control and watch astronauts in training, walk through a replica and an original shuttle carrier aircraft, and touch a moon rock.
Houston Zoo houstonzoo.org
Home to 6,000 animals on a park within Hermann Park beside the Museum District, the 96-year-old Houston Zoo is the second most visited zoo in the United States. Highlights include the African forest that houses zebras, gazelles, chimpanzees and giraffes, the habitat for Asian elephants, the Kipp Aquarium that contains 200 species of fish, a bird garden with more than 800 birds from more than 200 species and a sea lion pool.
Downtown Aquarium aquariumrestaurants.com/downtownaquariumhouston
Opened in 2003, Houston’s downtown aquarium houses 200 species of aquatic animals in almost 2 million litres of aquariums. The complex’s main restaurant even includes a sprawling aquarium of almost 600,000 litres. Indoor highlights include exhibits featuring Gulf Coast marine life, white tigers and stingrays that can be fed and touched. Outside is a small amusement park.