Cookbook serves up true Taste of Texas
Cookbook marks decades of west Houston mainstay’s kid-friendly, quality beef service
“Perfectly Aged” includes 40 years of beefy recipes and stories from the west Houston mainstay.
Nina Hendee remembers the day she and her husband, Edd, decided to shift gears at Taste of Texas. It was 1984, and the couple wanted to celebrate their wedding anniversary with their children but couldn’t find a white-tablecloth steakhouse where youngsters were welcome.
So they decided to turn their 7-year-old restaurant in Town & Country Village into a family-friendly steakhouse. They ditched the menu of nachos, Texas chili, burgers and fried shrimp for upscale fare centered on Certified Angus Beef. To underscore their intentions, they symbolically buried chicken fried steak — they held a mock funeral for the popular dish and put a headstone marked, “Here lies the chicken fried steak”
in a flower bed in front of the restaurant.
It was a risky move, given that the original restaurant was suffering financially as Houston floundered in the midst of an oil glut in the early 1980s. To drum up interest in the steakhouse, the Hendees printed a newsletter that included an Ambassador Pass that allowed customers to bring an extra guest for a complimentary meal.
The culinary shift proved to be prudent. Today, Taste of Texas is the largest restaurant user of Certified Angus Beef in America, according to the board of American beef producers participating in the Certified Angus Beef program. It is also highly profitable. Last year Taste of Texas’ sales were nearly $17 million, ranking it No. 41 on Restaurant Business’ annual report of the country’s top 100 independent restaurants. It was the only Texas restaurant to make the cut.
The switch to steakhouse wasn’t a huge stretch for the Hendees, who had relevant experience in the service industry. Edd’s first job was as a soda jerk at Dugan Drugstore in Bellaire, before becoming a busboy at Steak & Ale. Nina also worked at Steak & Ale, in Richardson in North Texas.
After marrying, the couple was transferred to Houston by Steak & Ale. Soon they were offered a job with the company in Kansas City but decided against the move. Instead, the couple, still in their 20s, opened their own restaurant. With a loan from Edd’s parents, Taste of Texas debuted in November 1977. It was a time of optimism for the fledgling restaurateurs. Houston, with 1.2 million residents, was changing and on the verge of tremendous growth. Oil was $14.40 a barrel. Gas was 65 cents a gallon. Town & Country near Interstate 10 and Beltway 8 was considered the edge of town.
The Hendees’ story is now told in a new cookbook, “Perfectly Aged: 40 Years of Recipes and Stories From the Taste of Texas.” Written by Nina Hendee, it contains recipes for the restaurant’s iconic dishes, including that late, great chicken fried steak. It also stirs in a healthy portion of history — on the Hendees, restaurants and Texas via the rare documents, artwork, memorabilia and ephemera on the restaurant’s walls that have long made it a veritable museum.
Nina Hendee, who gives tours to elementary school students, is a canny storyteller. On page 37 of the book, for example, she recalls a single night 30 years ago in which a woman’s perfumed renched sweater burst into flames when she reached over a candle and, at a different table later, an elderly woman appeared to have passed away. She was unresponsive with no pulse, Hendee writes; after 10 minutes, she woke up and resumed her meal.
“I love my subject so much that I learned a long time ago that you better be able to engage people in the story so they’ll fall in love with it, too,” Hendee said.
The restaurant is known for its artifact-laden décor as well as its food, primarily the Certified Angus Beef program of steaks
that are initially wet-aged for 30 days, then another two weeks that Taste of Texas insists on.
Hendee said that her family never saw the restaurant, which moved to its current location in 1989, as a multiunit operation. “We made the decision a long time ago to focus on doing what we do really well in one spot,” she said. “You can’t divide and conquer and still be good. We could not do the job we do with another unit. We’ve never regretted that decision.”