The allure ofa time capsule
Our critic finally gets why upscale chain Houston’s has so many fans
“I’ve never been to Houston’s,” I volunteered to my editor recently when we were kicking around ideas in online messages. Her reply shot back within seconds: “YOU’VE NEVER BEEN TO HOUSTON’S?!”
Well, no, not that I could remember. I had a hazy memory of the first one opening off Westheimer back in 1980, the fourth such upscale bar and grill in a fledgling Sunbelt chain out of Nashville. I’m sure I thought, as a big-city restaurant critic, that I was too cool to bother with it.
Besides, it irked me that the “Houston’s” name had little to do with our city. George Biel, the founder of its parent Hillstone Restaurant Group, was a native Texan and just liked the way it sounded, a nebulous reminder of home.
I took note as Hillstone flourished, moving its headquarters to Atlanta and later to tony Beverly Hills as it opened more units, renamed some Hillstone’s — “Sounds like a paint chip,” I scoffed — named others after their locales and launched various tweaks on the concept. Over the decades, the menus — which struck me as the kind of casual Americana you’d find in the downstairs grill room at your better class of country club — aged into late-20th-century nostalgia.
I had other things to think about. A wide world of culinary thrills to pursue. Yet right after this past New Year’s, I spied an Instagram post from chef Justin Yu, a James Beard Award winner and one of the city’s culinary pacesetters, that made me curious. “Date night,” proclaimed the post, showing a car turning at the familiar red neon “Houston’s” sign, set low to the ground.
I remembered that a friend I’ve traveled with to Michelin two- and three-stars swears by Houston’s prime rib. When I was 16, a high
schooler in Vermont, I thought prime rib was the ultimate restaurant dish. Maybe I’d go check it out.
Yu approved. “It’s one of those places that make my heart skip a beat when I hear my girlfriend suggesting it,” he said. “Houston’s is this miraculous mix of food, drink and service that, as a chef, you kind of feel a little guilty eating because it’s kind of everything that a lot of food-forward folk turn their noses up at. Everything is maybe just a little too sweet, or just a little too basic to be cool.” It’s precisely the un-cool simplicity — and the reliable execution — that Yu loves.
“I like how nice everyone is,” Yu said, “and how everything is just so, like how I remember when I first went when I was in high school, down to the globed sugar caddies.”
Fans had packed into the Houston’s at Kirby and Westpark the night I first visited. They filled every seat up in the long horseshoe bar, occupied every last booth on the dining-room floor, waited in an entryway anteroom for their names to be called. It was 6:15 p.m. on a Wednesday, but it seemed like Saturday night.
So did each subsequent visit, whether it was Friday late lunch or Tuesday late supper, when my efforts to score a barstool felt positively Darwinian. It appeared to be a crowd of regulars, too. Mostly in their 30s and up, all were prosperous looking, especially in the dining room — where a dress code excluding caps and tanks and big logos and such prevails. You can read about the strictures on the restaurant’s website. For a no-tablecloths spot, it’s stuffy enough to seem faintly comical. In the same unexpected vein, I noted that the valet had parked the Benzes and BMWs and Range Rovers near the entrance, as if it were a fancy steakhouse.
The rules signal a well-ordered, no-surprises world, part of the Houston’s bargain.
Everyone in the perpetually dim dining room and at the bar looked splendid, thanks to one of the universe’s great lighting schemes. Houston’s spotlights the table right in front of you, no matter where you are sitting, without casting a dreaded glare, or “hot spot” on noses or spectacles or wrinkles or bald domes. I almost wept with happiness that for once, I could see the print on the menu and the colors of my food.
And that food, I discovered, was indeed solid and curiously delightful in its old-fashioned way. There’s a reason all these people keep coming back, and back, and back.
I fell a little in love right off the bat, when I noticed Thousand Island dressing (a lost totem of my youth) as a choice for the splendid “Traditional Salad,” a neatly chopped and easy-toeat heap of greens crowned with diced egg and bacon. A kicker of big, sweet cornbread croutons lurked below, so crunchy I’d swear they were fried. I’d eat that salad every day if I could.
The charms of Houston’s iconic spinach dip seemed less apparent to me. This fern-bar relic was far less objectionable than I had anticipated, but I did not dive into it with the unbridled enthusiasm of my guests who swear by it.
The vaunted prime rib was massive and rosy-rare, and I had to saw at it only a little bit to get it into bite-sized chunks. It was really good, but I confess that I no longer consider prime rib the king of restaurant entrees.
I do consider Houston’s absurdly sumptuous prime-rib French dip, thinly sliced and rare, the king of sandwiches, though. Its devotees include the famous chef David Chang. A discriminating Houston bon vivant of my acquaintance customizes his with grilled onions and jack cheese — one of many “off-the-menu” tweaks that operate like a secret code. Here I added creamy horseradish sauce to my French dip and felt I’d won a membership badge.
The loaded baked potato proved to be the stuff of dreams: compact, plump and so expertly roasted that my dining companion could hear the salty skin crackle when I moved it.
I snagged some of the famous Thai Steak & Noodle Salad from my friend’s plate, noting that though the chunks of seared steak were beautifully cooked, the combo of mango, beef marinade and peanut vinaigrette made the effect a bit too sweet for my comfort.
Do not think for a moment that the presence of an Asianinflected salad means Houston’s is catering to the modern realities of our city’s evolving dining scene, with its international churn and dazzle. Nope, the Thai beef salad owes more to the 1980s California cuisine of chefs like Wolfgang Puck — remember his famous Chinese chicken salad? — than it does to 21stcentury Houston.
I was amused that one of the burgers here — the Hickory Burger by name — does nod to the local tastes for smoke and barbecue. But it does so by flavoring its barbecue-sauce condiment with fakey liquid smoke, a sin in my book.
Still, it’s a tribute to the fine quality of the ground beef patty, which reads more like a highlevel chopped steak, that I ate every bit of my Hickory Burger, down to its last shred of fluffy grated cheddar, its last square of chopped raw onion and its last bit of hickory-smoked bacon, which came curled on top of the patty like a coiled spring.
There were regular shoestring fries, ostensibly fresh cut, although they did not spark the joy I expect from serious fries. Give me that baked potato, or the buttery “pommes purée,” as the menu calls them in an unusual burst of affectation. Preferably with a mammoth doublecut pork chop that was ever so respectfully cooked, with the barest flush of dawn pink at its pale heart, and a crispy exterior singe from the grill.
Eaten with a creamy Pommery mustard-seed sauce and wonderfully earthy red cabbage, this chop makes for a remarkable plate of food. It’s recognizably American with a worldly hint of France, just the thing to eat with a $48 bottle of CrozesHermitage from the great producer Jean-Louis Chave. (That’s a welcome find on a wine list that centers largely on the New World.)
The cocktail revolution does not seem to have hit here. A margarita was so aggressively sweet-and-sour that two sips were enough. Better to order the classic martini with gin, not vodka. It’s far better.
Dessert, though — my inner 16-year-old, that innocent primerib aficionado, was in heaven. Crikey, there was a hot-fudge sundae to be had, with a sauceboat of actually hot fudge that transformed into a stretchy candy as it hit the cold ice cream.
I walked out happy, every time, to my own stupefaction. I’ll be back.
There is something reassuring in this shadowy room, where daylight can barely sneak in and perpetual twilight reigns; something soothing in the wordless burble and thump of jazz or what I think of as “spa music”; something inexpressibly comforting in a dependable, meticulously executed menu that takes you back to a simpler time, before sushi and truffle fries, before this peculiar, unsettled moment of American history.
Restaurants can function as refuge, and Houston’s performs this exceedingly well. Unmoored from the precise time of day or the precise decade, buffered by all those cushy booths and lots of caring service, it’s easy to float on a cloud of well-being.
“What’s it like?” asked my Uber driver, bearing me home from my last visit.
“It’s a time capsule in there,” I told him.
It was only later that I realized I meant that as a compliment.