A critic braves the sea of Astros orange
Playoffs bring a flood of baseball-loving fans to downtown restaurants
Texas Avenue was a sea of Astros orange at 4:30 p.m. on a recent Friday. Dodging and weaving, I threaded my way through the oncoming human tide toward the bar at Potente, Astros owner Jim Crane’s upscale Italian restaurant next to Minute Maid stadium. Approximately 68,000 baseball fans had just watched the Astros beat the Tampa Rays 6-2 in the first game of their playoff season. Now they were flooding onto the streets in a mood to celebrate.
Downtown’s restaurants and bars are used to accommodating fans before and after regular-season games. But the sellout crowds and supercharged party mood during playoffs pose particular challenges, and I had set out to see how some of my favorites near the ballpark were managing the horde.
Inside Potente’s bar, pandemonium reigned. Seats? Don’t be silly. The narrow, elegant space was so packed that I could barely worm my way through. The room throbbed with human electricity. Feeling short and buffeted about, I found myself wishing I could just plug into it, recharge my dying battery.
I made it to a register, where head bartender Nick Silva, who had calibrated a fresh, lemony French 75 so perfectly for me a couple weeks back, was up to his wrists in credit cards for patrons running tabs. My dark blue card joined hundreds of slabs of plastic, filed hurriedly in a box. As I inched away, balancing my cocktail in a scrum of elbows, I wondered with a thrill of panic whether I would ever see it again.
I found a tall table on which to set the stemmed coupe glass while I reconnoitered. Immediately someone
bumped into it, and the French 75 sloshed wildly. I texted two friends who’d been at the game and were on their way to meet me: “Do not do it! Not a spot to be had. Pray for me!” Then I spied a skinny space in a table alcove near the windows and slid into it, sideways. “You can set your drink on our table!” offered the couple sitting there.
And that’s how I met Tom and Becky, season ticket holders wise to the ways of eating and drinking around game times. For if the playoff crush challenges operators, so too are the fans challenged. The logistics of where to go, how to time it, where to park and where to avoid are issues to be dealt with.
Tom and Becky had a hack, they told me: they park in the Houston Partnership garage, a block from the ballpark and on the edge of Avenida Houston. There’s always a space, they told me, and the elevator deposits them near the ground-floor door of Kulture, where chef Dawn Burrell’s neo-soul menu lures them in. “Fried okra?” I queried, thinking of Burrell’s tempura-light pods. “Collard purses!” replied Tom. I tried to tell them that the cocktails there recently got an upgrade, thanks to James Haywood, of the late Kitchen 713, signing on as bar chef. But the room was so loud that I am pretty sure Tom and Becky didn’t hear me.
I longed for some of the oysters roasted with snail butter, artichoke and Pernod that Potente chef Danny Trace’s kitchen does so well, but I suspected it would require more effort and persistence than I had to give, even though I spied a couple platefuls of very fetching artichoke hummus sailing by. This was a drinking crowd, not an eating crowd.
I needed to pay up so I could hit Vic & Anthony’s with my friends, who had made two jostling circuits around the bar before finding me wedged into my tiny niche. Settling was not easy. The gracious and unflappable Silva was moving like a highly efficient robot by this point, taking orders and mixing drinks and marshaling staff and locating credit cards among the unruly piles. “You’re a hero,” I told him as I cashed out. “You’re all heroes.”
Across the street, the lobby and bar of Tilman Fertitta’s luxe steakhouse was standing room only, Astros regalia everywhere. It looked like some massive cocktail party. Smart fans had reserved seats either in the bar or the calm expanse of the dining room, where general manager Rob Harvey had decreed that shorts would be acceptable during the playoffs.
“It’s still hot out,” Harvey explained, as he escorted my shorts-wearing friends and I to our table. The whole room was filled to the brim with orangeclad diners spending big steakhouse bucks. A sky scraping seafood tower and a bottle of really good Grüner Veltliner from V&A’s excellent wine list fit the mood. Occasional dispatches filtered in from the throng near the bar, where the ladies room had gone out of order and guests were climbing the stairs to the banquet room facilities instead.
Leaving, I learned that some fans who lunch at V&A before an afternoon game leave their car with the valet and pick it up after the game. “A 10 dollar parking hack!” whispered my informant.
Night games divide fans more starkly than day games. The pregamers are generally understood to be more interested in food, with drink as secondary; postgamers have a reputation among operators of being much more booze-focused. You make allowances and adjust schedules accordingly.
At Osso & Kristalla, the more informal restaurant next to Potente, fans were “banging on the doors by 10 a.m.” before that Friday afternoon game, a manager told me. And Bill Floyd, who runs both restaurants for Crane, knows that playoffs will run him and his staff ragged. He didn’t make it home until 3 a.m. the night the Astros finally clinched the division championship from the Rays.
Xochi, Hugo Ortega’s highflying Oaxacan restaurant in the Marriott Marquis, just a couple of blocks from Minute Maid, is a favorite pregame spot among food-obsessed fans. For night playoff games, they can start showing up even before the 3 p.m. start of happy hour, says lead bartender Carlos Serrano. The Xochi bar was SRO before Game 5 with the Rays. And this past Sunday evening, as the Astros prepared to take on the Yankees after a 7-0 loss the night before, every seat at Xochi’s long, long bar was occupied by 5:30. Almost all of the dining room and patio was filled with the orangeclad tribe.
On my left, a guy in an Astros jersey demolished a trayful of oysters wood-roasted with yellow mole, after which he and his wife systematically demolished a whole fish roasted in a mole glaze, until only the skeleton and the head remained. At one point, I turned to scan the room and spotted Amy Henderson, a former Houstonian in from New York for the game, gnawing on a giant chicken foot — souvenir of the crispy half chicken in mole negro.
This was pregaming of a sophisticated order. Between that chicken foot and that fish skeleton, and over a brilliant new Masa Menos cocktail made by Serrano, I felt a bloom of civic pride. There was still a healthy crowd on hand at 6:30 p.m., but by 6:43 most fans had departed for the 7:08 p.m. game, and you could feel the buzz in the air depart with them, as the room smoothed into relative calm. “You can really feel the good energy one and a half or two hours before the game,” said Carlos Cuevas, another Xochi bartender, his eyes lighting up.
That’s part of the allure of preand postgaming in playoff season. The venues feel fully alive, as if you are part of something bigger. That holds true out on the downtown streets, too, I discovered as I strolled back toward the ballpark. There’s a festival air to the crowds, a happy sizzle in the air and in people’s step. Almost a shared sense of purpose, leavened with a feeling of “hail fellow well met.”
On the corner outside Potente, with the game barely underway, it felt like the outskirts of a medieval fair. A young woman played
her violin for tips. A panhandler in a motorized wheelchair plied his trade. Hawkers brandished tickets for sale, hoping for a last-minute windfall.
I walked back along Texas Avenue, noting that the Potente bar, full to bursting an hour back, had cleared out. Down the block, a lone worker wielded a vacuum cleaner in a brightly lit, empty dining room at the big new Irma’s Southwest, the cousin restaurant to Irma’s Original TexMex mecca a few blocks southeast, on the far side of the ballpark.
They had just locked their doors after the last of a noisy, full house departed. Cleaning solvent gleamed on the tile floors. At a table in a back dining room, owner Luis Galvan and his wife, Trish, were holding a war council with staff to plan for the upcoming playoff games.
Usually they don’t open on Sundays, but they had made an exception for the playoffs. (Not everyone takes advantage of the windfall — I had noticed Kulture closed up tight earlier.) Irma’s Southwest operates primarily on a reservation basis on game days, with a wait list for the few walk-in slots left over. “We do crowd control,” said Luis Galvan. “It’s not an open door.” They pared down the menu a bit, too: no chile rellenos to slow things down with their relatively longer prep times.
When I asked if they ever stayed open for postgamers, Galvan looked at me with something approaching horror. “There’s too much liability with alcohol after a night game,” he said. ”They don’t want to eat as much as they want to drink.”
Right then, he and his inner circle were preoccupied simply with staffing up enough to handle the orange horde. “We’re bringing in so many family members and even personal friends,” said Galvan.
Of course, uncertainty always looms in a playoff situation. By next weekend, Galvan will either be tapping his volunteers to come in and work, or the Astros’ season will be over and done, and life in the venues around the ballpark will return to a far less electric normal.