Roots Wine Bar a delicious boon for East End
Spring had sprung hard at Roots Wine Bar this past Saturday afternoon.
My plate of fluffy-crusted fried oysters looked like Neptune’s Easter bonnet, ringed around an orange mound of crema flavored with sugarcane and Crystal hot sauce, then scattered with a glitter of bright pickled Peppadew relish. They tasted even better than they looked, which tends to be the rule at this promising new spot.
Out in front, jewel-toned snapdragons popped from the big rusted planters that had first drawn my eye to the fledgling business. I had driven down this shady block on Leeland, where EaDo segues into Eastwood, back in March, when Roots’ inviting front patio and airy industrial room had been empty — caught in the no man’s land of stops, starts and reduced hours that followed our winter-storm power outages.
Now the scene was alive with young Houstonians in their springiest finery: little sundresses, designer sunglasses, pastel bow ties poised above ultratailored jackets, artfully draped one-shoulder tops, floaty little shorts sets, freshly laundered T-shirts over strategically ripped jeans.
I was already smiling when I pulled open the glass front door, but then my jaw slackened: At 4:45 p.m., the room was already
packed with merrymakers. They clinked toasts at big tables and swarmed the serve-yourself wine wall that dispenses variously sized pours from 50 different wine bottles, their contents stabilized under argon gas.
I hadn’t encountered this many people together in one space for more than a year. There was a moment or two of panic as my fightor-flight response flared and died.
But I calmed as I noted the masks on Roots staffers and on the guests milling before the wine wall. They were scoping out the choices, inserting their Rootsissued plastic wine-credit cards into the appropriate slots, grabbing a wine glass from the gleamy ranks above and below and — finally — pressing the button to dispense a 1-ounce, 3-ounce or 5-ounce portion from the bottle they had picked.
The masks came off only once they had returned to their tables. I found my own table-for-two outdoors, where I am still most comfortable dining these days, in a snug alley fitted out with heaters and tables both high and low, with chairs draped in white fake-fur throws that the Instagrammers adore. “It reminds me of New Orleans back here,” announced the friend I was meeting.
That’s fitting, in a way, because the executive chef and chief sommelier and manager presiding over this interesting universe is J.D. Fouché, whose work I admired at Reef six years ago and who went on to cook at Ryan Lachaine’s Riel.
Fouché was born in South Africa, moved with his family to New Orleans as a teen, then earned his Gulf Coast dining chops working for the Besh group’s Bourgne, a seafood place, and at the late Cuvée, the celebrated wine venue where he acquired the skills and sensibility that make him so well suited to Roots Wine Bar now.
Fouché’s food here is
exciting stuff that flies far above the usual wine-bar fare. He’s offering a tight, revolving menu based on seasonal Gulf Coast ingredients, and the dishes range from shareable and snacky (like those wonderful fried oysters) to serious entrees that can match those of the best restaurants in the city.
I’m still thinking about the hunk of sublimely crisp-skinned snapper he was serving last week, moored in a pool of brown butter and pinging off a caper purée that skimmed around the serving bowl in a swoosh of spring green. Roasted cauliflower provided some earthy ballast, and slices of kumquat foraged by Fouché from a neighborhood tree added bright citrus sparks.
It was the finest fish dish I had eaten in a long time. In fact, I liked everything I tried, and I can’t wait to go back for more. Fouché has a gift for layering umami flavors in bold, unusual fashion, which makes his dishes remarkably fun to pair with Roots’ array of well-chosen wines.
The roasted Brussels sprouts so ubiquitous (and often so boring) these days here arrive in a stunning
sweet-and-sour sauce deepened with pig’s blood, dusted with a flurry of pulverized pork rinds and crowned with rings of pickled shallot.
Crawfish stew comes with prosciutto-spiked sauce piquante, the marine thrum of shaved bottarga, a fleet of black-eyed peas and a flourish of the celery leaves Fouché likes so much.
Even patatas bravas, that Spanish wine-bar favorite, has its own stealth spin with a creamy fondue of Manchego cheese setting off the crisped potatoes,
which are zapped with a chorizo-tomato “marmalade.”
It’s lots of fun to shop the wine wall and choose something to match. The 1-ounce option is a reasonably priced way to discover what you like; and the 3-ounce pour is just enough to set off a dish without making a greater commitment.
I was pleased to see a good mix of Old and New World bottles, with some producers and/or distributors I already knew and admired, and others I’ll enjoy getting to know.
When I spied a Michel Bregeon Muscadet from Kermit Lynch, I knew my fried oysters were accounted for; a gorgeous Domaine Savary 2018 Chablis, which managed to taste rich and flinty at once (!), did the trick for that crispy-skinned snapper.
My friend discovered the joys of a San Biagio Vecchio from Emilia Romagna, a white with deep yellow tones and floral notes whose affect reminded us of an orange wine. I loved my graceful, woodsy sample of Metrick Mourvedre blend, a California wine I might not have picked out on a regular wine list.
Smart, concise wine notes in the form of little square cards float in a rack above each bottle, so you can remember what you liked or what you didn’t. I came home with a fistful.
There’s a good range of prices, too, from bargain wines up through splurges; and the bottle prices are posted (at 20 percent off retail) should you want to take a bottle home. Indeed, you could duck in and sample a few to decide what might go best with whatever you’re cooking for dinner.
The Roots plastic-creditcard system seems to work well, and it will require you to surrender your own credit card at the front desk first. You return there to order food, so there’s a lot of getting up and sitting back down again, and putting on your mask and removing it again. But after a year stationary at my laptop, the activity required seemed enlivening.
It was also safer pandemic-wise than it had seemed at first blush, thanks to the presence of two HVAC systems — one for the front of the house and one for the kitchen, plus a Reme Halo air-filtration system that uses ionized hydroperoxides to destroy bacteria, molds and viruses. (The system has tested well against COVID-19.)
All this would be enough to recommend Roots enthusiastically, and to compliment owners Lori Hernandez and Paul Siwak on a great idea, well executed.
But there is more, in the form of the view across to the high-grass field that sits between Leeland and the Gulf Freeway’s adjacent flyway. At first, I thought I was hallucinating the horses that seemed to graze the field under the late-afternoon sun, but no.
Headquarters for a horse-drawn-carriage business is right around a corner or two, and — until gentrification gets that meadow, anyway — the horses are put out to pasture there.
Only in the East End, folks.