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In the Sunday Travel section of the New York Times, Remixing Regional Flavors in Houston features five restaurants, three of which are located in the Houston Heights!
RARE is the city where a chef can set up tables inside a former car dealership and pack the house nightly. But on a recent evening in Houston, I sat inside that space, which has been reborn as Reef, a bustling, hyper-inventive seafood restaurant, and thought about the unusual fish on my plate: a Gulf of Mexico wahoo, to which the chef and co-owner Bryan Caswell had done unexpected, and unexpectedly delicious, things.
I was thinking, too, about how, in the years since I left Houston, where I grew up, it’s gone from a city where the high-end restaurants were as gilded as they were mostly mediocre to a place with a world-class food scene and a rising generation of culinary stars. Instead of playing catch-up to restaurant trends elsewhere, Houston’s most talented chefs are finding their own voice: uncovering the food traditions of the area’s ethnic populations, experimenting with little-known seafood varieties from the nearby gulf, and embracing Texas’s strange agricultural rhythms.
And given the city’s notorious lack of zoning laws, it probably shouldn’t come as a surprise that restaurateurs are setting up shop in refreshingly unusual spaces.
Reef
At Reef, which opened in 2007, Bryan Caswell and his design crew have managed to transform the huge space into one that is electrifying and surprisingly intimate. Windows that frame the city skyline, brick terrazzo floors, a gleaming open kitchen, an undulating white wall and a blue-green color scheme evoke a combination of a soothing underwater reverie and a giant theatrical stage.
Part of Reef’s appeal is in the obscure seafood from the gulf that Mr. Caswell has gotten his hands on, and part in the inspired quasi-Texan spins he’s come up with. On the menu the day I dined there was amberjack, a white-fleshed fish served with sautéed long beans, plantains and a pomegranate jus. I had not seen that combination anywhere else before, yet in Mr. Caswell’s hands it instantly seemed like a no-brainer.
The fish arrived grilled, the better to show off its firm, steaky texture; the plantains and pomegranate lent alternately sweet and tangy flavors and the blistered beans a luscious smokiness. Another fish rarely seen on menus, the creamy wahoo, arrived on a friend’s plate lightly grilled and atop a mound of couscous that was spiked with harissa, a Moroccan hot sauce, and studded with Champagne grapes: sweet, spicy, subtle, explosive. It was one of the best seafood meals I’d ever had.
Later, Mr. Caswell explained that his ideas pull from Southeast Asian, Latin American and North African influences, representing some of Houston’s most food-centric ethnic communities. “I grew up here eating all these different foods. So I argue that I’m doing Houston food,” said Mr. Caswell, an alum of Jean-Georges in New York.
It’s tough for an ambitious Houston chef to make a go of it on seafood alone, and in late November, Mr. Caswell — fresh off the debut of the second branch of his hit sliders-and-wine joint, Little Bigs — opened a new restaurant, Stella Sola, in a brick town house in the trendy Heights district. Stella Sola merges the flavors of Tuscany and Texas, an idea that turns out not to be as bizarre as it sounds, with dishes like pappardelle with ricotta and an intensely meaty ragù of Texas wild boar, and, more directly, a charcuterie platter of Texan and Tuscan meats, cured in-house by the up-and-coming salumi star Justin Basye, formerly of Blue Hill at Stone Barns, in Westchester County, New York.
I visited Stella Sola once during its first few weeks of service, and the place was, predictably, slammed. A couple of dishes were perhaps sent out too hastily as the kitchen found its footing. That wild-boar pappardelle and a sautéed tripletail, a Gulf fish, with Asiago broth were both a bit over-salted, but the salumi plate was superb — the Tuscan-style lardo silky and lush, the smoked andouille and venison kielbasa spicy and assertive. And butternut squash ravioli, often an uninspired choice, was transcendent here: the delicate, creamy-sweet pouches showered with crushed pecans and amaretti cookies.
Beaver’s
Bryan Caswell isn’t the only chef hankering to explore and remix the region’s food traditions, or to mark Houston as a city with a distinct sense of place. Still, it’s not always the easiest career path. Monica Pope, an owner of Beaver’s, which opened in 2007, and also the chef and co-owner of the six-year-old locavore restaurant T’Afia, is bent on getting Houstonians to recognize that eating well is not about eye-poppingly colorful supermarket produce, it’s about giving in to the idiosyncratic Texas growing climate and its peculiar surprises: strawberries in February, summer squash in November. (In the film “Urban Cowboy,” based in Houston and nearby Pasadena, the mother of the John Travolta character told him, “You just can’t get good vegetables in Houston.” You certainly can now.)
At Beaver’s, which sits on a quiet corner in the Sixth Ward, a historic area of mid-19th-century Victorian houses, Ms. Pope and her partners are riffing on a beloved but disappearing local institution: the ice house, where Houstonians who didn’t have in-home refrigeration once stopped by to pick up blocks of ice or just hang out over beer and jukebox tunes. The space, in a revamped ice house, features big booths and a central bar, and, keeping with ice-house tradition, picnic tables outside.
On a recent chilly afternoon, I grabbed an indoor booth. Though the barbecue — pulled pork, ribs — was lackluster, a seafood po’boy satisfied. Cornmeal-fried oysters and plump gulf shrimp were piled high on a soft French roll (which can also be ordered deep-fried) and layered with onions, slaw and a spicy tartar sauce. I hesitate to order po’boys outside New Orleans — why risk crushing disappointment? — but I’ll be back for this one.
Textile
A short drive from the Sixth Ward, the Houston native Scott Tycer stumbled into another city relic: an 1894 building in the Heights that once housed a burlap factory called the Oriental Textile Mill. In late 2008 it became Textile, where the tiny, 30-seat dining room plays up the space to stunning effect: vanilla-colored burlap panels hang above beautiful cast-iron industrial pieces, like an antique maintenance cart that’s now a wheelbarrow for serving petits fours.
It’s an impeccably styled, serene place to eat — perhaps a bit too serene: the esoteric offerings and tasting-menu format may be keeping less-adventurous diners away. (Mr. Tycer has added a short à la carte menu, and the tasting-menu dishes now can be ordered individually.)
The menus at Textile feature savory versions of bread puddings, tarts and strudels. During my recent visit, a hybrid of ratatouille and bread pudding, which the chef served alongside a juicy lamb ribeye, felt original, even if it didn’t win me over as much as three other glorious, bready concoctions: a powerfully rich bacon tart topped with a runny quail egg; a salad of bibb lettuce and Fourme D’Ambert blue cheese that came with a small, divine, house-pulled onion strudel; and a buttery, herby tarragon bread pudding wrapped in caramelized onion and paired with takali rasam, a South Asian soup tinged with cumin and the pungent spice asafetida. It’s probably safe to say that particular combination exists nowhere else.
Block 7 Wine Company
In a more rough-and-tumble stretch of the Heights, Block 7 Wine Company, a wine bar and retail shop hybrid that opened in July in a former appliance warehouse, features a seasonal menu built around Texas ingredients. American classics are deftly infused with Euro spins: there’s a hefty “sloppy Giuseppe” — a satisfyingly oozy sandwich made with ground venison and wild boar confit on oniony challah — and one of the best burgers in town, a dry-aged-beef patty topped with arugula, Gruyère and a Dijon-spiked aioli.
Thanks to a friendly staff and smart design, Block 7’s huge, potentially impersonal room feels warm and relaxed. Works by local artists line the walls, and there’s a checkout counter made from a row of eclectic cabinets salvaged from the old appliance company. Because the space is part wine shop, customers pay retail for any bottle of wine they order from the wine list (or buy at the store).
On a recent visit, my dining companions and I downed burgers and that Italian-style sloppy Joe with a terrific Salice Salentino ($15) and a boutique Barbera ($40) from the shop. It was a rare, zero-markup, zero-corkage wine experience — and yet another sign that Houston’s restaurant scene has entered a bold new era.
For restaurant locations and contact info, visit the original article at:
http://travel.nytimes.com/2010/02/07/travel/07choice.html
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