Archive for the 'news' Category

22
Jul

Voting begins for My Table awards

By Misha 11 Comments
Categories: chefs, desserts, houston and news

The annual My Table award nominees have been announced and voting begins this week.

I can’t bring myself to care about things like the bar service or best tablecloths, nor do I necessarily agree with all of the nominees, but there are a couple of categories worth a consideration.

Without a doubt, the Pastry Chef category belongs to Plinio Sandalio, currently with America’s in The Woodlands. You can get a good slice of cake almost anywhere in the city, but no one treats desserts as culinary creations quite like Plinio.

IMG_1173    IMG_1180 

lemon curd, sour cream cookie, blackberry confiture & lime pop rocks
from a recent tenacity dinner

It’s getting increasingly difficult to capture in words the interplay between flavors and textures in some of Plinio’s dishes (I have tried, here and here), but just try to imagine what happens when you combine a smooth, intensely flavored ball curd, a shard of a cookie and squirt of blackberry “sauce”, then finish with line flavored pop rocks. This is seriously cool stuff.

Chef of the Year is probably a toss up between Bryan Caswell and Chris Shepherd (more about him here).

I wish the menu changed more often at Reef and some of the food could use a touch of technical complexity just to make things interesting, but if this category is going to be decided on one dish and one dish only, the beet ravioli at Reef should put Bryan Caswell in the running. It’s one of the most interesting dishes I have come across all year with an absolutely brilliant contrast in flavors.

IMG_0061

beet ravioli at reef

I have been seeing beets on menus everywhere this year and order them almost every time I can, but this preparation at Reef and a completely different take on beets at Voice have been two of the best. What really stands out with this dish is how well the intensely acidic streaks of sauce and slightly bitter greens  work with the natural sweetness of roasted beets. The ravioli themselves are stuffed with beet tops, which might be the first time I have come across someone actually using those in cooking. 

The online menu (from February?!) on the Reef site does not list the beet ravioli, but according to Bryan you can still try it for another month or two, as long as he can get his hands on good product.

Cast your vote here.

10
Jul

News around town: Max’s Wine Dive and Cafe Rabelais

By Misha 7 Comments
Categories: american, brunch, french, houston, news and restaurants

Interesting bit of news today, via Alison Cook at the Chronicle. Max’s Wine Dive plans to expand outside of Houston. A second location is planned in Austin, which will probably appreciate Max’s irreverent atmosphere more than most other cities.

Strangely enough, I have never had dinner at Max’s and have only visited them during brunch, when I don’t have to fight for a table with party crowds on Washington. I cannot tell if Max’s has gone downhill, having never been there when JJ was still at the helm, but my few brunch visits have been very good.

Most recently, I went for the Nutella and banana stuffed French toast, which was a decadent combination of intensely sweet French toast, chocolate, perfectly crisp salty bacon and Serrano chile spiked roasted potatoes (what salmonella warning?). The dish is pure Texas and it tastes great.

 

Today I visited Cafe Rabelais for the first time since Jason Blankenship left. I have heard from several people that Rabelais has subsequently gone downhill, which is most unfortunate. The kitchen wasn’t always reliable, but Cafe Rabelais has long been one of the best French bistros in town.

Normally, showing up at Cafe Rabelais after 11:30am meant that you were pushing your luck and may have to wait for a table. Today, I found the restaurant almost entirely empty. The place filled up a more within the hour, but the crowds have clearly figured out that the quality has slipped.

Only it hasn’t. Maybe the food was subpar over the last few months, but my lunch today was very good. I’ve had the merguez sandwich at Rabelais once before, and it was almost completely dry. Today, the same sandwich was served on fresh loaf of bread and was perfectly grilled. The fries, which tasted battered to some people, taste light and crispy to me. I doubt there is batter on them, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they were properly double fried and dusted in potato starch, which would account for a difference in texture. Either way, I thought Rabelais is better than ever. The question is why?

One possibility is that there is some fresh talent in the kitchen. I spotted a new chef I have never seen before sporting a toque that said “Jason Kerr” at Rabelais today. Could this be the same Jason Kerr who has been keeping the lights on at Zula? If so, I expect Rabelais to continue going strong.

27
Jun

Flash in the pan

By Misha 2 Comments
Categories: chefs, houston, news, openings and restaurants

I wasn’t surprised when Phillipe Schmit departed from the Legacy Group; it was a marriage of convenience from the start.  But I certainly didn’t think the Antone’s Market concept would be given up for dead so soon after opening. The Antone’s sign is gone. No one is wearing the kitchy “Fast Food for Foodies” t-shirts. Windows are covered in butchers paper.

I stopped by Antone’s shortly after it opened and thought it had some promise. The former Greenberry’s space lost none of it’s warmth and seemed more like a neighborhood cafe than a fast food restaurant.

I ordered an oyster po-boy, which was better than most served in Houston. The baguette had an excellent crust that shattered into pieces at first bite. The fixins were great, especially the house made pickles. The oysters seemed a little water logged, but were properly breaded and fried. The only thing that seemed out of place was the red cabbage, which has a bit too much resistance for a po-boy. Still, a major improvement over the mess they serve at Ragin Cajun.

While I was waiting for my po-boy to be made I spotted Schmit run in for a few minutes, review some books at the office and scurry away. A man on a mission building a fast food empire.

I ordered some take out for a pair of starving pharmacists and they found Antone’s attempts at the falafel sandwich a bit over engineered. Apparently the sandwiches and the absurdly priced roasted red peppers ($7?) were studded with a heavy doze of lemon juice and herbs to kick up the flavor.

I wasn’t sure exactly why I never made it back to Antone’s Market after that, until I remembered the pastries, which looked good, but didn’t taste like much. Maybe that summed up Antone’s best - trying to do too much, without doing anything well. You could easily find better, less gentrified versions of food Antone’s offered elsewhere. This is Houston, after all.

I hope Phillipe Schmit lands at a proper restaurant somewhere. He is a good enough chef to not have to be a “corporate” anything.

09
Jun

Jason Gould going down under

By Misha 0 Comments
Categories: australia, chefs and news

When Philippe Schmidt went to France for a visit last year, the Chronicle recruited him to be a guest contributor to describe his experiences in the Chef’s Corner blog. Philippe’s daily exploits made for a great read, even though he is disturbingly cheerful and joyous about the daily wonders of life. 

imageNow the Chronicle is doing it again, this time with Jason Gould of Gravitas, who’s going to his hometown of Melbourne, Australia.

I had a blast visiting Sydney earlier this year, but my one regret was not making it to Melbourne. The difference between the two cities is described as that of LA vs NY, Melbourne being the bustling metropolis with much better food.

I thought Sydney was far more appealing than the craphole that is LA, but missing out on all the great food in Melbourne has been gnawing at me ever since. Now I can at least read about it as Jason eats his way through his hometown.

09
Jun

James Beard Awards mark another year of irrelevance

By Misha 6 Comments
Categories: chefs, news, restaurants and soapbox

image

The 2008 winners of the James Beard Awards Foundation have been announced. The only one I saw coming was Grant Achatz for Outstanding Chef. 

JBA are a little like the Golden Globes - not quite authoritative enough to get all worked up about. But, still. The sheer number of chefs at the top of their game that failed to win in numerous categories is a little surprising.

I think David Kinch is the best chef in the country today. Yet the award went to the guy from Delfina, a glorified neighborhood Italian joint. Really?

The Southern half of the US is equally perplexing. Sharon Hage and Andrew Weissman delivered some of the best meals I had in 2007. Neither won. Not a single chef from New Orleans even got nominated…

Graham Elliot Bowles and Michael Symon both got dissed, while Sean Brock got beat by some guy at Cafe Boulud.  I haven’t been to any of these restaurants, but can you really be an outstanding chef if all you do is execute someone else’s food all night?

Maybe DIY is the future. Chefs get together, get crunk and stroke each others egos. Everyone gets a trophy. Just like in T-ball. We’ll see what happens with Randy’s effort, I suppose.

 

P.S. - I am sitting on a pile of dusty photos and uncompleted posts about Manresa, Le Reve, Alinea, Nana, York Street and Restaurant August. I’ll try to write them up before I head out to Europe in August. Let me know which of those sound most interesting and I’ll work on those first.

 

P.P.S. I recently had the pleasure of visiting Tres Agaves, a San Francisco based Mexican restaurant nominated in the JBA Outstanding Graphics category. This has to be one of the more bizarre (gratuitous much?) awards in any category, especially given the blandish design I saw at Tres Agaves.

Now, how about the food? Well… Hit and miss, run of the mill Mexican fare made California fresh. Chiles rellenos were completely naked and roasted, rather than fried. Carnitas looked like a huge chunk of braised meat that was then flash fried and blow torched.

If you are really curious about San Francisco inflected Mexican cuisine look no further than Ninfa’s on Navigation, where Alex Padilla is tweaking the classics with refined west coast "technique".  Bleh.

« Previous Entries