Category — Uncategorized

I was irritated with Frank Bruni. How could someone with so much insight about food be so obviously pig headed?

Bruni’s enthusiasm for Bazaar may have matched my own when he named it one of the best new restaurants in the country, but I was stunned when Feast became his next pick. I am huge Feast fan, but Houston is not entirely visitor friendly and many restaurants deserving national attention are often overlooked as a result. It was great to see NY Times venture outside of their familiar stomping grounds. The only thing that really bugged me was that Bruni pandering to his base when he described Houston as the “land of big steaks and bold Tex-Mex”. Is the elitist attitude really necessary?

Every time someone makes such a sweeping generalization, I want to show them what the real Houston looks like in just one part of the city – the new Chinatown. Not the usual collection of pseudo-Chinese restaurants and gift shops that occupy a tidy span of 7 or 8 city blocks, but an entire city where real people live and eat. A place where pho, pupusas, boiled crawfish, dim sum and beignets very naturally occupy the same stretch of the road.

Vietnamese and cajun cultures collide at Boiling Crab

Frank Bruni, in particular, could also use a visit to Rainbow Lodge, so he can see the formation of the wholly new brand of Gulf Coast cuisine created without the benefit of fanfare that surrounds young NYC wunderkinds like David Chang. Great food is becoming as much the foundation of this city as oil and much of it is grounded in the diverse cultures of it’s residents.

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Jenny, who has cornered the Houston flavor tripping market, has dug up  a very amusing video of Gordon Ramsay doing a miracle berry taste test. Needless to say, results are “mixed”.

Clearly, people with superior palates and acerbic personalities are impervious to this miracle berry nonsense.

A few weeks ago I wrote about the Hidden Kitchen in Paris, which has tossed all haute dining conventions aside and became one of the most talked about “restaurants” in town. Shortly after, I went to a similar anti-establishment dinner, served at Randy Rucker’s home, in Houston and found some truly inspired cooking. Is it really possible that some of the best food today is served outside of professional kitchens and multi-million dollar dining rooms? Seems that way.

The night turned out to be such a success, Randy is considering making it a regular event and the second dinner will be held this Thursday. Getting a reservation at this point may be difficult. Meanwhile, you can entertain yourself with a recap of the first evening, complete with over 100 photos. If you want to see a larger slide show, just click on the gallery and it will take you to my Flickr page.

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Randy lives in a picture perfect house in the Heights and almost every bit of land is used to grow something that can be used in a kitchen. I am not exactly the “go off the grid and live on the commune” type, but there is something really appealing about getting the produce to the table in minutes, rather than days. When you consider the lunacy people go through in cities where population density creates the prototypical urban landscape, where there is barely any space for humans, much less other living organisms, you really begin to appreciate what Houston has to offer.

The people gathered for the first supper club were an eclectic bunch, which made the conversation almost as interesting as the food. Several chefs. A couple of art society types. More than a couple of people better at writing about food than cooking.

I had an especially good time listening to the chefs talk shop. I spend most of my time around people who get really excited about computing, and this is really the first time I am around people who feel the same way about food. You can tell these guys really feel like they are creating something. I imagine this is what the Homebrew Computer Club must have been like back in the days.

The Food

cured rainbow trout in yusu with microbasil, Korean chili threads - the trout had an interesting flavor that reminded me of the preserved roe I had at Sawa Sushi in Sunnivale, but the real depth came from the Korean chili threads, which I thought was some whacky saffron that had a hit of heat to it. Turns out they were Korean chile threads. I have no idea where you buy those, but they were good.

tilefish tiradito with lemon verbena, fennel blossoms and kimchee consomme - my favorite dish of the night. Ceviche preparations sound simple, but balancing the acidity with the delicate flavor of the fish can trip up even the most talented chefs, as I found out at Nishino earlier in June. Randy really nailed this one, despite the complexity of the ingredients involved. I don’t know how he decided to put together fennel and kimchee, but it was a brilliant combination. Although not mentioned in the description, what really brought the dish home were the Thai chilis, which added the level of heat you would never find on a tasting menu in a restaurant in NY or California. Absolute Houston.

smoked vichyssoise, foamed dashi, gulf crab, garlic flowers - a very close second best dish, this thing had perfectly balanced flavors and textures. I am not even going to try to describe it, because it wouldn’t do it justice. Read the other blog posts (links are above), if you must.

roasted gundermann’s farm peach, red komatsuma lettuce, warm lime-eucalyptus emulsion, and fenugreek meringue - one of those dishes where technique fades into the background and ingredients take over. Everything on the plate, from the meringue to the lime-eucalyptus emulsion (which could have been a disaster) worked really well together, but the peach carried most of the load.

toasted “bacalhau” gnocchi, trumpet royal mushrooms, & pea shoots - one of the best courses of the night. The bacalhau is in quotes because randy used trout that he salted for almost a week for this dish. Not sure I understand why it was hard to get bacalhau, since I come across it all the time in Houston, but this dish did not suffer the substitution much at all. At least for me, the dish flipped and the main ingredients were just supporting players to what I thought was the best thing on the plate - the pea shoots Randy cut down from his garden right before serving. The same happed to me on my first visit to Manresa, when I realized that Into the Vegetable Garden was the best dish I had all night. You simply cannot beat pristine produce.

mr buddy’s compressed pork, japanese cucumber, and “sauce” ravioli - a perfect example of how much a good story can enhance the flavor of the dish. Even with additional pork fat, the hog lacked the fat content to make the Coca-Cola and Indonesian spice braised meat truly tender, but overall the Aquavit-inspired dish was a success. I tried the compressed pork before it hit the saute pan and it was a bit more moist and had a completely different flavor than what came across in the final preparation. I think it actually would have worked very well as a terrine course.

frozen lemon balm gazpacho & opal basil - an excellent dish with very intense, layered flavors, that also displayed some skillful play on temperature and texture. If I remember right, the same gazpacho was served in a sorbet form, as well as a soft foam on top. Very nice.

strawberries, yogurt, and mint - very simple (and entirely too small) course of strawberries, which I think may have been compressed, yogurt and homegrown mint. Strange as it sounds, I think the dusting of the espresso ground really brought a whole new dimension to this dish.

“moonshine” - a rather intense bit of booze Randy brewed up in his kitchen and forgot about for 3 months. I am not a drinker, but this thing was awesome.

In the short time I have known Randy I got a sense that he is a true food enthusiast. I doubt there is anyone in Houston more curious about every aspect of food, which makes him an interesting guy to be around. But it didn’t at all mean he could cook, so I was going to the dinner with somewhat muted expectations.

I’ve been to a fair number of restaurants that walk the fine line between being a science experience and delivering really special food. Randy definitely fits into the latter category, which makes him one of the few chefs where technique and ingredients become a small part of a broader palette used to create new flavors and textures.

As long as he’d doing his supper club, I’ll be there to take it all in.

Alison Cook writes in her blog this week about a young American chef named Daniel Rose, who opened a tiny eatery in Paris against better judgement and proceeded to book out months in advance and charm the local Michelin reviewers. On the menu? Parsley root and chestnut soup — Pig’s feet, scallops and green apple — Pigeon, carrot purée, wilde hare, brussels sprouts glazed with balsamic vinegar. I’d fly for a night in Paris just to eat this stuff. No stopping there. Daniel Rose has a blog and broadcasts from the restaurant’s kitchen 24/7 via a set of web cams. It just might be the first Restaurant 2.0 in existence.

Small dining room, claustrophobic kitchen, a countertop and a chef is one of the best concepts to emerge in recent years (mix and match ingredients being the worst), very often producing exciting results. The menu changes every day, with dishes conjured up out of thin air during a morning trip to the market. It’s the antithesis of the fine dining experience, where precision and consistency rules, and menus change less frequently than governments.

One of the best restaurant experiences I’ve had was at L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon in London, where small tasting plates dominate the menu and the diner becomes immersed in the kitchen experience a feet away from the bar. L’Atelier is far from a tiny chef driven operation, but the idea is the same and it works, remarkably enough, despite being a chain.

We don’t have anything of the sort in Houston (does it really make sense in our egalitarian city?), but on my recent trip to San Francisco I came across Canteen, which sounds like a mirror image of Daniel Rose’s Spring.

I knew very little about Canteen going in. It made a short list of restaurants that had an interesting menu. Quick check to make sure it was within walking distance and I was off. I found Canteen about 10 minutes away from Union Square, just a few doors down and a world away from the iconic Fleur De Lys.

I liked Canteen from the moment I walked in. Four tables, green Formica countertop, tiny kitchen, a cook, unassuming waitress. 20 seats at most. It was perfect. The place felt comfortable, like a greasy spoon with great food. You can tell a lot about the place by how the staff carries themselves and the staff at Canteen moved through the tiny space as if they were serving a casual lunch at home. It’s the sort of kabuki dance you encounter when you come across a confident hand in the kitchen. Canteen seemed light years away from the imposing pomp and disappointment of Quince I experienced the night before (more on that later). I was hopeful.

The menu provided a second clue. One of the three dishes was spaghetti carbonara, with eggs, pancetta, parmigiano and black pepper. Cream was no where to be found Most restaurants, including the we-really-should-know-better-than-that Prego, bastardize this dish to make it more palatable to the alfredo loving crowds by replacing the raw eggs with cream. Classic carbonara on the menu was all I needed to know to dive in.

First up - a simple dinner roll and butter, which was pretty good. Seems like an odd thing to notice, but bread is important. Sometimes you know just what’s in store by the quality of the bread. This roll was soft, yeasty and had just enough texture to tell me that someone made it by hand that mornong. The Belgian endive salad with goat cheese was chopped and simply dressed in olive oil right in front of me. I don’t like grapefruit much, but it was a perfect compliment to the slightly bitter endive. The salad didn’t really need more acid and not much more was added. Things were off to a good start.

I ordered the Dover sole (at least I think it was a sole) for lunch, rather than the carbonara, which seemed a bit much considering my ambitious plan for Incanto later that night. The fish came out perfectly cooked and the sweet roasted onions on the side turned out to be the best thing on the plate. Problem was that the crust that coated the fish fillets made the dish almost inedible. The corn meal was neither toasted nor was the fish cooked at high enough temperature to make it crisp properly, giving the effect of uncooked grits being slathered on a the fish after cooking it.

And just like that my budding love affair with Canteen came to a grinding halt.

Behind me a couple of foodie types were digging into their sole with much enthusiasm. One was a San Francisco native, the other seemed to be on a visit from New York. They both knew Dennis Leary, the chef/owner of Canteen, and seemed completely unaware that there was something wrong with the fish. Could it be that different than mine, considering all three fillets were cooked in the same pan?

Strangely enough, I wanted to come back to Canteen the very next day (I did not make it) and plan to do so next time I am in town. Maybe this time for dinner, to see how things go when Dennis Leary mans the stove himself. The truth is that even with minor imperfections, this is a better way to eat than being patronized in a stuffy restaurant where food takes a back seat to everything else. I am willing to take the lumps along the way.

"I wanted to do something different," he says, "and create a restaurant totally stripped of all pretension, the kind of place where I can cook for a small group of customers, interact and improvise, and offer very personally prepared, unique, and accessible food." As the sole cook in the establishment, he will personally prepare nearly every dish in the restaurant, from amuse bouche to salad to dessert. - Dennis Leary

Robb Walsh reviews Masraff’s in Houston Press this week and finds surprisingly great food, despite their clubby atmosphere. So true. I don’t make it out to Masraff’s very often, but almost every one of my 7-8 visits over the years has been consistently good.

It’s not the most exciting cooking in the world, but its almost always well executed and somehow delivers on point. You could say the same of places like Mockingbird Bistro and Cafe Annie, although they are much more visible than Masraff’s because they have named chefs with personalities that draw attention. Masraff’s, meanwhile, is almost invisible on the food circuit, relying mostly on their aging Tanglewood clientèle.

Masraff’s is worth a visit. Dress like you’re going to a funeral, gas up the 7-series and dye your hair gray. You’ll fit right in.