FOODIE NEWS

New York Times prints love letter to Houston dining scene

By Sarah Rufca

February 4th, 2010 at 3:13 PM

Consider this a major coup, and another sign that the exciting and varied culinary landscape of Houston has finally begun to earn national recognition.

Sunday's edition of The New York Times' travel section has a guide to a handful of restaurants reported to be on the cutting edge of a unique Texas-centric food movement. With a focus on fusion between high-minded concepts and homage to local ethnic cuisine (and a weird obsession with restaurants created out of old industrial buildings), "Choice Tables — Remixing Regional Flavors in Houston" gives laudatory shout-outs to Bryan Caswell's Reef and Stella Sola, Beaver's, Textile and Block 7 Wine Co.

"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," writes Salma Abdelnour. "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."

We've compiled some of the choice descriptions below.

Reef
"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."

Textile
"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."

Block 7 Wine Co.
"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."