​“What’s the best restaurant in Houston?” is what a daughter of an old girlfriend asked me the other weekend while she, her mother and I were at a local wine bar.  I quickly responded that I didn’t know.  I mentioned a few places that might qualify though added that I couldn’t give a confident response.  I was the local Zagat editor for Houston for several years and have been in the process for the past year or so – dining out diligently – of trying to put together a thoroughly researched list of the city’s top fifty restaurants for my blog and website.  I should be in a better position than most to answer what Houston’s best restaurant is or its best few restaurants.
 
In the past, I’ve said that I think Houston might have a number of Michelin one-star restaurants but maybe not too many two-star restaurants, and likely not any three if Michelin plied our fair city (there are only thirteen restaurants with three stars in this country in the four metropolitan areas where Michelin has published guides).  So, for me, there are not any places that immediately jump to the top of my list.
 
In judging a restaurant what’s on the plate and on the menus are the most important aspects.  The quality and enjoyability of the food is paramount, in my opinion, as it is with most diners.  For the best places that usually manifests itself in dishes that exhibit either a complexity or depth of flavor throughout much of the meal.  I also tend to especially enjoy restaurants and dishes that are a reflection of the place and community.  An exhibition of creativity can be important, though that creativity needs to be agreeably flavorful for me.  The food has to be plated attractively in the best places.  Top restaurants need to have a well-chosen wine list.  Wine makes most food taste better, a well-suited wine even much more so.  An excellent, or at least decent, cocktail program also helps make the opening phase of a restaurant visit more pleasurable for me these days.  Beyond the output of the kitchen and from the purview of the beverage director, the level of service is very important when considering the best restaurants. The setting, the design and décor, should help to create a proper stage for diners that can complement the food and make the visit even more enjoyable.  These are just some of the more immediate criteria in trying to judge a restaurant.
 
To circle back to that query, some of the very best local spots for me would be, not in any order: The Pass, Tony’s, Café Annie, One Fifth, Da Marco, BCN, Kata Robota, Uchi, Kiran’s, Hugo’s and Caracol, Kata Robota and probably MF Sushi.  Maybe Xochi, too, which, to me, doesn’t have the value or quite the polish of its Mexican siblings, as much as I like the place.  Getting panhandled while sitting on its patio there probably plays into that.  I haven’t yet been to the rebooted Underbelly, UB Preserv, maybe this weekend.  I’ve been a fan of Chris Shepherd and company since the days of Catalan, and am looking forward to Georgia James, given how much I liked One Fifth Steak.  Brennan’s has been too inconsistent for me since Danny Trace departed as executive chef.  Due to schedule conflicts, I’ve had to at cancel reservations a few times at Potente, where Trace now plies his trade, and also at Justin Yu’s more casual successor to Oxheart, Theodore Rex.  I’ve likely overlooked a few in this short list.  More restaurants to visit and revisit, and likely some revisions to be made.
 
“What is the best restaurant in Houston?”  I hope to know in the coming months, or at least offer a more informed opinion.

​On Houston Public Media the other day, I heard a rebroadcast of an interview with Paul Galvani, who used to write about dining for the Houston Press and who had recently written a book with his wife, Lost Restaurants of Houston that highlights the most interesting restaurants of the city’s past.  The history of dining and how it has evolved and continues to evolve has long intrigued me, and I need to pick up a copy of the book.  The interview also reminded of an article I penned for My Table some time ago about how Texas Monthly saw the Houston restaurant scene back in the mid-1970s, now over four decades ago.  It’s changed considerably.
 
“Dining out is a highly personal experience.” is how the section on restaurants sagely begins in Texas Monthly’s Guide to Houston by Felicia Coates and Harriet Howle that was published in 1976 (and sold for $3.95).  Recently found in a friend’s rent house, this provides an interesting and often smile-inducing record of the not too distant past of the Houston restaurant scene, or at least a certain vantage point of it.  Unfortunately, this period was not nearly as glorious or historically important as the recent bygone culinary record of New York, Paris or New Orleans.  But, this time does seem very distant.  Thankfully.
 
Aiming to provide a representative overview of the best in Houston dining, not just fine-dining with over 140 restaurants were profiled.  Interestingly, that included four cafeterias and four ice cream parlors (including the abhorrently named Udder Delight).  There were plenty of steaks, sandwiches, Gulf filets and oysters, several oddly themed eateries (the Great Mine Company, anyone?) plus Mexican, Greek, red- and white-sauced Italian, and cornstarch and MSG-laden Chinese joints, but hardly the diversity that exists today.  At the higher end, French dishes are rather French-named dishes dominated, and all of the most highly rated restaurants were Gallic or their Francophile brethren Continental.  The two most highly rated restaurants were a past version of Tony’s and Maxim’s, followed in the second tier by Brennan’s, and the long gone Courtlandt’s and Foulard’s.  Tellingly, there was room for Benihana’s, TGI Friday’s and Steak and Ale.
 
Some of the dishes that make their appearance in the reviews are venerable species who are nearly extinct from local menus: baked Alaska, chauteaubriand, beef à la Stroganoff, crêpe Suzette, Grand Marnier soufflé, egg foo young, gazpacho, snapper Pontchartrain, trout Véronique, steak Diane, veal Berçy, lobster thermidor, and plenty of “drinkable desserts.”  On the lower end, surprising to me, barbecue was not that important, and Otto’s was deemed to be paramount.  Of course, you get the impression that these authors didn’t venture into the neighborhoods where the best barbecue was served.
 
The reporting and prose can seem unintentionally comical, at times, in retrospect, if revealing: Trader Vic’s, “has one of the most varied, interesting menus in town”; gnocchi “are poached”; crostini is “fried bread”; Mongolian beef is Cantonese fare; “Anglos” are welcomed at certain profiled Mexican, Greek and Chinese eateries; “the still life crowd appreciates the marinated mushrooms”, (though the portraiture set is left unmentioned); “the lasagna lacked character” (but nothing about the personality); Ninfa’s tacos al carbon filled with the “barbecued beef” are recommended; enchiladas Suizas needed a description, and, we are told that “many Houston restaurants are the stepchildren of architects and decorators who add food as an afterthought.”  As these and “carpenters” were mentioned in other profiles, it appears that a comparatively large percentage of the building trades were also restaurateurs during the 1970s.  Though the writing is often odd, the attitude and palates endearingly mid-century WASP provincial, the authors were not without some wit: “Cowboys and Indians dine” at Maharajah; the “service is heel-clicking” at Bismarck’s; and Maxim’s décor is “a nouveau riche Texan’s restaurant-bordello.”
 
Luckily, Houston has grown quite a bit in terms of restaurant quality and culinary know how, like the country as a whole.  There’s probably been a greater range of change here, as Houston went from a veritable restaurant backwater by most objective standards (just a few years earlier liquor in restaurants was legalized), to one of the very best in the country.  As transplants from elsewhere began to settle here in droves in the 1970s, and then with the increased immigration from south of the border and Southeast Asia, especially, has made Houston a truly international city, and one that demanded more varied and better places to dine.  A perusal of this guide shows how much the restaurant scene has improved in the subsequent thirty years.  And, hopefully, the restaurant writing, too.

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An excellent dish from an excellent meal at Tony's, which was a stalwart in the mid-1970s and remains so today.