Outstanding article in the Houston Press about Houston taco trucks and trailers.
This is what being a Houston Foodie is all about. This has got to be one of my all-time favorite lines from a food reviewer:
“The raw-flavored dried chile salsa came on like mole poblano’s punk-ass cousin.”
Classic.
"If you could have anything to eat right now, at this exact moment, what would it be?" If you want to work-up a true Foodie this is the question to ask.
Some will give an immediate answer, some will ponder for a moment. Some will give a different answer every time they are asked, some will always give the same answer. I would say 9 out of 10 times I will answer "Baby Back Ribs."
One of my favorite Baby Back Rib recipes is from Alton Brown's Good Eats program on the Food Network. This is a braising recipe, not BBQ. Braising usually involves the "low-and-slow" cooking technique which inevitably leads to meat following off the bone. And that is the way I like it.
The basics: a meaty slab of baby back ribs and dry rub ingredients.
Dry rub applied, allow to marinate overnight if possible.
Wrap that rascal in tin foil and add braising liquid.
A few hours later, we have reached the promise land.
The braising liquid makes an incredible sauce. BBQ sauce? We don't need no stinking BBQ sauce!
Let me at it!.
Tender as a mother's love, falling off the bone, moist, perfectly seasoned. I'd like to write more but I'm drooling on the keyboard. Bon appetit!
Being passionate about food and restaurants is both a blessing and a curse. You get to spend alot of time in great places, with great people, eating great food.
On the other hand alot of the food you eat is not exactly “lite”. I get asked alot about how I stay healthy and keep a normal weight for my age and height. Fortunately, the way to do it is not rocket science. The hard part is having the discipline to stick with the plan. Here are a few tips I live by to stay healthy and energetic.
Read More...1. Exercise. 30 minutes a day of reasonable aerobic exercise is half the battle.
2. When eating at a restaurant, eat half the dinner and take the rest home for lunch the next day. This technique can really challenge the discipline of a foodie. Having to deny yourself that half plate of the delicious food in front of you is a real test. But after you do it a few times, it gets easier. I promise.
3. Eat whole, not processed, food. I’m not a scientist so I don’t have any proof of this, but from my experience processed food in any quantity makes you fat and lethargic. Instead of eating 1 pop tart, eat 2, even 3, bananas.
4. Don’t drink soft drinks. They are basically a container of chemicals and sugar that goes directly to your waistline.
5. Drink water. Lots of water. Again, I can’t give any scientific explanations, but drinking lots of water somehow helps to cleanse your system and help digestion.
6. Get the most bang for your nutritional buck. Why eat a bowl of iceberg lettuce that has very little nutritional value, when you can eat a bowl of fresh spinach that is bursting with vitamins and fiber? If taste is an issue, just throw on some non-fat, all-natural salad dressing. Don’t know what foods have the most nutritional density? Glad you asked. Check out The World’s Healthiest Foods website. This site includes incredibly detailed nutritional information about all the food you should be eating. Highly recommended.
7. If you’ve got a sweet tooth, keep it as simple as possible. Obviously fruit is the first choice. And you can always dress it up–some fresh sliced peaches with a drizzle of whole milk and a sprinkle of sugar is refreshing and satisfying. When you crave chocolate–and every foodie craves chocolate–just stick with the good ol’ Hershey’s chocolate bar. And as much as it hurts, keep the chocolate ice cream to once a month.
A good part of my mis-spent youth was spent working at Quatorze Bis in NYC. How did I end up there?
Well, after 5 years in college and a $100K in tuition, what is a young, highly-educated and ambitious young man to do? Move to NY and work as a waiter/bartender/maitre d’ of course. I liked to call it “graduate school for life”. My family was NOT AMUSED.
Anyway, as a maitre d’ I could eat whatever I wanted off the menu and drink whatever was behind the bar every night I worked. Cassoulet? Check. Steak-frites? Check. Choucroute garnie? Check. And my mouth still waters when I think of the chicory salad with bacon and a hot vinaigrette...
Fettuccine Alfredo is one of those dishes that looks simple on paper, yet you can spend a lifetime perfecting it.
It’s also unique in that it’s an Italian-inspired dish (the Italian version being Fettuccine al burro) that contains no garlic or olive oil. The trick to great FA, in my experience, is to layer enough mellow, sweet flavors into the dish to balance the savory sharpness of the fresh Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese.
Read More...Here’s my trick. Sure, the sweet butter and heavy cream add a mellow sweetness to the sauce. But one more layer can’t hurt, and I add a bit more sweetness and zing with one of my all time favorite ingredients: shallots. Start by sweating the chopped shallots in a full stick of butter over medium heat. Add a pinch of salt and fresh cracked pepper to get the seasoning started. At this point, take a deep breath. The aroma of the bubbling butter and shallots is just plain sexy. Once the shallots are translucent, add lots of heavy cream. Cook down for a few minutes and add the fresh, finely-grated Parmigiano cheese. Don’t let it get too thick! Perfect creaminess is the goal here. Taste for seasoning and add salt if necessary.
Another couple of minutes and it’s ready to go. And now for the final ingredient: freshly chopped, Italian flat-leaf parsley. Not only do the green parsley specks add a beautiful visual texture to the pale sauce, the little spikes of bitterness add yet another layer of flavor to the whole dish. Once the ingredients are combined, take the pan off the heat. If you’ve timed it perfectly, you can transfer the cooked fettuccine directly into the pan, twisting the pasta into the sauce with tongs. Add a bit of pasta water to loosen up the sauce if necessary. Let sit for a couple of minutes to let the pasta soak up the sauce. Transfer to a serving dish, add a sprinkle of parsley and Parmagiano, and let the culinary love begin!
“I remember eating there when I was a kid!” This is the initial response when I invite my thirtysomething friends to dinner at Felix Mexican Restaurant. But this is usually followed by, “Let’s go somewhere else.”
Indeed, dining at Felix can be a lonely, as well as satisfying, affair. Living nearby, I pass Felix every day and never see more than 2 or 3 tables occupied. Suffice it to say that no reservations are necessary. Obviously, the history of Felix is long and colorful and beyond the scope of this review. But in order to set the stage I’ll briefly give my own personal experience with Felix Mexican restaurant.
Read More...Growing up in Beaumont, Texas, there were two choices for Mexican food: Felix (owned by the same family as the Felix in Houston) and Monterrey House. Monterrey House was closer to the “nicer” neighborhoods of Beaumont, so that is where we dined more often. Felix was on Calder Ave. on the way into downtown, you couldn’t miss it. By the time I got a driver’s license, I would occasionally trek to Felix for what my young palate deemed the superior Mexican food in Beaumont. And like the Felix in Houston in 2007, dining at the Felix in Beaumont circa 1985 was a lonely affair–I was usually the only one in the place. Around this time the Casa Ole Mexican restaurant chain got its start in Beaumont and that’s where all the cool kids hung out. Stubbornly, I continued patronizing Felix, sometimes taking dates there. Being 17 years old, on a first date, in an empty Mexican restaurant, surrounded by puzzled Mexican waiters, and eating food that would be considered boring compared to Casa Ole’s atomic tex-mex, well, let’s just say I didn’t get alot of second dates. After moving away from Beaumont to go to college, I never went back to a Felix restaurant until I moved to Houston. And it was at the remaining Felix restaurant near Montrose and Westheimer where I found myself dining on a Tuesday night not long ago.
Food/Drink (5/10)
First things first: magarita, chips and salsa.
The margarita was strong and tasty, nothing special, but enjoyable and satisfying. The chips were hot and fresh. The salsa was clearly old-school. Very tomato-ey, but surprisingly sweet with a spicey kick. The kick must have come from jalapenos as I could not detect any recognizable cilantro or garlic. Compared to contemporary tex-mex salsa, the sweetness and wateriness of this salsa may be off-putting for some diners. For me it was a welcome change.
Felix is known for its chili con queso, but tonite I went straight for the combination plate, Felix Mexican Dinner #1. This consisted of a beef taco, rice, tostada “veracruzana”, tamale, and cheese enchilada, with the final two smothered in Felix’s signature chili gravy. And you know this is old-school tex-mex when you can get an optional side of spaghetti and chili gravy. Tempting, but maybe next time.
The tostada, rice, tamale, enchilada and chili gravy were all quite bland but well-prepared and enjoyable; these are recipes suited to a palate from the 1950s when the experience of gastronomical fireworks was not the norm it is today. The one standout feature of the enchilada was the presence of fresh, crisp and very sweet chunks of onion sprinkled over the top of the cheesy enchiladas. You don’t see this alot in contemporary tex-mex.
The standout dish was the beef taco. The taco shell was made the old-school way–fresh corn tortilla fried and shaped until golden brown. This results in a perfect edible container for the ground beef, lettuce and tomatoes. Unlike store-bought taco shells which are so crispy they often break up during eating, tacos shells prepared this way retain a chewy/crispy texture that holds its form after biting into it. The beef was coarsely ground and spicey, and the lettuce fresh. The chopped tomatoes had a peculiar orange tint to them, but by all measures were fresh and flavorful.
Having been denied flan during a previous visit to a different tex-mex restaurant, I ordered it here for dessert (flan and sopapillas were the only desserts offered). What arrived was, again, bland yet edible. The caramel syrup was watery but sufficiently sweet. The custard had a good, silky texture, but lacked any flavor of cream or vanilla that is to be expected from good flan. Strangely, the plate was warm but the flan was (appropriately) cold.
Generally, this is the same food I remember from growing up. Of all the dishes, the beef tacos have stood the test of time better than anything else. On future visits to Felix (and there will be many as long as it is open) I will order the beef taco plate and an obligatory side of chili con queso.
Service (7/10)
The service was excellent. There were literally more staff in the restaurant than customers.
Atmosphere (6/10)
From the half-broken neon signs and faded Houston Press banner claiming “best retro-mex 2004” on the outside, to an interior filled with rickety hand-painted chairs and walls covered with pictures of the Felix Tijerina family, the atmosphere at the Felix Mexican Restaurant is, like the food, a fascinating time-warp. The sheet of glass covering my table protected pictures and nametags from a recent reunion of Lamar High School c/o 1954.
Value (4/10)
Although the food may be from the 1950s, the prices are not. Most entrees are in the $10 range, comparable to the higher end of prices at contemporary tex-mex restaurants like La Mexicana. But Felix has a loyal and captive audience who is willing to pay these prices to get the retro-mex food that they crave.
The Bottom Line (5/10)
Felix unapologetically gives its loyal customers exactly what they want: time-warp tex-mex food from the 1950s, attentively prepared, forever unchanging. If a contemporary Mexican restaurant were serving this food, it would not be a Foodie Favorite. But this is Felix, and respect must be paid. Being a Foodie is not just about gastronomical adventure. It is also about tradition and history. The value of Felix–aside from providing enjoyable if somewhat bland retro tex-mex food–is that it remains a still-living culinary baseline from which to evaluate all other tex-mex.
PostScript: By total coincidence, the day after visiting Felix here in Houston, I was reading the Beaumont newspaper website and found this article about the demolition of the old Felix restaurant location in Beaumont. (80KB PDF)
Foodie Favorite: YesPostScript #2, August 2008: Felix is no more. I went for lunch today and the door was locked and the lights were out. No sign on the door or any other notification of closure. But I, along with a few other bewildered lunch-goers peering through the windows, knew the unspoken truth. We nodded to each other and went our separate ways.
A week-or-so later a sign went up announcing a going-out-of-business sale. I stopped in. Not much to see but a lot of rickety chairs and a stack of old menus. I found a menu with the Houston and Beaumont locations listed and bought it for $10(!). I have made the Felix Restaurant menu available here for posterity. (130KB PDF)
One of the distinctive qualities of living in a large metropolis like Houston is that you can visit certain ethnic stores and restaurants and get a truly authentic feeling that you are in a different country.
Asia Market, a non-descript Thai mini-mart on Cavalcade near Airline just inside the north loop, offers a perfect example of this vicarious culinary travel.
On Saturdays, a table is set up in the front of the store and aspiring cooks within the Houston Thai community bring in their fresh culinary creations for sale and tasting. On this Saturday, it was all Thai desserts–lots of coconut and banana flavors.
Read More...The store shelves are filled with an amazing variety of exotic Thailand/Phillippines/Asian products, both packaged and fresh. A sample is to the left.
The proprietor, after overcoming a healthy suspicion of the caucasian male asking all the nosy questions, explained that on Saturday they cook fresh lunch dishes in the tiny kitchen in the back. Asked about durian, the infamously loved and hated produce native to SE Asia, she explained that the season was May, June and July and I should come back for a fresh sample. Oh I’ll be back.
For today I chose to purchase a fresh Thai dessert known as Kanom Tien.
Kanom Tien is a moist, sticky pastry that comes wrapped in banana leaves. The external dough appears to be made of sticky rice flour and mung bean paste. The texture is reminiscent of a Chinese dumpling, though thicker and stickier. The taste was sweet and earthy and admittedly my first experience with mung beans.
The interior is filled with coconut shavings and thick, sweet jam or jelly.
I can’t say that I’ll be eating Kanom Tien on a regular basis but it definitely satisfied my craving for vicarious culinary travel. You just don’t get this kind of unique flavor anywhere else in Houston. Counting the days until durian season!
Foodie Favorite: Yes
Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are.
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