Almost a Trip Down Memory Lane

Christie's
6029 Westheimer, between Fountain View and Voss
Houston

There used to be a Christie's restaurant on Broadway, in San Antonio. I only went there a couple of times, and it's been gone for many, many years; but everybody seems to remember it fondly.  It has the distinction of being like the Alamo: a well-loved place that people seldom went to. 

The Christie's restaurant in Houston, last survivor of a once-thriving chain, embodies everything that made the old S.A. location so popular: a clean, large, traditional dining room, with cloth table coverings, a menu full of long-time favorite dishes, and a swarm of staff keeping each customer supplied with everything they expect in a good restaurant and each place unobtrusively cleared. It's nice, I think, that a restaurant doesn't cut staff in order to save a few bucks. The quality of service is well worth the relatively slight premium in prices.

We chose this place mostly from a sense of nostalgia, and were rewarded with a pleasant meal at a reasonable price in a comfortable setting. I had the beluche, a snapper fillet topped with mushrooms, shrimp and crab in a light wine sauce. Rick chose the shrimp combination, a dish of fried and stuffed shrimp, with french fries and onion rings. 

Both meals were introduced by unremarkable dinner salads of fresh lettuce with a few classic additions: a little shredded carrot, a wedge of tomato, a handful of croutons; and bread, meaning a couple of hot crusty rolls with butter. This portion of the meal could stand some improvement: I think, for example, that an interesting selection of breads puts a diner in a receptive and mellow mood; and the bit of extra labour that would be needed to compile a more interesting salad would pay as many dividends as the smartly-staffed dining room. But Christie's hesitates to do too much updating, lest they upset their base of regular customers. Maybe a wise choice; I don't know.

The beluche was excellent. The fillet was perfectly cooked, a mark of some artistry in the kitchen (one that I can only achieve myself when the microwave is working properly, which it hasn't been for some time). Christie's kitchen manages it on an old-fashioned grill; I doubt there is a microwave in their kitchen at all. The sauce over it was, as I said, subtle. Rick, who had been noshing on his shrimp, thought it bland, while I thought it was extraordinary. After trying his shrimp, I could see why he couldn't appreciate the beluche without a thorough cleansing of the palate. 

What's that mean?

His shrimp were nicely done, though the light batters used on both the fried and stuffed shrimp seemed unusually sweet. These morsels, cooked in a traditional manner, couldn't compare for interest with the fried shrimp he had eaten the previous night at a nearby Thai restaurant, but they were masterpieces of their type. The stuffed shrimp were particularly impressive, with a nice mix of seafood in a pleasantly textured cornmeal coat. The fries were mere filler, having no merit to speak of, and the onion rings were a tremendous disappointment, being large and crunchy-looking but soft and mealy in the actual consumption.

My sides were steamed broccoli (ordered as an add-on) and a baked potato. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the broccoli was just steamed, not coated with some unnecessary oil or other fat for the table. It was a reasonably large serving of good-quality fresh broccoli, one large stem and a second bunch of florets, a genuine "serving." The potato (cooked in a real oven, not the microwave) was evenly done, large enough to satisfy without being one of those steroidal creations found at more au courant restaurants. The generosity of toppings was extraordinary as well, and included fresh-cut green onion in lieu of a sprinkle of bottled chives; a large dollop of fresh butter, an equally large dollop of sour cream, and an even larger portion of fancy-shredded cheddar cheese.  I don't usually let such toppings go to waste, but there was just so much that I had to leave some behind.

All in all,  a good place for seafood.

The Pleasures of Home

Something I'm reminded of very forcefully: Nothing can make you happier to live in San Antonio than spending a few hours in Houston traffic.

Get Your Mesquite-Grilled Margaritas Right Here

Goode Company Taqueria
4902 Kirby Drive
Houston

(at Westpark)

No, obviously, they don't have mesquite-grilled margaritas; they just have a little trouble with the niceties of the English language. A common enough occurence these days that generally passes unnoticed, except by grammar-wonks (which I have been ever since seeing the signs on the doors of the University of Texas Law School: "These doors are alarmed.") (I never learned what had the doors so agitated.)

What Goode Company Taqueria does have is an extensive breakfast menu made more than usually interesting by the prominence of unusual ingredients; things like venison, nopalitos and quail, for example. 

Our choices from this menu were Buck Fever and Huevos con Venado. The first is a plate of eggs any style, served with two patties of venison sausage, hash brown potatoes and a choice of bread. We chose eggs over easy and biscuits; there was, according to the menu, a choice of sausage with or without jalapeño, but our order-taker didn't ask and we didn't specify. We got sausage without jalapeño. 

What does that mean?

The eggs were cooked perfectly; clearly some restaurant kitchens need to find out where Goode Company trains its people. The sausage was very lean and had a very good flavour with a slight piquancy to it. The biscuits were just okay, not light or fluffy like fresh-made biscuits, but they weren't bad. The potatoes, though, were unappealing, despite a hefty treatment of both ham and bacon in the mix. They were overdone, approaching mushiness, and their dark colour was unappetizing.

The huevos con venado were better to eat than to look at. They are made with ground-up venison sausage mixed into scrambled eggs, and on the plate it looked unappealing: a dry, mottled brown-and-yellow slab. But looks are deceiving. The taste was reasonably good, though the final product was a little dry, as though the egg mixture had lain a moment too long on the grill. This dish was paired with traditional sides: rice and beans, both of which were excellent. The rice even had shredded chicken mixed in, an unexpected pleasure. The tortillas were excellent when warm: thin and flavourful; but they cooled and dried quickly to a chewy cardboard texture.

There is no service at Goode Company Taqueria: you order at the counter and pick up your order when called. The dining room appears comfortable; we sat in the large enclosed patio (there is also an open patio behind) but had trouble finding a table where there was no draft from the fans and air conditioning vents, and no puddles from the leaky roof. The tables are traditional Mexican-style café tables, the chairs metal and vinyl in traditional Mexican colours, inexpensive but comfortable and gay (in the non-sexual sense). The prices seemed a little high but not outrageous; once we were served, they seemed reasonable for what we got.

Come Hungry

Barnaby's Cafe
414 West Gray
Houston

(a few blocks east of Kirby)

The guy at the next table asked for a doggie bag for his Sausalito Chicken Crunch Salad, a dish I had decided to order. I looked at what he was packing up and thought, "He's hardly touched it!" It was a full bowl, and even though he raved about it, I thought there had to be something wrong with him, or something wrong with the salad.

I was wrong on both counts.

But before we got to the salad, we had an appetizer of Sticky Spicy Chicken Won Tons. These were a delicious chicken mixture wrapped in won tons and fried, served on a bed of red cabbage with a dressing made from sweet-and-sour sauce and Thai chili paste, with a kick that sneaks up on you and tingles long after the last drop is gone. Unfortunately, they didn't go well with the weissbier I had chosen to drink, but on their own they were fantastic.

My tablemate asked for a small salad in place of the french fries his entrée normally comes with. Barnaby's, apparently, doesn't really do "small." His salad, fresh greens topped with everything I would have put on it at home if I had no weight issues, was big enough to be a meal in itself. The bacon alone (excellently cooked, thick slices of Applewood-smoked bacon crumbled into a topping) would have done damage to my WeightWatcher's points-plus allotment (which I generally ignore anyway...); the shredded cheddar would have undone me completely.

His choice for dinner was the dish called Coronado beef. ("Coronado," as in the suburb of San Diego; the owner is an escaped Californio and still remembers all the place names.) It was a plate-sized patty of ground beef topped with cheddar and jack cheeses, diced tomatoes and green onions. For all its impressive appearance, it lacked any real interest. The meat was hardly seasoned and was, I thought, underdone for medium, the way it was ordered. It was just big.

What does that mean?

I certainly can't say that about my Sausalito Chicken Crunch salad. It was enormous, big enough to feed three people with average appetites, or two of me. The base of Romaine lettuce vanished under a gigantic pile of Napa cabbage, jicama, grape tomatoes, strips of fried corn tortilla, peanuts and queso fresco. There must have been chicken in there as well. All this was tossed with a light dressing to give it an even moistness and served piled high in a large bowl. The waiter also suggested a "red eye": a shot of hot chili sauce in ranch dressing. I had that on the side, and it added an almost superfluous zing to an already-wonderful mixture of textures and flavours. My one regret in ordering this was that I'm staying in a hotel room with no refrigerator, so a go-box was out of the question. We had to leave enough salad for a complete meal, and a good bit of the Coronado beef as well (though that was less of a heartache).