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).