The Most Exciting Place to Eat in America Right Now Is in Texas

Is there anything sadder than missing your first dinner in a new city because your plane was delayed? Well, yes, but I had been looking forward to starting at the South Asian emporium Aga’s like a mountaineer awaiting a blessing from the right kind of weather. And not because the Houston Chronicle had just named it the best restaurant in the city. “This is the only place in Houston I’d ever go for Pakistani cuisine,” a Pakistani acquaintance had insisted. “Apologies if you’re vegan.”

I clutched a note listing his favorites as my Uber hurtled through Houston’s vast web of highways. The city is huge. It was New Year’s Day, and service was set to conclude in 30 minutes. I had gory visions of arriving to dining chairs being turned up over tables. Instead I encountered 700 still-aspiring diners milling outside and servers sprinting by with giant trays of mango lassi with the consistency of molasses.

And that is how I ended up having my goat seekh kebab and chicken kali mirch karahi as takeout on the benches outside Vishala Grocery next door, staring at an Office Depot. The South Asian families who wandered by cast approving nods at my to-go containers. Surely, they were veterans of similar circumstances.

Over the past decade, Houston has experienced a fine-dining renaissance like many other cities. But I visited to soothe an expat’s longing. I’m from Brooklyn; I get nervous when I’m too far from the nearest chả lụa (Vietnamese pork sausage). And if you prowl the food message boards of Austin, where I live half the year, the wistful guidance is always the same: Go to Houston.

H-Town is Immigrant City. Nearly half its population speaks a language other than English at home. Its Asiatown neighborhood, as it’s known, is 8 miles long. Since the 1980s, America’s largest, or near-largest, diasporas of Nigerians, Vietnamese, South Asians, and Central Americans have made their home here, drawn by the familiar climate; employment in oil, gas, and fishing; and the low cost of living. They have been welcomed by a city that “might not be so beautiful on the outside, but there’s so much heart,” as June Rodil, a Philippines-born Master Sommelier and partner at Goodnight Hospitality, told me. As an immigrant, I had come to Houston to remember just how much immigrant cuisine has enriched the national palate.

For John Nguyen, head chef at Cajun Kitchen, it’s a marvel that Vietnamese and Cajun cuisines ever existed independently of each other. My sauce-spotted notebook was fighting for space with butter-grilled oysters with nam jim jaew and 4 pounds of young crawfish in sweet-and-savory preparations involving tamarind, oranges, fish sauce, and Thai basil. “Cajun cooking makes a lot of sense to Vietnamese people,” he said. “We love to eat communally, get our hands dirty, suck on the heads. And we add our little things to it. Everyone’s trying to experiment. It’s still evolving.” 

These old-school operators are top of mind for the next generation of hyphenated Houstonian chefs. “This area is so personal to me,” Vanarin Kuch, chef-owner at Koffeteria, a Cambodian-inspired bakery and café, said, referring to the old Chinatown location of his shop downtown. “My uncle used to own a Cambodian Chinese restaurant two blocks away — if you were Cambodian in Houston, that’s where you got married.” Kuch makes a Cambodian elote cornbread with coconut milk, scallion, and chile oil, a marriage of pot ang (Cambodian street corn) and hometown heat: “It’s my love letter to Houston.”

Young chefs are also using the opportunity of a city that welcomes their cooking to revive unblended traditions. At CasaEma, chefs Nicolas Vera and Stephanie Velasquez honor the bread, coffee, and nixtamalization traditions of their Mexican ancestors. At Maximo, when Adrian Torres was given an unexpected opportunity to take over what had been a Tex-Mex restaurant, he dropped the “Tex” part. The results, like a museum-worthy tuna tiradito with compressed jicama, are spellbinding. “I want people to know I’m an immigrant,” he said. “I want people to see that you can come here and do big things. We shouldn’t be hiding.”

Some chefs are sidestepping tradition altogether: The only heritage Nick Wong and Lisa Lee are honoring at the upscale Asian American diner Agnes and Sherman, where they serve crawfish egg foo young and cheeseburger fried rice, is their own. “A lot of Asian American narratives are about preserving your grandmother’s recipes, and they’re beautiful,” Wong said. “But our parents didn’t cook. I started cooking because they didn’t have time to. You don’t have to be traditional to be authentic. It’s just food.” 

My fearless local guide in some of these explorations was the beloved 2013 F&W Best New Chef Chris Shepherd, whose restaurants have not only trained many of the city’s best chefs but also drawn attention to the immigrant food that made Shepherd, a Nebraskan, first fall in love with his adopted city. “People don’t understand Houston,” he said. “You have to get off the freeway.” 

On my last night in Houston, I traded strip malls and office parks for open water and the ultimate nonimmigrant food. In the tiny Gulf Coast town of Kemah, 45 minutes from Houston, Choctaw chef David Skinner serves some of the most dazzling Indigenous cuisine in America at his restaurant Ishtia: deer cheek in potato ribbons, a diver scallop in “corn butter,” a tree-shaped tuile over a dish of beets and edible flowers. “Five years ago, I started serving Native dishes, but I didn’t tell people,” he said. “And they would always say those were their favorite. Ingredients from North and South America have populated more than 60 cuisines around the world. It takes people home.”

Where to eat in Houston