A half bucket of crawfish -- around two dozen mudbugs with corn and potatoes -- is selling for $11.95 at Ragin Cajun on Richmond.
Crawfish prices are hitting new records this year with some restaurants charging as much as $5.50 a pound for boiled crawfish. Two pounds for $10, once an unthinkable amount to pay for mudbugs, is now average.
David Wildbur, the owner of the just-opened Sage (2221 Alabama), originally wanted to call the romantic restaurant The Garden Inn. But when he went down to the TABC to obtain his liquor license, he discovered that the name "was taken, so, on the spur of the moment I decided to call it Sage." Why Sage? "You know the song 'Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme'? Well, I like that song and besides, sage has a double meaning." Sage it is.
I like to go to farmers’ markets on Saturday mornings. The Midtown market and the one on Richmond are my favorites. But it's interesting to compare Houston's farmers’ markets with others around the country and around the world. Here are some photos taken on a Saturday morning while I was in Monterrey, Mexico, visiting that city’s first Taco Bell. -- Robb Walsh
Felix Mexican Restaurant was the granddaddy of Houston Tex-Mex. It was named for Felix Tijerina, a Mexican immigrant who worked at The Original Mexican Restaurant on Fannin before opening his own Tex-Mex restaurant, The Mexican Inn, in 1929. Felix’s first Montrose location opened in 1937.
The flagship restaurant at 904 Westheimer opened in 1948. At the time, a regular dinner cost 50 cents. In the heyday of the chain, there were six Felix Mexican restaurants in Houston and Beaumont. Tijernia became active in Houston politics and was a four-time national president of LULAC.
“Once you get into Indonesian culture, you really get into it,” he told me. “It’s a very powerful thing.”
Over a pile of the Indonesian fish cakes called otak otak, Oseland explained how he got hooked on the Spice Islands. The son of an office products salesman, he grew up in an average middle class home in California. In 1982, he was studying film at the Art Institute in San Francisco. That year, his life changed dramatically when a classmate invited him to spend the summer at her family’s home in Indonesia.
What $13 gets you: A surprisingly generous portion of fresh, delicious Japanese cuisine in a swank, luxurious setting.
Good sushi for $13? Impossible, right? I thought so, too, until I recently wandered into Zake Sushi Lounge, which is set in that same little strip as the old Alabama Theater.
I stopped eating sushi a long time ago, and not because I don’t love it because I do. And it wasn’t because of that recent New York Times report on high mercury levels in sushi because, hey, we all gotta die sometime. I stopped eating sushi because I couldn’t afford it. And, anyway, it sucks to drop 60 bucks or more on a meal and still be hungry. (Note to self: raw fish followed by day-old pizza will cause tummy ache.)
The Bushmills people got their distilling license 400 years ago, so they are celebrating with a premium blend called Bushmills 1608 which will be available only during the anniversary year of 2008. No, it doesn’t have any 400 year old whiskey in the blend, but they claim it was made with some kind of special crystal malt.
The master distiller kindly sent me an itty-bitty sample bottle, which I drank for breakfast a few mornings ago with a fried egg and toast. The whiskey is aged in sherry barrels, like Black Bush, so it has a sweet aftertaste that kind of reminds me of butterscotch. It’s bottled at a full 46 percent alcohol, so the flavor is intense. The aroma reminds me of an aged Cognac – and so does the price.
It’s a lovely breakfast beverage on the whole, but personally, I’d rather have five bottles of regular Bushmills, which has always been my favorite Irish whiskey anyway. – Robb Walsh
Then, a couple of weeks ago, I received a tiny perfume bottle of the new super premium Jameson in the mail.
Jameson’s Rarest Vintage Reserve is evidently a blend of the oldest and rarest whiskeys the distillery has on hand. The flavor is more intense than regular Jameson’s – mainly because it’s bottled at a higher proof – 46 percent alcohol compared to the usual 40 percent. In fact, I had to add a couple of drops of water to a snifter of the stuff before I could a good whiff of the stuff.
Ask your typical Brit or Anglophile where the term “bangers” comes from, and you’ll hear a stiff-upper-lipped tale of World War II, meat rationing and high water content in sausages which popped when cooked too long. This 2005 BBC News story on “The politics of sausage” sums up that version of the term’s origin:
“Bangers” dates from WWII - high water content meant they exploded when fried
One problem: Aussies have been calling sausages “bangers” since at least WWI. The Oxford English Dictionary’s first citation comes from 1919, in W.H. Downing’s Digger Dialects, a glossary of phrases and terms used by Australian soldiers during the Great War. The term popped up again in 1928 in the Weekly Dispatch before, ahem, exploding into common usage as a result of watery links during the Second World War.
I have fulfilled a lifelong dream.
For years now, I have secretly envied those fortunate few who man the tortilla stations at Mexican restaurants. What could be more fulfilling than playing with dough all day? Could there be a more therapeutic job? I have longed to sink my fingers into a balled-up, uncooked tortilla. I have wondered what it would feel like to mold it, roll it, cook it, eat it — fresh off the whatchamacallit.
I am also inept at cooking.
And so, armed only with my dream and my handicap, I contacted the original Ninfa’s on Navigation and asked to shadow a tortilla maker during a low-volume shift. Miraculously, General Manager Heath Beeman agreed.
In this week’s Café review, I wrote about the breakfast offerings at the Pakistani halal chicken shack and curry joint called Kings Chicken on Beechnut.
Where: Prince’s Hamburgers, 3899 Southwest Freeway, 713-626-9950
What $13 gets you: Stuffed
It seems to me that $13 at Prince’s Hamburgers ought to cover lunch or dinner for two, but it doesn’t. Even if you steer clear of the big ticket items such as the fried shrimp basket ($9.95) or chicken-fried steak ($7.95) and just get the classics – two cheeseburgers with fries ($5.45 each) and two Cokes ($1.50 each) – you wind up breaking the bank. So what to do?
Go alone and pig out.
