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When you order the 75-cent Afghani-style nan bread at Kings Chicken on Beechnut near Wilcrest, they bake it for you fresh, Jay Francis enthused.

We ordered some and then hung around the front counter and watched the cooks in the kitchen throwing the big piece of dough in the air like a good pizza crust. Then they slid the dough into the hot steel oven. A few minutes later, they brought the giant flatbread to our table – it was too hot to touch.

“This is the second best bread in Houston,” Francis said as we tore into the crispy-crusted, puffy loaf. (The best, he claimed, is the Afghani nan at Himalaya restaurant on Hillcroft.) The nan resembled a folded over pizza without any toppings. We used pieces of it to mop up some spicy chicken korma.

Misir wot is an extremely spicy dish that food explorer Jay Francis calls “Ethiopian chili.” It’s a vegetarian stew of split lentils simmered in red chile sauce with ginger and garlic. I watched Francis spread a huge serving of the stuff on injera bread and sprinkle it with beriberi, the Ethiopian chili powder. Then he rolled the whole thing up into an Ethiopian chili taco.

“The Lucy Show at the Museum of Natural Science made me really hungry for Ethiopian food,” Francis told me as we sat at a table in the cozy little restaurant called Nazareth Cafe on Chimney Rock. I helped him mop up the chili with the rest of the injera bread. An order of misir wot goes for $7.99 at Nazareth Cafe and it’s probably the best vegetarian chili I've ever tasted.

Food explorer Jay Francis roams the city in his spare time looking for cool things to eat. Bicultural burgers are one of his favorite genres and he really hit the jackpot with this one.

The $7.99 gigante tortaburger at Tortas El Angel is a double cheeseburger torta on talera bread with refried beans, lettuce, tomato, onion, jalapeño and avocado. It feeds two easily. The ground meat patties were a little overcooked for my tastes, but the sandwich was such a riot of flavors, I loved it anyway.