Photo by mintprofusion

Oysters affected by red tide are toxic to humans.

​On January 27, two small portions of Texas Gulf waters were conditionally opened to shellfish harvesting after a red tide epidemic forced the indefinite closure of oyster season in October.

San Antonio and Espiritu Santo Bays were approved by the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department for commercial oyster harvesting, while the Texas Department of State Health Services closely monitored the waters for remaining signs of this year's devastating red tide.

Cautiously optimistic news came yesterday from Jim Gossen, owner of Louisiana Foods and oyster expert, who stated that the red tide appears to have finally subsided.

"It appears that, as of the end of last week, the red tide in Galveston Bay has officially dissipated," Gossen wrote. He was quick to caution, however, that this does not mean that Texas Gulf waters are now fully open for oyster harvesting.

"No higher than acceptable readings were found anywhere in Galveston Bay last Thursday or Friday," Gossen reported of the red tide's toxins, which are produced by an overabundance of algal bloom. In the Gulf of Mexico, the algae responsible for red tides is Karenia brevis, algae that occurs naturally in the ocean.

In normal periods, the algae is present in much lower concentrations and poses no threat to marine life. During a drought, like the one Texas just experienced, a red tide can and often will occur as the result of a lack of fresh water flowing into increasingly salty Gulf waters.

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My own personal version of heaven, served up at our No. 1 pick.

​For the next 20 weeks, we'll be rounding up the runners-up to our 2011 Best of Houston® winners. In many categories, picking each year's winner is no easy task. We'll be spotlighting 20 of those categories, in which the winner had hefty competition from other Houston bars and restaurants.

Houston has two world-class sushi restaurants headed its way in 2012: Uchi, to open in the old Felix space at Montrose and Westheimer, and Katsuya by Starck, which will become another tenant in the tony West Ave development. Our sushi landscape will undoubtedly change dramatically with these two heavy-hitters, which could render this entire list moot shortly.

But for now, here are our top picks for when you get the raw fish jones.

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​Lucky Peach is the new food magazine from the cool kids at McSweeney's, part Gourmet for hipsters and part zine. It's not always appetizing -- the latest [and only the magazine's second] issue features a five-page spread of rotting food transforming into nightmarish new foods -- but it's been interesting so far.

This latest issue delves into more than just drawings of decomposing fruit; it's a guide, of sorts, to the "sweet spot" of various foodstuffs. There's an illustrated guide to leaving things in your refrigerator until ripe, an incredibly detailed recipe for creating the perfect, multi-layered Arnold Palmer cake, and a photo spread of dealing a death blow to a striped bass at that ideal moment: the ike jime process in action, or the Japanese art of killing fish.

Unlike our stories on ike jime -- which focused on Gulf-caught fish like red snapper -- the Lucky Peach story shows the death of a Long Island striped bass. Of course, the techniques demonstrated in Lucky Peach are different from the ones that we highlighted (see our cover story from August: "The Fish That Got Away"), but that's just ike jime: There's no one "right way" to kill every fish.

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Photo by djfpaagman

Red Lobster's shrimp swimming in their natural habitat: butter.

​Recently, during a particularly rowdy Sunday Funday, a three-second flash across the screen of Red Lobster's famous Cheddar Bay Biscuits caught the attention of a few friends of mine. The Red Lobster commercial was promoting the restaurant's limited-time-only Endless Shrimp deal, but it was the cheddar biscuits that really caught the eye.

Drunk and vowing to wreak havoc on the helpless little endless shrimp and free baskets of fluffy, cheesy biscuits, my friend Mike put together a Facebook invite for a bunch of our friends. He named the event Cheddar biscuits! and somehow, more than 10 of us responded as "attending." The group consisted of a couple veterans, a few who hadn't dined at the chain in at least 10 years, and one Red Lobster virgin.

Anxious and giddy with the "endless" possibilities, we made our way over to the restaurant's Highway 290 location last Tuesday night. I have to say, upon arrival, I was shocked. The atmosphere of Red Lobster has come a long way in the years since I've last visited. The restaurant was dimly lit, with the slow rhythms of jazz softly wafting through the dining room. "Where the eff am I?", I thought.

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Photo by Brandon Fisch

Mahi mahi with watermelon radish, jicama and avocado.

​​This year leading up to our annual Best of Houston issue, we're counting down our 100 favorite dishes in Houston. This list comprises our favorite dishes from the last year, dishes that are essential to Houston's cultural landscape and/or dishes that any visitor (or resident) should try at least once.

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Human beings: acting like jerks since we killed off the pupfish.

​Yesterday, we touched briefly on the plight of the idiot fish, a small red fish with giant, round marbles for eyes. It's delicious, despite its odd appearance. And it's also endangered. Yet it's still sold and served across the world.

The idiot fish is only "endangered," however, not "critically endangered." There are degrees of being endangered, after all. And a critically endangered species is one that is in real, immediate danger of having its numbers decimated by 80 percent within three generations.

So these critically endangered species must be under some sort of protection, right? We don't eat California condors or mountain gorillas after all.

Nope. Endangered fish, no matter what their popularity, don't get the kind of attention and therefore protection that their mammalian counterparts do. For every Iberian lynx that is saved, there are a dozen critically endangered fish that will continue to be fished, sold and consumed.

This is our list of the 10 fish you can buy and eat right now that are endangered. Some are merely endangered, while the ones toward the top are critically endangered. Either way, these fish should be avoided where and whenever possible.

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The idiot fish is endangered for a reason: It's delicious.

​A couple of weeks back, I enjoyed a beautiful dinner at Kubo's next to a table of hilariously drunk Japanese people boisterously eating sashimi off a giant wooden boat that acted as a centerpiece/serving tray, while my dining companion and I marveled at our smaller -- yet no less impressive -- arrangement of sashimi that we'd ordered omakase-style. In other words, whatever Chef Kiyoka Ito wanted to send out that night.

I'd also been interested in something else I spotted on Kubo's specials menu: idiot fish, or kinki. I'd tried all of the other fish Kubo's had listed as specials, but never idiot fish. So I decided to give it a shot.

It turns out that idiot fish is endangered. I didn't find this out until long after I'd reveled in the fish's soft, pale pink flesh, the same glossy color of the inside of a conch shell, and long after I'd eaten its head and bones fried to a golden crisp. I mourned eating the poor endangered idiot fish on Twitter the next day.

"If everyone looked at the IUCN redlist, there'd be a lot less fish eaten," responded P.J. Stoops, local fish expert at Louisiana Foods, who also runs the company's weekly Total Catch Market. "That's how much trouble a LOT of stocks are in," he continued.

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Photo by Troy Fields

​​This year leading up to our annual Best of Houston issue, we're counting down our 100 favorite dishes in Houston. This list comprises our favorite dishes from the last year, dishes that are essential to Houston's cultural landscape and/or dishes that any visitor (or resident) should try at least once.

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GLOW, a Rockport restaurant, serves Jim Naismith's sashimi-grade Gulf red snapper.

​This is the final installment of our series on sashimi-grade Gulf fish. Read parts one, two and three for more on ike jime and the Gulf Coast.

A tidy white boathouse is set back from the shore of Little Bay's dark blue waters in Rockport. Seagulls cry overhead and brightly colored signal flags flap loudly in the wind. It's a sunny day in this tiny resort town, just north of Corpus Christi, and GLOW is open for business.

Inside the boathouse, owner Karey Johnson has whitewashed the walls and created three separate areas in the small space: a cozy, wood-toned bar area featuring handmade cocktails; a miniscule kitchen, the activities in which are easily visible through a large window; and a dining room with tall ceilings and mustard-toned leather booths among mismatched chairs. Sunlight fills the entire space.

The menu at GLOW features Jim Naismith's red snapper among its short list of dishes. Johnson is an advocate of using as many local products as possible in her restaurant, which has a modern French edge to it. I sip a jalapeño-laden cocktail and wait for my lunch to arrive: grilled red snapper over a large market salad.

I'm eager to taste the fruits of the labor I witnessed aboard the La Victoria only the day before, to see if Naismith's fish really does taste better...or even just different.

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​​This year leading up to our annual Best of Houston issue, we're counting down our 100 favorite dishes in Houston. This list comprises our favorite dishes from the last year, dishes that are essential to Houston's cultural landscape and/or dishes that any visitor (or resident) should try at least once.

More >>