Flavor Boulevard

Curry rice with tonkatsu – $10.95 – a bit more peppery than the curry rice at Musashi in Berkeley, but still mild enough to my taste, pretty good.

On the western edge of Yosemite National Park is a little town called Sonora. In Sonora there is Koto, the only Japanese restaurant in a 38-mile radius. In Koto, I had saba shio for the first time. It’s a grilled mackerel seasoned with salt, squeeze on some lemon juice if you like. I love homey things like that, especially when it’s so good I wanted it again the next day, but Koto was closed on Sundays. We left on Monday, with a hole in my heart.

Now before I go to any Japanese restaurant, I check if it has saba shio.

Not many do, but Kaneyama does. Only as an appetizer (which means half a mackerel instead of the whole fish) but better than nothing. A delicious crunching sound broke the air as Little Mom broke the skin with her chopsticks. We knew at that instant that the saba shio was the best dish of the day.

Saba shio – $6.25 – Grilled mackerel with salt. So simple and the best of the bunch.

Gindala – $10.95 – Black cod marinated in sweet miso glaze, and they weren’t kidding, it was really sweet. Nice and plump.

The gindala appeared fancier, took longer time to prepare, and I liked the moist, dense, almost doughy flesh of the black cod, but the miso glaze was too sweet. The spinach goma ae, another common Japanese sidedish that I was only recently introduced to and was eager to show Little Mom, didn’t impress her too much because the sesame sauce could also use more salt and less sugar.

Spinach goma ae – $5.50 – a bit expensive for some boiled spinach with black sesame sauce, and not as good as expected. The sesame sauce could use less sugar and more salt.

I was surprised to see okonomiyaki on the menu, however described as a seafood pancake. Feeling demanding for no good reason, I asked the waitress if they could add pork belly, but no luck. 🙁 I was even more surprised when the okonomiyaki was brought to me: instead of the usual round shape I’m used to, this one is two quarters of dough on an oval hot plate, the kind you see with dak bokkeum at Korean restaurants, with copious amount of mayonnaise and katsuobushi (at least this part is familiar). I don’t know where the seafood in “seafood pancake” was. Even the cabbage was scarce. Final verdict: I make better okonomiyaki. 😉

Luckily, Little Mom’s udon with shrimp tempura and Dad’s curry rice with tonkatsu, looking unassuming as they were, actually tasted good. I’m glad, you know, cuz I actually wanted to like this restaurant. Sure, its food needed some fixing to live up to its posh setting, and the saba shio was not as good as the one I had at Koto in that little town Sonora. But I did order things off the beaten path (should have gotten sushi maybe?), and the waitress was cute.

For dessert, I tried my luck again and asked for black sesame ice cream, although it’s not listed on the menu. But Kaneyama is no In ‘n Out with a hidden menu, the manager said no, adding “That was the first time I got this question. Not many people know about it.” Guys, next time you’re at a Japanese restaurant, ask for sesame ice cream.

Okonomiyaki – $8.95 – strange looking and too doughy. I make better.

Udon with shrimp tempura – $10.50 – The noodle soup looks pretty barren (seriously, just kamaboko and spinach?), but the broth is good. The tempura is also good, “not oily” always scores in my book.

Red bean, plum and green tea ice cream – $2.50 each scoop – Too expensive, not good enough, casual pho restaurants have better green tea ice cream than this, but the plum ice cream is good.

Speaking of ice cream, today I realized that I have become a sea urchin of a customer. I asked questions, and returned the wrong scoop of ice cream to the kitchen, although Little Mom said it was fine. (The right scoop turned out to be her favorite and the best flavor. I did something right, Mom 😉 ) In another year will I be sending back a medium well steak when I had asked for medium? (On a few occasions, I thought of sending back pork sausages that weren’t properly defrosted and still a bit pink inside. But I just didn’t eat the sausage.) What will I be then… a durian?

Address: Kaneyama
9527 Westheimer Suite D
Houston, TX 77063
(713) 784-5168
www.kaneyama-houston.us

Lunch for three: $67.76

Happy New Year from Port Arthur, TX. 🙂 Just when I thought El Sombrero Taqueria in Berkeley was interesting for combining Mexican, Indian and Pakistani food under one roof (not in one dish, thank goodness), or I Squared in Oakland for Italian and Iranian, we stumbled onto a Japanese restaurant that also dishes out Chinese, Thai, Indian, and Indonesian.

The lady who greeted us at the door is South Asian, probably Indian, but I can’t tell the difference between the Indian accent and those from the surrounding countries. We were seated as far as possible from the sushi bar and the kitchen, so we couldn’t tell who did the cooking, and our waitress was American. Instead of miso soup to wet our appetite, we were given a stock that tasted similar to hu tieu broth. We were asked if we would prefer normal edamame or spicy edamame. The vegetable that came with the shrimp teriyaki and the grilled steak were mixed baby corn-carrot-bell pepper-snap pea in a stir fry sauce, something that you would find at any Asian diner that gives you the option of 2 sides with a scoop of rice for seven fifty. And the rice that came with the shrimp teriyaki and the steak were Chinese fried rice. Not the most Japanese you can get on this side of the pond.

But it sure did surprise me that even in this town of little more than fifty thousand people, three hours driving eastward from the nearest big Asian community, you can get a taste of ayam kalasan and beef rendang.

Closewise from top left: Ichiban Cajun roll (tempura shrimp, avocado, spicy mayonnaise and unagi sauce) and edamame, soup, shrimp teriyaki, beef rendang, hibachi grilled steak

There were a fair amount of Japanese dishes on the menu (salmon teriyaki, unagi don, soba…) plus the real sushi (nigiri) that we’ll try the next time we visit the Buddhist temple in Port Arthur. They may not be Japanese enough, but what we got were tasty enough.

Maybe not the mochi ice cream, though. But we didn’t tell the southerner-sweet waitress that, she was just too sweet. 🙂

Address: Ichiban Hibachi & Sushi Bar
3437 N Twin City Hwy
Port Arthur, TX 77642
(409) 962-7300
Lunch for three: ~ $60

Legend said the first ever bánh dầy (pronounced |beng yay|) was a flat thick bun of cooked-and-pounded sticky rice, white and chewy and not recommended for dentures. The prince, taught by a Bodhisattva in his dream, made it to represent the sky, and bánh chưng to represent the earth. I don’t think the sky is chewy, but I really like it when it’s white. I also like banh day with silk sausage a lot. But somewhere along the history of Vietnam, somebody gave banh day a mung bean filling, softened the dough (which means more pounding for the sticky rice), rolled it into the size of a pingpong ball, and coated it with mung bean powder. I can NEVER get enough of this thing.

$2 for 3. Found at: Alpha Bakery & Deli (inside Hong Kong City Mall)
11209 Bellaire Blvd # C-02
Houston, TX 77072-2548
(281) 988-5222

Unfortunately, I love them so much that the store-bought version just doesn’t do it for me. With Little Mom’s help, a batch has been made. A recipe is on the way. (UPDATE: the recipe is here.)

Previously on Sandwich Shop Goodies: cudweed sticky rice (xôi khúc)

Little Mom likes Houston because it’s big, I’ve grown to like Berkeley because it’s so tiny I can get around without a car. Little Mom likes our big garden where she can grow 20 trees and who knows how many rose bushes, I’m content with my little dried-plum-container-turned-flower-pot in which I grow my onion. Point is, Little Mom likes big things, and I, well, sometimes like and most of the time don’t mind small things. But as often as she likes big restaurants, Little Mom likes little Cafe Du Bois in Kingwood.

It makes me feel better than if I had liked Cafe Du Bois myself. The joy when you pick out a place and your company likes it, the more important the company to you the bigger the joy, and to top that with a company of people with sensitive, rarely pleased tastebuds, it feels like winning the lottery. And here my mom suggested that we should go to Cafe Du Bois again.

She likes it for the roasted red snapper on rice with a light cream and tomato basil sauce, for being a mere 10 minutes from our house, for the slow, peaceful air of a little French restaurant way in the back of Kingwood Town Center – two old men finished eating before us, us, and another old man who was about to get his order after sipping wine for 30 minutes as we were waiting for our check seemed to be the only customers at lunch that Sunday. The carrot sauce was not too impressive, but she likes the fried yucca. She likes some of many paintings for sale on the walls. The bread was great. She likes the peach carnations on the white table cloths. She loves the creme brulee.

I remember the spinach and strawberry salad being a hair too sweet, the crab cake sandwich a bit dry, the shrimp primavera pretty cheesy. But you know what, Little Mom’s red snapper was good. So I like Cafe Du Bois.

Address: Cafe Du Bois
2845A Town Center Circle West
(Kingwood Town Center)
Kingwood, Texas 77339
(281) 360-2530

Pretty is the right word. Hearsay, or “Heresy” as Aaron calls it for some reason, warms your senses with a large yellow glass chandelier dangling several meters above the bar. The old walls, now lined with artsy thin bricks, bring to mind the image of a mahogany cascade from the high ceiling; tiny specs of light from the chandelier reflect off them like a meteor shower. It feels like a church almost. The only thing that could be remotely heretic here, if you understand “heretic” in its broadest meaning of “being different”, is if you don’t drink and you’re dining with a group of alcohol-appreciating friends just five feet from an alcohol-sparkling bar. Which is exactly what I was doing.

But I found plenty of things to occupy myself with, taking pictures of food being one of them, which would not have been possible without the flash light from Harshita’s iPhone (there was practically no light beside the chandelier). Eating was another possible activity. Our group of odd number managed to share the even number of pieces in the Chef Nick’s Appetizer Plate without too much a fight: the beer-batter-fried asparagus is the easiest to share, one shrimp-and-chicken spring rolls is doable, two crawfish stuffed mushroom and three smoked salmon crostini looked impossible to divide, so we didn’t try.

Except for my cute little stuffed mushrooms having a hair too much salt, every entree tasted as good as it should. Another exception was Varun’s chicken breast stuffed with goat cheese and spinach, which looks exactly like a kolache (already a good point!). That one blew my mind. I won’t look down on all chicken breast anymore.

I don’t know how Varun found this little 123-year-old building-turn-restaurant in the middle of the Warehouse District, but I’m glad he did. It feels unlike any gastro pub I’ve been to, you’re crammed horizontally as people push through between you and the bar seats, but you can always look up and find yourself lost in the space under that super high ceiling. You can order a humongous hamburger with bacon and a fried egg, or go simple and fresh with a caprese salad. You can indulge in as much bread pudding with ice cream as you want, all alone in the dark.

Click to see more pictures from Hearsay.

Address: Hearsay Gastro Lounge
218 Travis Street
Houston, Texas 77002
(713) 225-8079

Sometimes things just refuse to go the way you plan.

I’ve been looking forward to the fried chicken at this place called Number 1 Chicken Rice & Seafood for half a year. It’s in Houston, so I have two time windows each year, each a couple of weeks long, to plan my voyage. Last winter we hit the place less than an hour after they closed (which was like 8 pm, I think), this June we were even more determined. According to Aaron’s sources, they open on Sunday between 6 and 7 pm. Strange, but okay. We camped out at the museum for over an hour because the museum is relatively near Number 1 Chicken, and we didn’t want to take any chances. At 6 we drove into its parking lot. The OPEN sign wasn’t lit up. Aaron checked the schedule posted on the door: they’re closed on Sunday. Fine. I’m not meant to eat Number 1 Chicken’s fried chicken. Surely there must be other fried chickens somewhere along Alameda. Following Varun’s advanced GPS system that didn’t allow us to type in anything unless the car is stopped (for safety reason, even though the one who punched the buttons wasn’t the driver), we drove to a few more possible-blogging-material spots, one of them no longer exists. And all of them were closed. We weren’t even meant to eat on Alameda?!

Accepting fate, we gave up on Alameda and headed back to the Rice Village, Aaron’s “hunting ground”. Between Picky Varun and Picky Mai, we settled into El Meson. Cuban.

Here we were in this pretty good-looking Latin American place with frescos of flamboyant girls in flamboyant flamenco dresses and a generous bowl of Andes Mint at the front desk, from which we took (quite) a few as we walked in. The guys were wondering if they have free chips and salsa here (you know, like at the usual Tex-Mex resto in your neighborhood strip mall). We were hungry. Well, they do. The chips and salsa came out after we ordered. I was a bit sad that I couldn’t get the paella (minimum order of 2 people, and yet another thing that didn’t go my way that day), so I got two tapas plates.

If you have a sweet tooth like me, and I don’t mean just a liking for dessert but a liking for sweetness in everything from meat to noodle soup(*), El Meson is for you. The plantains are one thing, but the cinnamon pineapple that goes with the crab cakes ($9.95) and the honey-glazed pork belly ($9.95) are sweet enough to be desserts. The crackling skin offered a nice textural contrast, but slices of poached apple didn’t help toning down the sugar.

I liked the plantains in Varun’s Pollo Salteado ($15.95, grilled chicken sauteed with onion and pepper in sherry sauce, served on rice and black beans with a side of grilled plantains), but Varun found them too sweet.

For dessert, we took “some” more Andes Mint. 😉

Address: El Meson
2425 University Blvd.
Houston, TX 77005
(713) 522-9306
Dinner for 3: $65 – For more pictures of our food, see Photon Flavors.

(*) There are many noodle soups with a sweet broth. Not sweet like your banana cream pie but when you taste the first spoon, you’d go “wow this broth is sweet!” Examples are Lao and Cambodian noodle soups (such as hu tiu). One of my favorite ingredients in the Korean mul naengmyun (cold buckwheat noodle soup) is the Asian pear, which is sweet. But it’s nothing new really, all broths need some kind of sweetness, either from bone marrow or from mushroom.

Ever wonder why Banh Cuon Tay Ho has the best steamed roll of all places? Thin like a veil, never too chewy or oily, the flour never tastes sour, and the mixed fish sauce never has the bitter hint of lime. Their secrets are mysteries to me. By chance, the Lưu family who operates Tay Ho 18 in Houston stumbled on my blog post of 4 years ago and invited me to the opening week after the relocation early April, which would feature a new item: crawfish banh cuon. I couldn’t come then due to a minor distraction called school, but a month later the place is stilled packed to the rim like an Apple store the day of a new iPhone release. I managed to snatch Mr. James Lưu aside for a brief chat during lunch rush, wonder if his staff liked me or hated me for it.

Leaving Vietnam in ’79, getting attacked by pirates, rescued ashore but later tricked and stranded by the natives in the Malaysian jungle, rescued by an American helicpopter after a month in the jungle, immigrated to the US as an orphan (Mr. Lưu was then 16 years old, any child refugee under 18 without parent supervision was categorized as an orphan in US immigration rules), living with foster parents in New York until the age of 18, moving out to California to be independent, studying and later working as a legal administrator for many years, Mr. Lưu’s life journey had all the drama to constitute a movie. In 2007, the Lưu family moved from Southern California to Houston, and after surveying the restaurant scene, Mr. Lưu set up his steamed roll business as part of the Bánh Cuốn Tây Hồ franchise.

Last time I came, the restaurant stood inside the Hong Kong Market (HKM) complex, but according to Mr. Lưu, because the main patronage was customers of the market, the number peaked at lunch time and on the weekends but stayed flaccid otherwise, they closed at 7 pm, parking was difficult (the HKM parking lot is always crowded), and “it didn’t really feel like a restaurant”. At the end of the 3-year contract, he moved out next to Kim Son this spring, and business takes off.

The new crawfish banh cuon, accompanied by a special terracotta butter sauce with a zing, receives warm attention, but the Number 1 special combo, bánh cuốn đặc biệt, remains the most popular choice among the patrons because it has a bit of everything: some porky rolls (bánh cuốn nhân thịt), some flat rolls with shrimp flakes (bánh cuốn tôm chấy), some old-styled Thanh Trì sheet noodle (bánh ướt) to eat with the sausage, a hefty shrimp-and-sweet-potato deep-fried. But just between you and me, I told Mr. Lưu that I’m loyal to Number 7 – bánh cuốn nhân thịt, that has everything Number 1 has except the banh uot, and he laughed in agreement.

FB: Your menu spans all popular dishes of the 3 regions, with rice, bun, and noodle soups. Why don’t you limit it to only the rolls, the way specialty eating establishments in Vietnam limit to one or two dishes and their names become practically synonymous with the dish? After all, Tây Hồ is known for bánh cuốn like Ánh Hồng for 7-course beef or 46A Đinh Công Tráng St. for sizzling crepes…
Mr. Lưu: It’s precisely because we’re known for banh cuon that we have to have other dishes too. If we had only banh cuon, it’d be sold out by 2, then we’d have to apologize to the later customers and people would ask how come a banh cuon place doesn’t have banh cuon. Besides, everyone in a family would like something different and we’d want to accomodate that.
FB: So you make your batter fresh everyday? You don’t have some in storage in case of sold-outs?
Mr. Lưu: Yes and no. The batter is made daily and processed for a few days before it’s ready, so it’s not like we can make it on the spot.
FB: Is that the secret to your quality? Can you reveal a little more? *puppy eyes of Puss-in-Boots*
Mr. Lưu: Well, I can’t tell you the exact proportion, but the water for the mixed flour is changed daily in a fermentation period. Tay Ho standard requires the batter to be used between 3-7 days after the first mix.
FB: So that’s why the rolls taste a bit sour at some places, they left their batter sit too long?
Mr. Lưu: Yes, longer than 7 days would result in a sour batter. But shorter than 3 days and your rolls would fall apart, you need the fermentation to give the sheet its elasticity. Actually here we only use 5- to 6-day-old batter to render the right chew.
FB: What about the fish sauce?
Mr. Lưu: Can’t tell you that. *grin* The two deciding factors in a plate of steamed rolls are the fish sauce and the batter, and I make them both myself everyday. There’s a lot to balance between taste and cost, the quality of pure fish sauce you put in, the kind of water to mix. You want it to taste sweet and fresh, and you don’t want the bitterness from the lime. We also avoid using MSG.
FB: So I just have to buy your fish sauce then *grin*
Mr. Lưu: *grin* Yes, we do have mixed fish sauce for sale, and it stays good for a month in the fridge.

Between fragments of our conversation, Mr. Lưu was also waving at customers, directing his staff, printing the checks and exchanging handshakes with the regulars. The lunch rush was a spectacular sight. I thanked him for the meal and the conversation; had I lived closer, I’d relive my middle school dream: a plate of porky steamed rolls everyday for breakfast.

Address: Bánh Cuốn Tây Hồ 18
10613 Bellaire Blvd. #A168
Houston, TX 77072
(281) 495-8346

Aside from opening a little bit late on Sunday (11:30 am), the Tokyo One at Westchase is a lovely place. Three things that I have now associated with Tokyo One, although I probably shouldn’t, since they kinda belong to the ukiyo (floating world) more than to the permanents:
1. A beautiful peach-colored water lily in the mini pond creek artificial water thing surrounding the building
2. Perfect silky chawanmushi (pictured)
3. The gentle (the gentlest I’ve ever heard) but persistent recommendation of Sean, our server, for ice cream. We were full to the brim, but I gave in after he asked us for the second time if we would like some ice cream (as if I could ever turn down icecream 8)). I’m happy that he insisted, the plum ice cream with plum bits was great, and green tea ice cream is always good. We finished two scoops, Sean came back and asked if we’d like some more. Honest to goodness, I wanted to say yes.

Address: Tokyo One at Westchase
2938 W Sam Houston Pkwy South
Houston, TX 77042
(713) 785-8899
Buffet lunch for three: $51.93
Ah, food-wise? Good tempura, good gyoza, good fish, good rice, etc.

There’s a Vietnamese song that starts like this: “Ten years pass by without seeing each other, I thought love had grown old/ Like the clouds that have flown by so many years, I thought we had forgotten.”(*) It then went on to say, as you might expect, that the narrator still yearns for that love like ten years ago. An even more dramatic thing happens to me: I still crave xôi khúc with the same passion of the last time I had it, which was twenty years ago.

The lady who sold xôi khúc (xôi cúc if you’re from the South)(*) near our elementary school was old. In her sixties at least. She was clean, so Little Mom bought xôi from her. We never had xôi khúc from anyone else, and I don’t remember seeing anyone else selling it. Loosely wrapped in banana leaves like all other xôi(*), her xôi khúc beamed with the smell of ground black pepper in the bean paste and the cool, herbal flavor of the steamy sticky rice. After the lady stopped showing up in the mornings with her basket, we stopped having xôi khúc for breakfast.

Xôi khúc is too much of a hassle for living-alone home cooks. First of all, you need the leaves that make xôi khúc xôi khúc: the not-so-popular-and rau khúc (“rau” is greens)(***) whose English name I could find only after I found out its Japanese name from the blog of a Vietnamese expat in Japan, and I don’t even know Japanese. The Japanese use this grass in their kusa mochi, a category of grass mochi to which the yomogi daifuku belongs. De javu. The Vietnamese grind it up and use the juice to knead sticky rice flour into a dough and make xôi khúc. The dough coats a ball of savory mung bean paste, the whole thing is laid between thin layers of sticky rice and steamed. In the end, you get a handful of something with grains of sticky rice on the outside, so its appearance is like xôi, and a ball of grassy sticky rice dough with bean paste filling on the inside, so its construction is like bánh (anything made of dough). Hence its name varies: bánh khúc, xôi khúc, xôi cúc (the Southerners’ simplified pronunciation).

Today, I’ve reunited with xôi khúc. This small store in Bellaire, packed with xôi, chè, savory foods and customers at 9 on a Sunday morning, sells xôi khúc, 1 đồng 1 viên ($1/ball), each ball as big as a lemon, two of them fit snuggly in a white styrofoam box. The rice scoop digs into the tray. A slight bounce and the soft sticky rice separates. A familiar peppery smell infiltrates my veins. The guy asked if I’d like to top them with a few spoonfuls of fried shallots. Yes, please!

Address: Đức Phương Thạch Chè
11360 Bellaire Blvd
Houston, TX 77072
(281) 498-1838
(also in the Vietnamese Veteran Memorial area, near Giò Chả Đức Hương where Little Mom buys silk sausage)

Previously on Sandwich Shop Goodies: sesame beignet (bánh tiêu)

(*): Vietnamese lyrics: “Mười năm không gặp tưởng tình đã cũ/ Mây bay bao năm tưởng mình đã quên”. The song is titled Mười Năm Tình Cũ (“love dated ten years”). You can listen to it here.
(**): xôi is steamed sticky rice, either mixed with beans (sweet xôi) or eaten with meat (savory xôi). I’ve written about xôi bắp (corn xôi) and xôi đậu (peanut xôi) before.
(***): Gnaphallium affine, Jersey cudweed in English, hahakogusa (ハハコグサ in Katakana or “母子草” in Kanji) in Japanese. My inner linguistics savvy especially likes the Japanese name: 母 (haha) is Kanji for mother, 子 (ko) child, and 草 (gusa) grass: so rau khúc is Mother [and] Child Grass (mẫu tử thảo).

Nothing in the Rosemary Garden compound quite fits the name “Bistro”, there’s a chapel, a few stores across the parking lot with signs too far for me to read, a bakery that only takes order for wedding cakes, birthday cakes and Christmas cakes, and a restaurant big enough to host a small wedding banquet. Little Mom saw its ad in the local Vietnamese newspapers, and grilled alligator sounds good enough to make a trip across town.

My vegan intention was quickly thwarted, as expected in any Vietnamese or Korean restaurant, the few non-meat things available are all related to stir-fried bokchoy or eggplant. Little Mom eyed a few courses in the 9-course fish ($29.95), but you can’t get one without getting all nine, and she’s against fish spring roll while I’m against fish congee, so we flipped to the next page. Since Rosemary Garden is a làng nướng (grill village), it’s only appropriate that we meat-out and ignore the rice/noodles altogether (they don’t grill tofu). Besides, rice comes with alligator. Lots of rice, which took me by surprise for a split second. Guess I’ve been in the Bay for too long…

My friends said alligator tastes like chicken, and the important-looking lady who came out to greet us said the same thing, but I’m not convinced. It has more chew than chicken. It’s more like pork. We asked for no pepper in our “stir-fried alligator with pepper and lemongrass” (cá sấu xào sả ớt, $18.95), the pieces came out nicely seasoned, not spicy and evenly browned.

Although a bit on a the scrawny side (like me :D), the eel stir-fried in a coconut curry sauce with woodear mushroom and thin cellophane noodle, topped with Limnophila aromatica (rice paddy herb) and crushed peanuts, is a winner. All conversations come to a happy halt as one breaks a piece of toasted rice cracker (bánh đa) to scoop up that sauce and the soggy noodle in it.

Opposing the airy rice cracker are the oil-streaming, deep-fried sticky rice patties that accompany the grilled rabbit topped with white sesame seeds. Instruction says dip the rabbit in the fermented tofu sauce (chao), and drizzle the sticky rice patties with a sticky sugared soy sauce, but the other way around made more sense to me: dried, charred rabbit needs something sweet, and oily patties need spice. Dad likes them either way.

Despite the original difficulty of choosing something interesting from a standard list, if we ignore the outdated plate styling with limp slices of red bellpepper laid around the meat like an ancient picture of the sun, and if we rank a restaurant solely on taste, Rosemary Garden deserves 7 out of 10. Then again I’m soft, and our hosts were nice (they also gave us three pieces of coffee cream cake, in which both of my parents claimed to detect some wine flavoring but I couldn’t sense anything bitter), so let’s say 8/10. We’d come here more often and order some cakes if it hadn’t been all the way across Highway 6. Do come here if you get married.

Address: Rosemary Garden Bistro
14639 Bellaire Blvd
Houston, TX 77083
(281) 568-9151

Dinner for three: $56.13 (I’ve got to comment on this because I’m still not used to it: this is way too reasonable in North Cali standard and perhaps a bit high in Houston standard, but with so much leftover it’s still reasonable.)