Slag Heap Park

There’s a park off Highway 90, and I mean right off Highway 90, in an otherwise blighted and heavily industrial part of town that most people only scream past on their way from Missouri City to the Inner Loop, where Highway 90 abruptly turns into Main Street, cars skidding to a rough stop at the traffic light where the three-lane highway slams into Loop 610. The park is in a part of town that folks once would have said outright was a “bad part of town.” These days, we say things like, “It isn’t a great part of town,” as if this absolves us from the judgments we’re making. This park overlooks a slag heap, or should I say the slag heap overlooks the park? Really it doesn’t matter either way, because the end result is a park filled with lakes and flowers and trees and odd wooden sculptures and shaded trails that overlook an absolutely massive slag heap. It is, to me, one of the most beautiful places in Houston.

I often walk my dog in this place, which is formally called a “waterhole” because it’s really just a retention basin retrofitted into a nearly 300-acre park, and marvel at how even when Houston attempts to be deliberate about beautifying itself, the result is less silk-purse-from-a-sow’s-ear and more lipstick-on-a-pig (if we’re employing porcine metaphors). I, for one, love the idea of lipstick on a pig, like a sassy little sow that just wants to have some fun for once. Sometimes I think about bringing other people here and showing them what I think is one of the most beautiful places in Houston, but then I wonder if they’d struggle with the whole slag heap aspect. It kind of has a tendency to photobomb every pretty view, and when it doesn’t, the surrounding industrial parks and apartment complex Dumpsters share the load.

This is what I like about Houston, however. I love it here because Houston is ridiculous and life is ridiculous. Houston is not a serious place. Houston is not for serious people. Our mayor gets into Facebook slap fights with the county judge. It’s the largest U.S. city without zoning or a true public transit system or an unbroken series of sidewalks. The Inuit have multiple words for different kinds of snow; we have feeder roads, because we needed to create new words for all of the different kinds of freeways and highways and tollways and loops that are as common to us as snow is to the Arctic Circle. This place is an absurdity. This place is a circus oddity. There is no reason why this should be the fourth largest city in the United States. It makes absolutely no sense, and you can’t appreciate things like a slag heap overlooking a gorgeous public park then you have no business living here or understanding this place at all.

And listen: Houston will never do anything about that slag heap. If this were a serious place, maybe there would not be a slag heap overlooking a gorgeous public park, but it took Houston 30 years to build the damn park in the first place. Do you think Houston cares if there’s also a slag keep next-door? No! You should be thankful you got the park at all.

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The Houston of my childhood was one that architectural critics and traveling writers described as gaudy and decadent. That Houston is long gone. This Houston does not value beauty unless it can generate income. Houston’s old old money were notably charitable towards arts institutions and public parks — things that made the city somewhat tolerable despite being located largely in a hot swamp. The new old money and new money alike have lost interest, with a few notable exceptions, in beautifying their city or otherwise making it more inhabitable. And why should they be trying to make it more inhabitable when they’re busy buying second homes in Aspen and private jets to take them to their new ranch in Montana and other performing other acts of conspicuous consumption designed purely to show all of the other fancy rich people how rich they are? Rich people used to invest in Houston because they liked to show off too, of course, but they also wanted people to come live here and do business here; we are kind of stocked up on people and business these days.

Our civic pride seemed to peak around Hurricane Ike and started to really erode after Hurricane Harvey, when it became clear that the city that has always flooded is only one more big flood away from the dams breaking for good. Why invest in a place that’s doomed? Extract what you can out of it now. Beautifying the city seems to make as much sense as putting makeup on a pig you’re going to slaughter.

Old Houston was, in some ways, a more serious place. You kind of had to be serious to even make it in this malaria-ridden swamp to begin with. This was not a place where life was easy — and then came air conditioning and cars. Suddenly, Houston was awash with people who never knew the difficulties of walking down Main Street in early September when it’s still 100° outside and you’re wearing wool head-to-toe (your summer wool, sure, but still) and schlepping your wool-encased, sweat-drenched body from one store to another for your errands because other than street cars and horses there was no other real alternative. Those are the people who thrived and survived in old Houston.

New Houston is soft and easy. New Houston has an underground tunnel system connecting most of the office buildings and skyscrapers so that no sane person has to set foot on a sidewalk during the day, despite the tunnels’ propensity to flood at the slightest gully washer. Our housing prices are low because we know there is no real attraction otherwise. Our grocery stores are large and inviting. Our freeways are widening more by the year. We are growing soft and complacent and we are now a city for the soft and complacent. I should know as I myself am soft and complacent. This is how Houston shapes us and we shape it.

When you yourself are not a serious person designed to tackle serious challenges and survive serious situations, then it is silly for you to otherwise take the world too seriously. This is especially true because when you’re taking things too seriously, you miss out on all the joy and the beauty of life.

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This evening I was walking through the park on one of its more remote trails. One side of the trail runs alongside a giant warehouse complex surrounded by chain-link fences topped with razor wire. The lots around the warehouses are littered with industrial parts I don’t recognize and so I can’t tell you what they are, just that they are huge and metal, some of them have paint and some of them don’t. There are caterpillars and bulldozers and all kinds of other earthmovers sitting around the warehouse yards. I think they have something to do with the giant slag heap next-door, I’m not sure.

On one side is this slag heap: these giant gray, pyramid shaped mountains of junk concrete and other earthen debris, and they are so perfectly symmetrical and they are so hideous. And on the other side of the trail, a turn of the head away, the sun is glittering on the lake below and the golden hour light is filtering through the pine and magnolia trees and tall meadow reeds are waving in the breeze, and it’s all just so beautiful: the slag heap and the lake and the giant plants and the little fuzzy cattails down by the water and the kudzu that’s slowly creeping up and consuming some of the trees and the wild, lanky, black-eyed Susans and the drone of noise from Highway 90 competing with the evening thrum of the cicadas as they buzz throughout the thickets of trees and reeds. How ridiculous that they both exist here together side-by-side like this. How absurd it is that any of us are here at all.

There is also a slight sense of danger and disarray in the park, set where it is amongst lonely industrial parks and silent Vietnamese convents (also surrounded by razor wire) and the backs of squalid-looking, low-slung apartment complexes with more old mattresses than cars in the parking lots. My dog and I are usually the only people or pets on the trails, although sometimes a few folks can be found fishing on the lake’s distant dock. There’s always the sense that some sort of strangler or pervert or even just a run-of-the-mill dead body could be around the next curve, hiding in the thick, dense bushes. Today on my walk, I found a pair of used men’s underwear decorated with a Christmas light pattern hung jauntily from one of the park entrance gates. It was next to a pile of either dog or human feces; either way it was a big pile.

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I’ve often wondered why crime novelist David Lindsey set his most popular series of thrillers in Houston rather than his home city of Austin — he’s never even lived in Houston, though he did visit Houston homicide detectives routinely as he built out background for his books — but I suppose the answer is simply that the kinds of gritty, salacious murders he depicts in A Cold Mind or Mercy just don’t seem like they could’ve taken place in a the rolling hills of a small town like Austin, especially not in the 1980s. In a city like Houston? Absolutely.

“This would be a great place to hide a body,” I’ve often to myself as I’ve walked around the park. I have literally never thought that while hiking up Mount Bonnell or strolling around Zilker, and not just because there’s usually too many people around.

My father moved to Dallas over a decade ago, something I regarded as a huge betrayal at the time, even though he was from Fort Worth to begin with. A few years ago during a visit back home, my home, not his anymore, we were walking along Main Street downtown, melting in the heat, dodging piles of feces as some of the world’s most beautiful buildings glittered high above us. The New York Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable called the twin jet-black trapezoids of Pennzoil Plaza “a work of art” in a 1975 article about the skyscraper which is still my favorite among our ever-expanding skyline.

“If Houston has found the formula for turning prosperity and growth into beauty and elegance, it is indeed the city of the future,” she wrote. Houston…has not done this. And yet here we are, almost 50 years later, still the city of the still-to-come, the prophetic city, as Stephen Klineberg likes to call us, a microcosm of America’s own absurdist future.

My eyes are ever upward when I’m downtown, craning my neck to find the gracious dome of the Esperson Building, delighting in the postmodern giddiness of the Dutch-gabled TC Energy Center (only its most recent name, known by too many to count since it was built in 1983). My father’s are more observant, guiding us around unknown liquids on the sidewalk or people sprawled out asleep, high or dreaming.

“I’d forgotten how gritty Houston is,” he said, chuckling. I misheard him.

“How pretty Houston is?” I replied, surprised at the compliment.

“No, gritty.” He laughed. “Gritty, not pretty.”

I smiled, shook my head. “What’s the difference?”

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The Past Is a Foreign Country

I have a set of mugs from 1979, the year my parents were married. My mother registered for them at Sears or wherever people were registering for wedding gifts back then. They’re tall and slender, with a speckled beige background and a rust-bordering-on-maroon pattern covering the beige that looks like abstract flowers from a distance. They stand on elegant speckled beige feet and have delicately curving handles that only accommodate two fingers at a time. Despite the fact that my parents’ marriage only lasted a few years, which is how I ended up with the mugs decades later after my mother went on a cleaning-out spree, I love drinking from them so much that I often take my coffee or tea to work in them instead of a more modern Yeti tumbler or Stanley mug, which have no such character in their stark metal lines.

I work at a university these days, which means students often drift in and out of my office. One morning, a student stood in my doorway chatting before he noticed the mug on my desk. “Where is that from?” he asked. “It looks like it’s from another country.”

“It is,” I told him. “The past.” His furrowed brow and cocked head told me he was too young to understand the reference.

This is a sensation I imagine most people who are lucky enough to grow old experience. The past is a place you’ve been, one that you never realized at the time would become a place distant and unreachable to you in the future.

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The West Alabama Bookstop was originally built as the Alabama Theater in 1939.

The past is a place you inhabited with the kind of intense familiarity that it often seems unreal that you can’t simply slip back to that country and visit once again. The past can only be experienced now in postcards slipped to you across time: 1970s mugs, your father’s old albums, the scent of your grandmother every time you open the old china cabinet she left you, the gentle perfume fading more every time you open the door to slip one of her own mother’s pieces of china out for a dinner that’s not even that fancy — you’re just hoping that somewhere across time they know that you still use the gold-trimmed plates with violets at the edges, the things they once cherished, and that you think of a woman you only met as an infant every time you do. You hope these women know you still cherish them too, unreachable and distant.

You wonder how it would be possible to know things from across time and death like that, and all you can do is hope that love endures the same way that mugs and albums and gold-trimmed plates do. It still feels as tangible as these souvenirs from another place, another life. When you miss the past and the people who inhabit that far-away land, they’re all you can turn to.

When I think of the past I think of people forced from their homes and their lands who know they’ll never be able to return. I think of my best friend’s grandmother, who was removed from her seaside home in Haifa against her will during the formation of the modern Israeli state. I think of how she kept the key to her home until the day she died, certain that one day she’d be able to slip that key into that familiar door, to feel the bolt tumble and turn under her hand like it had a thousand times, to open it onto a warm room flooded with sunlight, to smell the familiar scent of home. I think of what it felt like to lock the door one last time. I think of the yearning she must have felt to return, knowing that she had the key — if she could just reach the door.

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The Clark Gable House once stood at 411 Hyde Park.

I think of the past every time I drive down Westheimer and feel a tug to return to a place that’s long gone. I think of the 1920s-era house I once shared with the ghost of Clark Gable on a rambling Montrose street that’s been obliterated by stucco-clad townhomes. I think of all the senseless erasures that mean the young man who asked about my mug will never be able to know the Houston I once knew, the Houston I once inhabited. The city I grew up in has vanished. And this is not a rare story. This is everyone’s story. No one will ever be able to visit that country ever again.

No one will ever be able to perch with a coffee and a new book on the upper balcony of the West Alabama book store that was once a grand movie theater, just as no one will ever see a film within its Deco-clad walls ever again. The building remains, gutted for a chain grocery store that removed every last colorful Deco accent and enclosed the balcony for what I’m told are offices. No one will ever again watch the peacocks stroll along the grand, green lawns of Vargo’s along the gentle slopes of Buffalo Bayou. No one will ever again watch the fireworks explode over the Texas Cyclone each night at Astroworld. The young man who asked about my mug only knows Astroworld as the event where Travis Scott performed as eight people were crushed to death at his feet. He didn’t even know it was named after an amusement park.

I’ve kept this blog for 17 years. I haven’t updated it as frequently as I once did. This used to be my outlet for all that was good and bad in my life. So much has changed in 17 years that reading old blog posts now feels like reading dispatches from a lost country, once densely populated, now vacant. I used to average 20,000 views a day on this little patch of land at its peak. Now it waits in the dust, still and quiet, ruins of another time.

Soapbox rants about topics that once mattered so intensely are now vague references I barely remember; they may as well be battle plans drawn up for long-dead armies. Links to articles I wrote for the Houston Press are 404’d now, dead-ending into the digital ether. At least the Press still exists in some form; Houstonist is verging on Troy at this point, long vanished and so little remembered it could easily disappear into the mists of mythology, its existence only attested by scattered remnants and shattered links across the web. Maybe someday an Internet archaeologist will piece together an idea of what they think it once was.

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare. The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Food Poetry Saturdays

A long time ago, I was very committed to posting some of my favorite food-related poetry on Wednesdays. What I never did was post any of my own poetry. All of my earliest writing was poetry. All of my first favorites were poems. I still think poetry conveys what prose cannot. I still think in poetry all these years later.

Counting in years

Today I used the last of the bread
That I used to make you a sandwich
Late Saturday afternoon
Today is Friday
And tomorrow will be a week
And soon I won’t be counting in slices of bread
Or days since I’ve seen you
I’ll be counting in weeks and months
And one day I’ll be counting in years

Giving up on you

Every morning
I use the coffee cup you gave me
Months ago
I chipped the lip of its wide, fragile mouth
Right on the place where I placed my own lips
Every morning
Today
I use it like a bowl, cupping the sides with each sip
These days
I drink around the chip
I can’t give up the peony-painted cup
I already gave up on you

Live oak

When we first moved in to this little house
It was shaded by a huge oak tree
Little by little
Its limbs have been stripped away
By storms, by hurricanes, by wild acts of nature
And still its trunk stands thick, twisted, defiant
It offers so little shade now, its limbs mostly gone now
Limbs that hung too close to a power line, too close to a roof, a fence
Our landlord tells us the entire tree will be gone soon
It’s a volunteer, a weed, he tells us
That should never have been allowed to grow there in the first place
I marvel at its barrel-chested trunk every chance I get
Knowing our time together is short
The tree did nothing wrong
Except to grow where it was not wanted

Houston Is a Mirage

Houston is a mirage. Sometimes you’ll be barreling down the tollroad toward your friend’s far-flung suburban home south of the city, a place you’ve been countless times, and suddenly on your right, three monstrous towers emerge into your view, rising so high they might as well be violating U.S. air space. It’s enough to make you briefly drift out of your lane and onto the shoulder.

You’ve never seen these towers before in all these many trips. They’re impossibly huge; hard to think you would have missed them. What was there before? You ask yourself the common Houston refrain aloud to no one in particular, because you’re driving alone like almost everyone else around you. In Houston, it seems like everyone owns at least one more car than they need. Was it a field? It was probably a field.

The towers are so tall they inspire a sort of primal awe in you. You think of the podcast you just listened to about Teotihuacan (you need to have a lot of podcasts and playlists on hand for daily driving in Houston) and you wonder if this is how Aztec people from outside the city felt the first time they laid eyes on the Pyramid of the Sun. You are from a city of skyscrapers and you are still dumbstruck by the height of these cloud-piercing towers. What are they?

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How are you going to figure this out? You run through a list in your head of people you could ask about this. Who knows this nameless southern stretch of one of too many tollroads? How would you Google this? Giant towers in field off Sam Houston tollway near landfill. Maybe Google Maps? You can’t believe your eyes. You need something else, some tangible source to explain what you’re seeing.

Later, at home, you’re scanning a satellite map with the little 3D button turned on, searching among endless of the same scoured landscape: brownish-green lots split by gray ribbons of infrastructure and concrete in various thicknesses. Is that the towers? No, it’s just a long field of regular old electrical equipment. In other parts of town, oak or pine canopies afford more cover, but not here. (Here is where a brand-new park complete with a bridge over a fully-stocked fishing pond and miles of walking trails overlooks a slag heap and industrial junk yard directly next door. You love this park.) You thought this would be easier.

You keep scrolling back and forth across the long southern stretch of the tollroad and eyeing every little thing that catches your eye. You stop to linger over Monumental Plaza Garibaldi, a dirt-floor arena that hosts everything from popular Mexican bands to fancy horse shows, which reminds you that you want to stop at nearby Red’s Snow Wagon next time you’re in the area for a peaches and cream sno-ball.

When you hit the Bombshells (imagine a military-themed Hooters that sells the most liquor in Houston by volume every year) next to the 150,000-square-foot Bass Pro Shop (the same square footage as the Great American Pyramid in Memphis), you’ve gone too far. When you hit Buffalo Run Park (an even better park than the slag heap park, with four lakes!) you’ve gone too far in the other direction. The towers had to have been between these landmarks.

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Now that you think of it, were you even on the Sam Houston Tollroad when you saw those towers? You could have been on the Fort Bend Tollroad; you were trying to avoid traffic that day. But all of these roads look the same. All of these flat-topped industrial office parks look the same. There are Bombshells everywhere, for Christ’s sake.

The towers loom in your mind. You’ve given up scrolling back and forth on Google Maps. And you know you’ve thoroughly given up because now you’re trying your luck with the r/Houston subreddit. What luck? Nothing. All of the threads are just complaining about traffic or gagging over recent news that the Michelin guide has finally decided to come to Houston (and Dallas, etc.) And then! Finally! In a random civil engineering subreddit! An answer.

“The largest transmission lines I’ve seen are ~200′ off of Sam Houston Parkway near Hardy, but those are the truss structures – not monolithic poles.”

Your excitement fades immediately. This is where the Sam Houston Tollroad intersects the Hardy Tollroad, which is to the far north of the city (basically 38 miles between the southern Bombshells and one of its northern counterparts near the airport). It is not your answer after all.  These are not your monstrous towers. You slam your laptop closed with a huff.

“Jess, what are you doing this weekend?” You text your friend in the far-flung southern suburb. “Want to take Coral on a walk and grab a coffee?”

If you’re going to retrace your steps in order to track down the mystery of these Teotihuacan towers, you may as well visit your old friend while you’re at it. These days you’ll take any excuse to see your friends, the ones who grew up right down the street from you 30 years ago, now scattered like dandelion fluff from north to south, east to west, blanketing all 10,062 square miles of a city so large it can only be seen obliquely, and only in shimmering glimpses.

This Was Never the Point

For about 10 years, everything I wrote was almost immediately published. This sort of instant gratification really does a number on a young writer’s brain.

During the onset of the digital age, newspaper editors became hungry for what would soon be called “content” rather than stories — online and in print — and this naturally led newsrooms the nation over to reward quantity over quality. Young, desperate-to-please writers like me who would churn out relatively decent work for pennies somehow became eminently publishable. Sure, I wrote some James Beard Award-nominated work amid the churn but I mostly reviewed strip club food and composed top 10 lists of the best kitchen utensils to use as sex toys. (“Eggbeaters,” my editor had helpfully suggested when I balked.)

Still, I wanted to believe that the bulk of my work was good, actually. And having absolutely every impulse piece you write immediately published in the local paper (see: a series of haikus about Muscle Milk) does tend to make you think the general public gives more weight to your words than is true, actually.

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I was among the most prolific writers at each place I worked. And in the heyday of social media and online platforms, this meant my words scattered like dandelion fluff. I was always fascinated to see how far my stories reached. One time, Alton Brown emailed me to say he’d liked a piece I’d written. Another time, a man emailed me my address and threatened to come to my house and rape me because he disagreed with my most recent restaurant review.

When I left the Houston Press in 2013, the art director mocked up a cover of the paper for my going away party. Among the coverlines around my face on the fake paper was the astounding number of articles I’d written during my time there — somewhere north of 11,000. I don’t remember exactly anymore, and although Monica carefully mounted the mock cover on a lovely mat for me to ostensibly frame one day, I threw it in the garbage when I moved out of my studio apartment later that year. The fake cover and the real number, both gone forever.

I haven’t kept much physical evidence over the years of my career as a food critic at the local paper or my work as an editor for the city magazine, which was once monthly and is now quarterly. The paper itself ceased physical publication six years ago and now exists only online. In true Houston fashion, the historic Press building itself was demolished in 2018, no longer leaving any tangible traces of itself here on earth. I wonder if one day someone will be searching through old Houston Press editions and wonder why the paper suddenly evaporates in 2017. (For now, at least, a Google search of the terms “Backpage” and “lawsuit” suffice to explain.)

The paper recently changed the way its website is hosted and all of its archives prior to 2020 disappeared, a further distressing withdrawal from the world. If I hadn’t digitally archived all of my own years’ worth of Houston Press articles a couple of years ago, all trace of the online content I wrote would also have evaporated.

Most of those articles that I thought mattered so much, those pieces I labored over, the ones that ricocheted across the Internet, the ones that won awards, the ones that lost me friends, even the stupid and silly ones like the time I was assigned to write about the worst things to puke up on New Year’s Day — no one will ever read them again. They exist nowhere now except in my own little digital vault. The physical papers possibly exist in some libraries somewhere, but they contained perhaps only 15 percent of those 11,000+ articles I wrote. All those words, all those worried over words, all vapor now.

For a long time, I struggled under the weight of writing all of these stories. When I was first hired as a young, naive food critic, I owed the paper three online articles a day (some of which would later be reprinted in the following week’s issue), a weekly restaurant review for the print edition and at least one cover feature every quarter. Once, it was about butchers reviving a lost charcuterie tradition; another time it was a pandering photo essay about chefs’ food-themed tattoos.

By virtue of this workload, everything I wrote was publishable — or at least we all pretended it was. And all of these articles were chum for the readers.

A dining review is chum in the water by its very nature: Plenty of people wanted to know whether the hot new restaurant in town was good, actually, and many, many more people wanted to read about it when that hot new restaurant was terrible, actually. The online articles were even less subtle.

A best-of burgers list? Done to death. How about a best-public-bathrooms-to-bang-in piece?

Sometimes these were my ideas, sometimes they weren’t. But at the end of the day, it was my byline attached to the story. This made it easier to part with the physical copies of papers and, later, magazines full of content I was embarrassed to witness as my own.

And yet I felt strangely compelled to keep the digital stuff. Its existence is no more or less precarious than the print stuff — there were only so many copies of Houstonia Magazine printed, for instance, and those increasingly rare early editions are certainly dwindling in number now that I’ve put so many of my own through the shredder — so it’s not about choosing to save one over another.

I suppose it’s more the idea that the online stories always existed in such a liminal state to begin with: layers of code and raw binary data that briefly coalesced on your computer screen to form an article about tracking down the elusive Dr Pepper Icee, before snapping back into the Internet ether once you close the tab. Sparking to life briefly, a little flame burning brightly for a moment, then just as quickly extinguished.

For a long time I wanted to distance myself from the things I wrote, for better or worse, because of the way in which I’d let my voluminous body of work come to define me. I left the city magazine as managing editor and stopped writing for public consumption altogether, turning inward to a university where I instead wrote about anyone else’s opinions except my own, keeping my thoughts entirely to my private journals. It was a liberating relief.

No longer did I have to share my weekly thoughts on dining out with rabid Twitter and Facebook audiences that our publications’ owners insisted we were responsible for growing into an even more vociferous crowd, nor write the kind of personal essays in the city magazine that caused my cousin to stop speaking to me. I hadn’t anticipated the toll it would take on me, publishing my every thought because I was so eager to write and because some faceless publisher needed grist for the mill.

It turns out that keeping my opinions to myself and listening to other people’s opinions instead has been deeply therapeutic. This revelation will not rock the world of those stable, empathetic people out there for whom this is just a straightforward recipe for a gentle life. And some people — myself once included — don’t want a gentle life; they want a life that speaks truth to power or at least draws enough attention that they feel seen and heard for one brief moment.

Maybe that’s why I keep the old online stuff in my little vault, to remind me of my non-gentle days, when I was sparking to life in all the right and wrong ways. When I was figuring it all out, trying to fan my flame into a fire, watching it flare up and out of control on the bad days, admiring its bright, steady shine on the good ones. All that struggle, all those tears shed over hitting deadlines or surviving pitch meetings, all those words written and now gone — was all of it for nothing, if those articles are gone forever?

This was never the point.

Things I Have Recently Eaten

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Baby boomers and click-bait headline generators want you to hate avocado toast as much as they hate themselves. I ate this ridiculously hearty version topped with fresh tomatoes and an overeasy egg at Edison & Patton and loved it as much as I love telling Millennials that they’re the next Greatest Generation. (This, of course, leaves plenty of room for a lazy Gen Xer like me to ride their coattails to a world where universal basic income will finally allow me to pursue my dream of photographing avocado toast full time.)

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This avocado toast from Bebidas was fine. Needed salt, acid. Pretty enough to merit a photo but the overall flavor profile was further turfed by those tragically gnarf alfalfa sprouts.

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“Are these just fancy chicken tenders?” I asked our waiter at Night Heron. He replied gamely. “Yes. And they come with buttermilk dipping sauce!” Also pictured: fancy smoked queso, which was even better poured directly on top of that bowl of crispy potatoes. Color outside those lines, y’all. Vincent, Morgan and Ryan aren’t your real moms.

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Jesus Christ, Barnaby’s. Did Brothers septuple your carrot order on accident?

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Shake Shack is here now. Okay.

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I put these photos next to one another on purpose. I get the appeal of these wee aluminum pans for restaurants, I really do. They’re inexpensive, they don’t have the annoying tendency to break like plates do, these ones right here don’t rust, et cetera. But I’m just going to leave this right here. (Also the bagels at Golden Bagel are great and the antithesis of any such sterile aesthetic.)

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The hot-and-sour boil at LA Crawfish in 99 Ranch (plus an unpictured side of garlic fried rice) remains a favorite quintessentially Houston experience for me. Bonus points can be gained throughout 99 Ranch by obtaining a case of cheap beer for the table, boba tea for the kids and half-price Chinese pastries for dessert on Sundays.

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Out of all the hot dog stands in Sunny Flea Market, my favorite has no name but can be found by looking for a woman working a massive griddle in between a stall that sells light-up shoes and one that sells baby t-shirts with slogans such as “Hecho in Estados Unidos con partes hondureñas.” Behind her is a small room with its walls and ceilings covered by Extruded Polystyrene Rigid Foam Insulation in a lovely shade of lavender. Your waiter will bring menus, but you really just want the dogs. The hot dogs are wrapped in raw bacon before being cooked, then topped with chopped onions, chopped tomatoes, jalapeños, mayonnaise and mustard after the Sonoran style. They’re $2. The ambience is priceless. Leave a tip; this is table service after all.

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I did, Cacao & Cardamom. I did eat you.

Episode IV

Seeing as how I’ve announced all of my other life changes on this blog — the blog that got me hired at the Houston Press and began my new path as a real-life employed writer — it only made sense to return here after too many months away, to make another official announcement about the career I started four years ago.

A few weeks following my fourth anniversary with the paper and just a few months shy of my three-year mark as the food critic, I am stepping down from the Houston Press to explore a different path, both as a writer and now an editor.

By the beginning of June, I’ll be the Features Editor at Houstonia — our new metropolitan monthly — where I’m thrilled to be reunited with my old Press colleagues Cathy Matusow, John Nova Lomax and Robb Walsh. I owe a tremendous amount to both Cathy and Robb for being my editor and mentor, respectively, in a career I never thought I’d have. I’ve been tremendously lucky to have them both in my life.

I’ll miss my colleagues at the Press immensely, especially my editor-in-chief, Margaret Downing, who — not to be too cliche — took a chance on a wet-behind-the-ears kid with no writing experience and provided me with the guidance and education I so badly needed as a completely untrained journalist. This has been more valuable than any four years spent in any college (and I don’t owe the Press any student loans!).

As sad as I am to leave my home here at the Press behind, I’m excited to cultivate a new readership at a publication I respect equally. I think Houstonia will prove to be every bit as vital as our daily and our alt-weekly, filling a monthly niche that’s been wanting for passionate, discerning, thoughtful coverage — some of which I hope I’ll be able to provide as well. The team that Scott and Nicole Vogel have put together over there is amazing, and the chance to work among them will be humbling and inspiring.

Until June, I’ll still be at the Press, and taking suggestions as to the very last restaurant review I’ll write.

The Days of Wine and Cupcakes

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Wine and cupcakes at 13 Celsius: The perfect pairing.
It’s rare for me to post here anymore. And it’s even rarer for me to post an event. I don’t recall posting a single one in recent memory. But I’d do just about anything for my good friend Jody.

Jody Stevens, also known as Jodycakes, is hosting an event tonight at 13 Celsius with Lucrece Borrego of downtown’s “Center for Culinary Entrepreneurship,” Kitchen Incubator, to talk all things cupcakes. The inaugural Houston Cupcake Meetup is an event for like-minded bakers to come and discuss matters from the trivial (cupcake crawls!) to the important (the Texas Cottage Food Bill; locating commercial kitchen and/or baking spaces in the city). Having navigated the city’s baking scene for years, Jody and Lucrece are just the women you want to talk to if you’re interested in baking for profit or just baking (and eating!) for fun.

The event starts tonight at 7 p.m. at 13 Celsius and the cover is $10. That $10 will net you a wine and cupcake pairing from 13 Celsius’ knowledgeable staff and Jodycakes herself. It will also likely net you some new friends and very useful contacts.

Hell, even if you aren’t a baker, there are few finer ways to spend your Wednesday evening than with wine and cupcakes. Trust me.

Going to Gaido’s

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Over cocktails a few nights ago with a new friend, he asked me a question I’d never before considered: At what point did you realize that you were more “into” food than the average bear?

I had to stop and think about it for a moment. Back in high school, I was notorious among my friends for always dragging them to the latest hole-in-the-wall I’d found or force-feeding them sashimi back at a time when sushi wasn’t nearly as accessible or omnipresent as it is today. But finally it struck me: that moment, the one that my parents still tease me about to this day.

In elementary school, my class was planning a field trip to Galveston to visit the Elissa (typical Houston schoolkid journey, of course). And while the prospect of climbing all over the old ship was charming and all, my single-minded focus at 10 years old was where we were eating while we were down there. Surely we couldn’t drive all that way and not dine at some of the island’s best restaurants!
Continue reading Going to Gaido’s

Why I’m Crying Today

ImageOnly nine months into my job as the food critic at the Houston Press, I was nominated for a James Beard Award today for my “Designer Meats” feature. Considering the fact that only two years ago, I was working [somewhat miserably] in the human resources department of a cement company, I’m gobsmacked to say the least.

It’s especially ironic considering that the feature for which I’m nominated was one that caused an enormous ruckus (or so I’m told; none of the chefs interviewed have ever said a single word to me about it) in the dining scene when some of the charcuterie discussed in the article was destroyed by the Health Department. I didn’t know about this until quite a bit after the fact, and was distressed to hear that it had happened. Nevertheless, all of the chefs I spoke to for the feature were well aware of any possible risks in publicly discussing their charcuterie programs. And examining both sides of the issue is what makes a piece actual journalism as opposed to a one-sided fluff piece.

I’m still stunned and shocked to have been nominated for anything at all, and it’s all thanks to this wonderful video of Catalan’s Chris Shepherd butchering a pig. The feature was nominated in the “Multimedia Food Feature” category and it wouldn’t have been at all possible if Chef Shepherd hadn’t graciously allowed me into his kitchen and let me witness the fascinating act of breaking down an entire half a hog.

So to Chef Shepherd and all the chefs who participated in the feature — Ryan Pera of Revival Market, Justin Basye of Stella Sola, James Silk and Richard Knight of Feast — and to Robb Walsh, my fellow nominee and the man who brought me to the Houston Press in the first place…thank you. Of course, there wouldn’t have been a feature in the first place without my incredible editor Cathy Matusow, without whom I wouldn’t be half the writer I am, and the beautiful charcuterie photos from Troy Fields. And it wouldn’t even have been considered for a nomination if my awesome editor-in-chief, Margaret Downing, hadn’t believed it in enough to send it in. There are so many people involved in one piece and they all deserve to be thanked, repeatedly and profusely.

Thank you. 🙂

Stay tuned when I go to NYC in May to attend the awards ceremony, try to keep from vomiting every time I see a famous person and lose to Andrew Zimmern, because…really. It’s Andrew freaking Zimmern. It’d be an honor to lose to a man who’s eaten squirrel brains and lived to tell.