Monthly Archives: July 2011

If you enjoy interesting stories about how Italian restaurants (or any kind of restaurants) came to live in the Houston area, consider the strange case of Luca & Leonardo, doing great business along the Woodlands Waterway since the beginning of June. For all its authenticity Italian-wise, it actually is the first U.S. outpost of a successful restaurant company - in Mexico!

Luca & Leonardo is molto (and mucho) intimate and romantic, I can report after a wine-kissed debache with my friend Almost Veggie. The wine glasses always glisten - no accident there - and the red napkins are always formed into rose petals. Most of all, the service always seems to know and go the extra mile, without ever hanging over you - all to make the most of executive chef Daniel Miranda’s cooking.

Since he comes to us from Mexico, the land of ceviche, Miranda should be forgiven for immediately thinking the beef carpaccio created years ago at Harry’s Bar in Venice (thanks for the Bellini, while we’re at it) needed to be “reloaded” as a seafood appetizer. This is an amazing summer dish, with several seafoods like octopus and swordfish super-thinly sliced and covered with a kind of sauce swished through with balsamic vinegar. Ceviche, say hello to my little friend, carpaccio.

Another super-hit at Luca & Leonardo, which actually began as a concept called Lucca (Puccini’s hometown) in Mexico City, is something they’ve dubbed malfatti. Always meaning “poorly made,” these are not the irregular tortellini-style stuffed pastas we’re familar with (usually spelled “malafatta”) but a spinach and cheese ball that’s batter-fried and covered in more cheese and red sauce. Gee, I wonder why Texas loves this so much!

In one of the first nifty appearances of saffron at the new restaurant, here’s a risotto dish featuring extra-large Gulf shrimp. Thanks to Miranda’s 15-plus years of chef experience in Mexico, much of it cooking Italian food, the guy knows how to make risotto that’s soft enough to be lush but still hard enough to not be mush. I’d like to study with the Italian guy he learned this from.

As I learned recently, when you travel to Bologna in Italy, the last thing you’ll see on anybody’s menu is “Bolognese sauce.” There it’s called simply ragu, despite the association many Americans might feel to those jars of supermarket pasta and pizza sauce. Chef Miranda calls his Bolognese ragu as well, then ladles it generously over homemade papardelle.

For diners who like to sing to their pasta “I Get a Kick Outta You,” there is Luca and Leonardo’s fettuccine arrabiata (the word means “angry,” which this will not make you). The dish is offered on the menu with chicken but, out of unbounded affection for Almost Veggie, Luca - or was it Leonardo? - served us a variation with shrimp. This one needs to be on the menu too.

And speaking of Almost Veggie, she was particularly delighted to revisit something she sampled on her first visit to Luca & Leonardo - the dish that made her text me that we had to come here sometime. This pan-roasted halibut was perfect, given a bit of extra texture by leeks sprinkled around the top and decadence by the saffron sauce spooned around the bottom.

Needless to say, I was on my own for this osso buco. Chef Daniel and Co. have been experimenting with different cooking times, rejecting the shortest times that, of course, leave the shank too tough but also rejecting the longer times that turn it into the tasty mush we find in so many Italian restaurants. Like barbecue geeks in Lockhart or Taylor, they’ve found the perfect cooking time for tender yet still looking like itself.

Sometime before, during or after the meal, I’d swear I took a photo (and know I tasted) one or two of Luca & Leonardo’s first-rate pizzas. But, probably a function of too many San Giovese grapes, I can’t find that picture now. So I’d better close with my favorite dessert, something the guys called cracked meringue, or sometimes simply “meringue crack.” Either phrase describes this dessert, and perhaps the entire experience of Luca & Leonardo, pretty well.

A festive mood dominated a reception tonight to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Anita Jaisinghani’s innovative Indian restaurant Indika. A crowd of Houston’s in-the-know turned out for the party, congratulating Anita on her first decade in business and wishing her the best for her second. “It’s hard to believe we’ve been here ten years,” she kept saying over and over.

Then again, as many at the birthday reception surely understood, “here” was not always here. Indika was born in a much humbler abode far out Memorial, where rumors of this little restaurant serving Indian food that went beyond the handful of familiar dishes started almost immediately. Today’s abode on lower Westheimer, part of a Restaurant Row that includes Dolce Vita and Feast, is far more striking than humble.

All through the reception, servers moved among the crowd with creative Indian hors d’oeuvres, the best of which was a kind of sweet potato cake topped with bright green cilantro sauce. As expected, however, one of the liveliest scenes was the one around the petal-strewn bar, where mixologists shook and stirred when they weren’t pouring wine and champagne. All the better to toast Anita in honor of Indika, the restaurant that did so much to deepen and broaden our appreciation of one of the world’s greatest cuisines.

I’ve spent most of my eating life terrified of dishes like Lobster Thermidor. For one thing, they’re not my style of food - which always prefers clean to creamy, bright and even explosive to lush. I hate foods that lie defeated beneath cream and butter. And I’d trade every bowl of soup on earth with “Cream of” as its first name for one small cup of bouncy Tom Yum Goong from Thailand. But now executive chef Mark Schmidt of Rainbow Lodge insists I’ve been avoiding these foods for no good reason all these years.

“I’ve generally found that when people say they hate this or that food because it’s too heavy,” he told us yesterday, “then it’s really a case of not having tried good examples. Time and time again in France, I’ve tasted dishes that I’ve been told were heavy and they weren’t at all. It’s all about balance, really.”

This seemed odd talk for a guy whose Lobster Thermidor is described on the menu as “decadent” and who had claimed a moment earlier to be taking a rich dish and finding ways to make it even richer. But as soon as we started transporting forkfuls of lobster, sauce and cheese to our lips, we knew Chef Mark had a point. This Thermidor was (or at least seemed) lighter than a lot of things I do love, starting with my beloved cheese enchiladas or equally necessary eggplant parmigiana.

Like most foods, especially French ones, Lobster Thermidor has quite a story to tell. Though the related Lobster Newberg was created in the States a few years earlier, the dish appeared in 1894 at a Paris restaurant called Marie’s across from the Comedie Francaise. It took its name from yet another potboiler by Victorien Sardou (famous for the heavy-breathing story that became Puccini’s opera Tosca, and of course as Eggs Sardou at brunch in New Orleans). Thermidor was about something called the Thermidorian Reaction, a rebellion as only the French do rebellion, which overthrew Robispierre and ended the Reign of Terror.

I was feeling similar emotions cleaning my plate of any lingering bits of lobster and using crusty bread to sop up the last pockets of sauce. I now love Lobster Thermidor, at least Chef Mark’s at Rainbow Lodge. The Reign of Terror has come to an end.

I’m sure we all remember, back through the mists of time, being told we could “have it your way.” But at a new-to-Texas “better burger” concept known as The Counter, we’re told we can have it at least 312,120 ways. That, apparently, is the math behind a place that lets you BYOB (“Build Your Own Burger,” with a trademark TM, no less) with a creative clipboard for choice after choice after choice.

In addition to the choices inherent in Building Your Own Burger (must I say TM?), there are choices in side dishes that begin and end with the traditional “You want fries with that,” but travel many places in between. If you buy into the Counter timeline, in fact, your fries will show up as a starter, along with things like onion strings and fried dill pickles. The photo above shows Parmesan Fries (involving cheese melted atop a garlic aioli - a word the fast-food boys tend not to use), plus the excellent onion strings with ranch and apricot dipping sauces, both good.

In keeping with The Counter’s origins in southern California, much effort goes into being, or at least seeming, more healthy than the pleasures involved might imply. Sometimes “health” is merely using better beef and other meats to build the burgers, going so far as to promise “humane” treatment of the animals involved. Other times it’s a platter of quite tasty grilled vegetables.

Still, it’s a safe bet that the demographic that accepts paying more for healthy, humane, sustainable or organic food also loves to throw the calorie counter out the window and splurge on dessert. One of the better choices for said splurge is this oversized chocolate chip cookie served a la mode.

My favorite sweet finale, though, is this apple crumble, which combines the finest aspects of terrific Texas apple cobbler with some sort of Girl Scout streusel-dump cake thing, the kind some Mom probably made. All these treats are available at The Counter, brought to the Houston market by Aisha Waliany and her family, operating as NextGen Ventures, Aisha being the NextGen. The debut location on Washington Avenue will be joined in August by a second in the Market Street entertainment district in The Woodlands.

Photos by Sara DeMers