Alison Cook

It’s time again to reflect on the best bites of the month — and boy, do I have some stellar bites for the memory book. Come along to restaurants new and newish, including a California import worth your time and money, plus a star Houston restaurant just coming into its own. GUIDE: Houston’s Top 100 restaurants 1. Oysters Ratatouille, Andiron It’s always fun when a dish confounds my expectations, and these sensitively handled grilled oysters from chef Michael O’Connor at Andiron, the fancy live-f…

MF Lobster & Ceviche may be Houston’s ultimate summer restaurant. So cool and collected is this perfectly round, glassed-in room that it seems to have been dropped into an oak-rimmed corner of Autry Park from some more temperate dimension. The pale cords of fabric that course from ceiling to floor are perpetually astir. The light that snakes through shimmers: on pearlescent floor tiles; on the cool, marbled bar that looks into the kitchen; on shiny white tabletops and gleaming glassware. The m…

Fire-grilled shrimp on the half-shell at Baso Technique is (almost) everything when it comes to these unconventional shrimp at Baso, the young Basque-inspired restaurant in the Heights. The wild-caught shellfish are stored at freezer temps so they won’t overcook while they’re shaken over the wood coals, so they emerge juicy and immediate under their coating of powdered chile and garlic. If you’ve ever wondered what it woud be like to crunch up the shrimp heads, shells and all, try it and marvel…

Fresh-squeezed orange juice was my gateway drug at Harry’s, the Montrose breakfast classic that has been serving Houston, in one form or another, for 70-odd years. The juice materialized at my counter seat in a tall glass tumbler. It was cool, not stored at the kind of cold temperature that damps down the flavor, so that it tasted expansively sweet and full, lit up by a bright edge of tartness. I had been a bit unnerved by the $5.95 price tag, but the more juice I drank, the more I realized wha…

Just stepping into the anteroom at Baso, the young Basque-inspired live-fire restaurant in the Heights, I could feel my pulse quicken. Purposefully calm in its neutral tones, the space gave glimpses into a chic minimalist cavern and sweep of open kitchen beyond, flames leaping out from a large square hearth. Here was the promise of drama — backed up by substance, I came to discover over the course of three dinners and a well-executed, 18-course wine dinner I signed up for, curious to see the ra…

“These came out fast!” exclaimed our waiter at Via 313, the Austin-based Detroit-style pizzeria that opened recently on Interstate 10 in Memorial, next to Goode Company Seafood. He had just deposited two rectangular pies on our table, their craggy browned cheese perimeters standing tall. I had come to probe the mysteries of Detroit pizza after my confounding experiences at Gold Tooth Tony’s, where the brilliant toppings had been weighed down by sodden-in-the-middle crusts. Did I just not like…

Let’s review, shall we? Like many of my food-centric peers on Instagram these days, I too feel a compulsion to round up my top 10 dishes of the month. It clarifies the mind — and suggests themes I may not have even known were at work as I set about my wanderings through the Houston dining landscape. April’s thread, looking back, seems to be a yen for comfort food and primal Houston dishes that I sought out (or stumbled across) at the following establishments. Hoja santa French toast at Ema The h…

Brunch menus are often riddled with cliches: the Benedict variants; the waffle riffs; the extravagant French toasts; the egg dishes given various international or ethnic embellishments. So it’s refreshing to encounter a brunch menu like Mimo’s, which goes its own way. For starters, there is nothing in Houston quite like chef Fernando Rios’ mortazza, a veritable schooner of a sandwich-and-pizza hybrid. Its furled crust springs up like a billowing mainsail, singed in all the right places. Forest…

For my money — which in this case is a painful $4 a pop — Clark’s Oyster Bar is all about the halfshell oysters. Since I would choose raw oysters as my last meal, the fact that the Houston edition of Austin-based Clark’s has served leapingly fresh, immaculately opened bivalves on each of three visits matters intensely to me. They haven’t put a foot or an oyster knife wrong. So varied and exhilarating have been 19 different kinds of oysters sourced from Canada, Maine and beyond that I took to ri…

The Google listing for the original Nickel City on Austin’s east side describes it thus: “Retro watering hole with craft cocktails & a laid-back attitude plus coney dog food truck.” Prowl a little more, and you’ll run into acres of copy about instant-dive-bar decor and the owners’ Detroit and Buffalo roots. Two of them are Brandon and Zane Hunt, the brothers behind Austin’s Detroit-style Via 313 pizza, an outpost of which opened in Memorial just before our version of Nickel City. A third partne…