The night before Halloween was fairly quiet at benjy's, despite its location on Washington Avenue. Two Hamburglars — one male, one female — sat at the bar, sipping pints of beer, while a woman dressed as a Rubik's cube ambled around semi-awkwardly in search of her friends. They were upstairs, it turned out. And it turned out that all of the loud partying one would normally expect from a Washington hangout was upstairs, too. Downstairs at this new benjy's was serene, calm and home to some surprisingly amazing dishes.
Troy Fields
Asian-inspired comfort food: the beef udon at benjy's.
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Hours: 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. and 5 to 9 p.m. Mondays, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. and 5 to 10 p.m. Tuesdays through Thursdays, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. and 5 to 11 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. and 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. Sundays.
Sashimi: $11.95
Goat cheese cakes: $9.50
Pork potstickers: $8.95
Cuban sandwich: $11.95
Beef udon: $15.95
Tofu with forbidden rice: $14.95
Short rib pizza: $11.95
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That night, a friend and I were dawdling over a fifth of Jester King's Drink'in the Sunbelt Hoppy Wheat beer and the remnants of our meal. It had been so good that we were in no rush to leave, especially with some Halloween costumes beginning to trickle in the door. We'd already seen a sexy Hamburglar — what other treasures would the night hold?
We picked at the remains of our entrées, too full to continue but unwilling to part with them. The cobia sashimi with green apple slices and wasabi had gone quickly, the pearlescent, soft pink discs of fish gobbled down with just the barest hint of a soy vinaigrette on top. The shark-like fish is thick in Gulf waters and can be seen served as hamachi just as often as it's referred to as cobia. It's not in constant rotation, however; the sashimis served each day rotate out according to whichever fish the restaurant has in at the moment.
Much of the strikingly Asian-influenced menu is this way, thanks to Japan-born chef Mike Potowski. Aside from being steadfastly seasonal (the current menu is charmingly labeled "early fall," as if Houston has any other seasons than summer and February), benjy's is also keen to use local ingredients as often as possible. It doesn't flout this fact aside from a few T-shirts seen on staff members that read "Farm to Table," and it doesn't just talk the talk, like many other restaurants in town — benjy's actually uses roughage from Animal Farm, pork from Black Hill Ranch, cheese from Pola and Mia Bella, even beer from local breweries like Karbach.
It's refreshing to see a restaurant commit so quietly and unobtrusively to serving local food, and gives me hope that overused terms like "farm to table" and "locavorism" will one day fade away and that restaurants like benjy's will still be serving Texas pork and cheese when it's no longer fashionable to do so. It gives me hope that one day locally sourced food will be a given in our restaurants, and neither a curiosity nor an obsequious spectacle.
"As the farm-to-table movement ramped up, so, too, did the idea of restaurants printing their purveyors' names on menus as some sort of badge of locavore honor," wrote a frustrated Felix Salmon last week in Grub Street, New York magazine's food blog. "But even as the qualifying terms have become more vague, their ability to increase a restaurant's bottom line has gone up."
I don't get this sense from the local items at benjy's, in spite of the fact that the benjy's team — headed up by owner Benjy Levitt and partner Dylan Murray — has just opened its own Revival Market-esque store next to the original benjy's in Rice Village, a store called (appropriately enough) Local Foods. Because at the same time, benjy's doesn't hew so closely to locavorist dogma that it eschews quality ingredients sourced from far and wide.
Take, for example, the forbidden rice in my tofu entrée from that pre-Halloween night. It's pleasant enough to see a well-constructed, thoughtful vegetarian item on a menu, let alone to have it actually taste good. The onyx grains of rice were tossed together with curried cubes of tofu, green beans, cauliflower and candied pumpkin seeds in an autumnal dish that was kept light with bright leaves of cilantro but still hearty enough for a full meal.
My best friend and I traded our dishes back and forth, trying to decide which was better. I was ultimately more enamored of her beef udon with thick, juicy slices of rib eye in an oil-slicked broth that was thick with bok choy and slithery, slurpable noodles. Served with a fried egg on top, the udon was the epitome of Asian-inspired comfort food that night, washed down ably with glass after glass of the pleasantly hoppy Jester King on our table.
The beer director stopped by toward the end of our meal and checked out the 750-milliliter bottle, nodding approvingly at our selection. He told us that the restaurant had just gotten in (512) Brewing's latest anniversary beer, a Belgian-style triple. My friend and I looked at each other, paid our tab, then moved promptly to benjy's bar, where we ordered up another round — this time of the triple.
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The downstairs bar area is small here, but that's because the action is all upstairs. Downstairs is where I'd prefer to be anyway, taking in the sweeping views of benjy's luxe dining room. Familiar touches from the now 16-year-old Rice Village location are found here — such as the studded, white leather chairs with seductively curved arms that line the bar and the semiprivate dining table at the front of the restaurant — but it's mostly a creature unto itself.
