Restaurants and Food Services

Young Woman Raped in Stall By Registered Sex Offender Enlists Rusty Hardin to Sue TGI Friday's for Negligence

Nearly two years after claiming she was raped in the stall of a TGI Friday's in Webster, Texas, by one of its employees, a young woman is suing the restaurant for negligence. The woman, who was 17 at the time of the rape and is referred to as Jane Doe within the lawsuit, the man who raped her regist ... More >>

Healthy Fast Food Menu Items Can Lure and Deceive Consumers

If you're on a diet, or are at least trying to eat healthier, you probably don't frequent fast food restaurants throughout the day. A typical fast food menu isn't full of healthy and nutritious items. However, a few fast food chains recently began to add lighter options to menus, due in part to a re ... More >>

Clumsy Butcher: Bobby Heugel and Company Announce New Restaurant Group and New Downtown Tequila Bar

It was bound to happen. After opening so many concepts in only four years -- and taking over operations of two other longtime Houston institutions -- Bobby Heugel, Kevin Floyd and Michael Burnett have announced the creation of restaurant group Clumsy Butcher to hem everything into one tidy package. ... More >>

Battle Fast Food Fish Sandwich: Which One Should You Have During Lent?

With fish being a choice food throughout the 40 days of Lent, many fast food chain restaurants have added a fish sandwich to their menus, or at least brought them back. I decided to try five fish sandwiches and determine which ones are the best based on overall quality, taste and price. You might b ... More >>

Your Stress-Free Holiday Dining Guide: Where to Eat on Christmas Day 2012

The presents are unwrapped, the place is destroyed and the pine needles from the Christmas tree have formed a fine carpet throughout the house. The last thing you want to do is dirty up a bunch of dishes cooking after all that. So why not let one of the many Houston restaurants open on Christmas Day ... More >>

Your Stress-Free Holiday Dining Guide: Where to Eat on Christmas Day 2012

The presents are unwrapped, the place is destroyed and the pine needles from the Christmas tree have formed a fine carpet throughout the house. The last thing you want to do is dirty up a bunch of dishes cooking after all that. So why not let one of the many Houston restaurants open on Christmas Day ... More >>

Your Stress-Free Holiday Dining Guide: Where to Eat on Christmas Day 2012

The presents are unwrapped, the place is destroyed and the pine needles from the Christmas tree have formed a fine carpet throughout the house. The last thing you want to do is dirty up a bunch of dishes cooking after all that. So why not let one of the many Houston restaurants open on Christmas Day ... More >>

Outback Steakhouse's Gingerbread Martini and Los Tios' Ramos Gin Fizz: Two Perennial Cocktail Favorites

Every year around the holidays, it happens. Like clockwork. For as long as I've worked for or at the Houston Press. The Outback Steakhouse gingerbread martini article crawls out of the netherdepths of the Internet like some ink-stained zombie as people across the United States scour search engines f ... More >>

Ron Chen, Owner and "Head Coach" at Rattan Pan-Asian Bistro

What he does Ron Chen is quick to note something right up front: "I am not a chef. I'm like a coach. As in, I don't play basketball but I coach the game, you know?" The owner of Rattan Pan-Asian Bistro, Chen has already put in a lifetime in the restaurant business and has no plans on stopping now. ... More >>

Restaurants and Road Trips: Learning to Settle

On a recent road trip to Chicago, my girlfriend and I wound up eating far more Wendy's than normal people should. Driving through small towns and with options limited, sometimes fast food is the preferable option to the local truck stop with all the windowless vans parked out back. I rarely eat fa ... More >>

John T. Edge: The Truck Food Cookbook: 150 Recipes and Ramblings from America’s Best Restaurants on Wheels

Federal Lawsuit Filed in Corpus Christi Over Lobster Baked Potato

It's the clash of the Longhorn Steakhouse titans down south in Corpus Christi, where a local chain of steakhouses with a similar name to the national LongHorn Steakhouse restaurants has filed a federal lawsuit over a lobster baked potato. It's more complicated than that, of course, but the lobster ... More >>

Why Restaurants Matter (and Why You Should Tip Generously)

Last week's post Corkage: A Privilege, Not a Right generated a heated comment thread. "Are you f'n kidding me?" asked "Corkage Smorkage" rhetorically. "Offer your server a taste of your wine." ???? I'm already paying them a BS "fee" to open it. What's next, offering them a taste of my food so the ... More >>

Grand Forks, North Dakota, Gets an Olive Garden

Since I first read the Grand Forks Herald article last night -- "Long-awaited Olive Garden receives warm welcome" -- it's made its way around the Internet as an object of fascination faster than faked cell phone pictures of Christina Hendricks's breasts. "An Onion-worthy, rave review of...Olive Gar ... More >>

Comment of the Day

​Joanna O'Leary had a delicious Italian meal at Fratelli's and decided that the restaurant was worth driving outside the loop for. Which gave commenter Laurie pause: Heaven forbid! Outside the Loop! Joanna get over it. It is all of 5 min outside the Loop. A majority of Houston lives outside ... More >>

Restaurant Lawyer David Jordan on Tip Pools and Illegal Immigration

​David Jordan is a partner in the Houston office of Littler Mendelson, an international law firm specializing in labor and employment law. Before he was a lawyer, Jordan worked in the restaurant industry for several years: flipping burgers at Burger King when he was in high school; working in ... More >>

Tilman Fertitta an "Executive to Watch" in 2011

This is Tilman Fertitta's three-story yacht. How's your 2011 looking so far?​Houston's Tilman Fertitta made a short list of restaurant executives to watch in 2011, in part because of his recent acquisition of a trio of new restaurant chains: The Oceanaire, Claim Jumper and Bubba Gump Shrimp Co ... More >>

Taco Palenque

Where Are We Drinking?

A pool table and some long neck beers, hazy windows and boozy customers. It's all good here, at one of Houston's best dive bars in town. Think you know where we're shooting pool drinking this week? ​Leave your best guess in the comments section below.

Where Are We Drinking?

Sturdy wooden tables, comfortable banquets, soft lighting and a glass of wine. This could be any upscale restaurant in Houston, right? Not if you look for the hidden clues... Think you know where we're drinking this week? ​Leave your best guess in the comments section below.

Diving Into Houston's Best Dive Bars

​Although the number of "true" dive bars is shrinking by the day, that didn't stop our own John Nova Lomax from tracking down the best ones left in the city and covering them in last October's feature story, "Dive Bars: A Handcrafted Tour of the Best, Most Obscure Places to Lean on a Stool in ... More >>

Live at the MGM Grand Garden Arena: Brock Lesnar vs. Shane Carwin

The UFC starts the fireworks a day early with a Live at the MGM Grand Garden Arena bout between two heavyweight contenders

Health Dept. Roundup: 77077 to 77099

​This week on Health Department Roundup, we finally complete our systematic tour of Houston's zip codes. This last leg was pretty smooth sailing, as we made it all the way from 77077 to 77099 with very few offenders. We also checked in on the non-sequential zip codes that make up recently anne ... More >>

The Yelp Effect

​Although there was no shortage of food-related panels at the Interactive portion of South by Southwest (SXSWi) this year, none were as insightful or as incendiary as The Yelp Effect, a frank discussion on the effect that online reviews and criticisms have on the restaurant industry. Led by A ... More >>

A Decade of Landry's

Photo by B. Tse​Whether you love them or hate them, you can't escape them -- not even if you leave Houston. Over the past ten years, Landry's has become a household name. Besides owning such well-known restaurants as Saltgrass Steak House, Aquarium, and Vic and Anthony's, Landry's has dabbled ... More >>

Health Department Roundup: Cafeteria Edition

​ As with other restaurants, a cafeteria's quality varies, depending on management and food freshness standards, which -- as habitual readers of this column know -- often has little to do with menu pricing. The shadow of the Houston health inspector has recently fallen upon the following:The D ... More >>

Dive Bar-ology 101: What A Dive Bar Is Not

​These days, there are a lot of misconceptions about what constitutes a dive bar. Going by lists on sites like Yelp and Citysearch, and especially this laughable list from the Houston Chronicle, apparently any drinking establishment that does not sport bottle service, valet parking and a velvet r ... More >>

Dive Bar Eats: At Best, A Mixed Bag

Photo by Option ThisAre questionable jars of pickled eggs the most you can hope for at Houston's best dive bars?​This week's feature is all about Houston's best dive bars. Dive bar food in Houston is a pretty hit-and-miss affair. If you lump icehouses in with the overall class of dive bars, as ... More >>

Menu Flashback: Don's Seafood 1972

Photo by J.C. ReidBack in 1972, the Landry brothers were on a roll. They'd opened four of their Cajun-inspired seafood restaurants in Louisiana and had just begun a push into Texas with a restaurant in Beaumont. One of their employees, Jim Gossen, ordered a new menu design for their flagship restaur ... More >>

Some Value: Texas Roadhouse Will Take Those Benningan’s and Steak and Ale Gift Cards

Anthony Bourdain on Illegal Immigrant Labor in U.S. Kitchens

Buen Idea

Buen Idea

Grande Plans

Houston's most famous chef talks about prostate cancer, turning 50 and what's next for Cafe Annie

Dry-Aged Discrimination

What grade of beef are the steaks at The Capital Grille?

Best Expense-Account Restaurant

Capital Grille

Dining by Demographic

Fleming's Prime Steakhouse serves up excellent renditions of the nation's most average food and wine preferences

Steak House Shuffle

Vallone's takes a break just in time to give Fleming's a shot

Best Overall Restaurant

Da Marco

Best Stuffed Mushrooms

Istanbul Grill & Deli

Chain for Fools

Houston versus Dallas: We're family-run; they're chained up.

Play Ball!

Sports bars and gay bars cater to a similar crowd: Guys who watch buff men

Stirred and Shaken

Champps Americana's Manhattan

Stirred and Shaken

P.F. Chang's mai tai

Attack of the Killer Developers

Restaurants pop up in Midtown

Nothing Small About It

The expansive Maggiano's Little Italy serves portions to match

Pushed Around

For City Hall, one downtown cart vendor may be too many

Capital Idea

Is one more palace of red meat one too many? If it's the Capital Grille, the answer is no.

Food Fight

The Landrys came to Houston with good food and good ideas. But a good family squabble let Tilman Fertitta step in and carve himself an empire.

Last Call at Maud's