Southwestern cuisine stopped being hip in Houston somewhere around Cafe Annie’s millionth year in existence, long before its closure last year. So imagine our surprise when TQLA swooped in with Southwestern vet Tommy Birdwell at the helm and made it cool again. (Of course, having 167 different varieties of tequila, many of them on tap, doesn’t hurt either.) The updated Southwestern cuisine here incorporates Tex-Mex influences as well as our own Gulf Coast cuisine, and the result is a fresh, lively menu that features excellent dishes such as crawfish corncakes with lime butter and blue corn-fried oysters with chorizo cream.
This article appears in Sep 22-28, 2011.