Back in the early '90s, The Axiom was the coolest hellhole in Houston. In a best-of issue of its own, Details magazine listed the bar (in its Catal Hüyük incarnation) as the punk place to visit when in town. Skanky, dark and perpetually sticky, the punk rock bar hunkered on the eastern edge of downtown and filled the night air with grungy, growling alternative rock and wildly screeching punk. It was host to the young and pierced, who slithered up to the bar with their shaved heads and combat boots for poetry slams and pitchers of brown beer.

On the outside, Jason Nodler looked like any other Axiom barfly, with his hangdog T-shirt style and his perpetually ironic sneer. Of course, even bellied up to the bar, guzzling pitchers of Lone Star, the wiry young man who would soon become artistic director of Infernal Bridegroom Productions was casting his artful eye on the wide open spaces of The Axiom, sticky though they may have been. In fact, he had a vision. The Axiom, with all its angsty, dank, too-cool blackness, would become the space where Nodler would produce his first show, In the Under Thunderloo. The eccentric rock musical about cavemen and the Apocalypse caused a riot of energy among young Houston hipsters. The show sold out every night, and Nodler's star was on the rise. But as he and IBP began to make waves, The Axiom began to lose steam. When it closed, it seemed as though an era of wild-bar finery was over.

Throughout the '90s the building would take on many identities, even as a fabulous transvestite bar. But it seemed as though the space that had launched one of our city's most stirring and successful theater companies would never return to the glory of its early-'90s punk rock heyday. Re-enter Nodler, who clearly never forgot the power of those times. Last year, when IBP finally got the funding for a space of its own, it wasn't long before Nodler and his motley crew were back at McKinney, rolling up their sleeves and getting down to the nitty-gritty business of turning the dilapidated bar into a first-class avant-garde theater. These days it's scrubbed and painted and dressed up with couches and carpets -- but not too dressed up. After shows and during weeks when nothing's in production, the expansive lobby hosts punk bands, just like in the good old days. The mix of highbrow and lowbrow, of theater and music, is making The Axiom one of the most compelling things happening in Houston when the night sky rolls in.

To a lot of people, perhaps, the scene was desultory: a mid-June game between two teams far below .500, the seventh inning of a 7-1 blowout, Milwaukee's Miller Park two-thirds empty. Houston Astro Alan Zinter waited in the on-deck circle. To the fans barely paying attention in the stands, Zinter was just another no-name pinch hitter strolling to the plate. For him, the moment could not have been more tense or exciting. "My knees just shook; I could feel my heart beating in my chest; I could hear my pulse in my ears," he says. But that short walk from the on-deck circle to the batter's box marked the end of a long, long journey for the 34-year-old catcher.

It marked his big-league debut after 13 years in the minors. Thirteen years of bad pay and endless bus trips, 13 years of watching his teammates get younger and younger as former hopefuls gave up the dream or got promoted past him. Big things had been expected of him. He was a first-round draft pick of the New York Mets in 1989, but his big break never came. Somehow, Zinter never gave up.

"If you had asked me 13 years ago at Shea Stadium, 'You're not going to make the big leagues until 2002 -- can you do it?' I probably would've said no," says the El Paso native. "It was frustrating, watching TV and seeing people I had played with or against. I was never jealous -- it just fueled my fire to do more." Zinter says he stuck with it all these years simply because he loves the game. "I've always had heart and dedication," he says. "But I would critique things a lot -- I wanted to be a perfectionist."

But baseball, as he notes, is a game where the best batters fail 70 percent of the time; he had to learn to accept that and not dwell on the times he couldn't get a hit. "I realized I had to change my attitude and think positive thoughts," he says. "You have to not let the bad days be so bad and the good days be so good, but to stay on an even keel."

Each spring would bring the moment when he'd get the bad news that he was being shipped down to the minors. But this year the new Astros manager, Jimy Williams, left him believing his chance would come soon.

Sure enough, his chance came, on that otherwise forgettable mid-June night. Zinter grounded out against Brewer pitcher Ben Sheets. From then on he was a big-leaguer, his career statistics forever listed in the Baseball Encyclopedia no matter what the rest of his future held. Now, instead of long bus trips, he's taking charter flights to four-star hotels in Chicago and Montreal, playing in stadiums he's only dreamed about and basking in the casual locker-room luxuries that veterans take for granted.

"I'm not a prospect anymore. I think I appreciate it all even more now than I would have if I was 23," he says. "I'm enjoying every minute of it."

That's right, folks, chocolate's making a comeback. Did it ever go away? you may ask. Well, for most of us, no. But health-conscious types now have a new reason to indulge: Chocolate is good for you. A recent Penn State review says cocoa beans are loaded with flavonoids, which have strong antioxidant effects and can lower cholesterol levels and improve cardiovascular health. (Remember the scene in Woody Allen's Sleeper when the physician recommends a hot fudge sundae as holistic medicine? Not so crazy, huh?)

Whatever their reasons for going back to the dark stuff, local chocolate cravers should be grateful that Gilbert Johnson didn't like Florida. If he had, he might still be there today, and Houston would never have known the fantasyland that is The Chocolate Bar.

Johnson's love affair with chocolate began two decades ago in Kansas City, Missouri. Driven by his passion, he moved to Florida with a business partner to open his own store. After a brief detour through Austin (which, lucky for us, Johnson also disliked), he settled in Houston in the fall of '98 to retire and be an artist. But he was unfulfilled. He longed to return to business -- and to making chocolate.

"For me to be totally happy, I have to have my chocolate world," says Johnson. And does he ever. Since The Chocolate Bar opened two years ago, it has succeeded beyond his wildest dreams: Houston demanded 2,000 pounds of milk chocolate last Christmas for the chocolate-covered popcorn alone.

Johnson agrees that chocolate is great for your heart, but he's not talking medicine. He sums up the success of his business with one word: comfort. "After 9/11, our business just went out the ceiling, because everybody was like, 'Oh, I just need a piece of chocolate.' "

"It's about fun and happiness," Johnson adds. "It brings back unbelievably happy thoughts." As customers poke around the shop, marveling at the chocolate ballet slippers (which one clever visitor said were "too too"), the chocolate golf sets, the solid chocolate baby bottles, the violins, the dental kits (!), the dipped potato chips and the outrageous homemade ice cream concoctions, "You can see 'em having these flashbacks," Johnson says. "And regression therapy. I call chocolate a very soothing regression therapy."

It's enough to make you feel like a kid in a candy store. But as Johnson puts it -- and when you visit, you'll know exactly what he means -- "This is not candy. This is chocolate."

"Back in the '80s, people used to tell me I had the best restaurant downtown," says Clive Berkman, owner of Charley's 517. "I would laugh and mutter under my breath, 'I have the only restaurant downtown.' "

Charley's 517, which opened in 1971, was originally an old-school dinner house, with waiters in tuxedos and a stuffy private-club atmosphere. But a succession of great chefs elevated the food there to something quite unique. French nouvelle cuisine blossomed there under chef Amy Ferguson in the mid-'80s. And in 1988, the New American cuisine debuted there under London-born chef Bruce Auden, who now owns the highly acclaimed Biga in San Antonio. Arturo Boada, now chef and owner at Solero, followed Auden, bringing a Spanish flair to the classical kitchen long before the Nuevo Latino era. More great European and classically trained chefs succeeded these culinary pioneers. But when a fire closed Charley's 517 in 1994, Berkman decided to try something different.

"Our customers had changed," he recalls. "The old, stuffy, high-end restaurant market was going away and being replaced by this new baby-boomer high end, which was quite different. So we downscaled the restaurant. No more tuxedos on the waiters. And we went to sort of a steak-house menu." The name of the restaurant was changed to Clive's, and Berkman became the head chef. The formula worked for a couple of years, but then in 1998 the city began tearing up the streets. "We started experiencing what Main Street is experiencing right now," says Berkman. The construction was finally finished in 2001, just as Tropical Storm Allison arrived, devastating the arts district. Soon after 9/11 came the Enron scandal. Funding was cut in the arts, and business dried up at Clive's. "Enron, Arthur Andersen, Dynegy and Reliant made up 60 percent of our corporate business," says Berkman. "All of a sudden it was just gone."

About three years ago, Clive Berkman found Jesus. And since July of last year, he has been a minister at Second Baptist Church. For a guy who was raised Jewish, and who had long fought the Baptists over liquor licenses, his transformation was a bit of a surprise. "Now my life has taken on a whole new meaning," Berkman says. The Lord also moved Berkman to remove his toque. "I never was that good at it; I was just all I could afford," he admits. Last year a classically trained Irish chef named Mark Johnston took over in the kitchen. The steak-house menu was dropped, and so was the name Clive's. According to Berkman, Johnston's new menu is a nostalgic homage to Charley's 517 "through the ages," with borrowings from all the former great chefs who have worked there.

"The old classic dining rooms of Houston have faded away," says Berkman. "Maxim's is gone, and Tony's will soon be replaced by Anthony's, if you believe the rumors." Berkman hopes that Charley's 517 can fill the old-fashioned dinner-house void with an elegant place that isn't stuffy or pretentious. It will be a few years before the Charley's 517 comeback pays any dividends. "Downtown is a mess now," Berkman says. "But in two years, when the construction is done, this area is going to take off like a rocket. Then we will really be back."