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Best Jellyfish Salad

Tay Do

In the Gulf of Mexico, they sting; on a plate at Tay Do, you get revenge. It is a sugary sweet revenge, tempered with the warmth of roasted garlic and the bite of fresh red onion. If you've never tried chilled jellyfish salad -- or Summer Delight, as they call it here -- you will be surprised at the tastiness of Tay Do's. If you have, well, ditto. The translucent jellyfish strands look like thick rice noodles and offer up a slight, pleasant crunch. Their flavor is mild, more of a conduit for spicy-sweet fish sauce. The strands are tossed in a salad of sliced shrimp, pork, cucumber and shredded carrot. Try it atop one of the shrimp chips served on the side. On a hot summer night, it goes perfectly with a chilled glass of beer.

Best Vintage Barbecue Restaurant

Reid's Barbecue

The wood parquet pattern on the linoleum floors is wearing off. The menu hanging on the wall has been slow-smoked to a light brown. Inside the old wall clock above the bar, the Budweiser Clydesdales have been frozen midstride since Reid's opened for business in 1968. Eddie Reid opened the place with her husband, James Reid, who passed away nine years ago. Eddie runs the place now, along with her son James, who learned to smoke meat from his father and has worked at the restaurant since the beginning. The brisket and ribs are smoked in the classic East Texas African-American style, so that the meats are moist and tender with a powerful, smoky aroma. And in keeping with the style, everything is drenched in a barbecue sauce that's a tad sweet (ask for it on the side). The mashed potato salad is homemade and seasoned with a little pickle juice. The pinto beans are plain. The "sandwich" is actually a generous pile of falling-apart brisket with a couple of slices of white bread on the side. You put it together when you get home. That way it doesn't get all soggy.

Best Ice Cream

Hank's Ice Cream Parlor

Grape Nuts, turtle cheesecake, orange-chocolate chip, mango madness and banana pudding are among the favorites at this vintage ice cream parlor on South Main. Hank and his wife make all the ice cream on site; they even roast their own pecans for their famous butter pecan. You can get yours in a cup or a cone or in pints, quarts and gallons packaged with dry ice to go. There's no gelato, mix-ins or any other gimmick, just old-fashioned homemade ice cream with lots of butterfat. Don't be surprised to see provocatively costumed members of the Houston Texans cheerleader squad buying cones here -- it's a popular after-practice hangout. There are also lots of pictures of football players on the wall, which is devoted to signed celebrity photos.
Readers' choice: Marble Slab

Best Vintage Breakfast

Lankford Grocery and Market

The eggs over easy at Lankford Grocery are cooked slowly so they stay tender -- the yolks are perfect, not too runny and not a bit hard. The patty-style sausage is a little spicy and a touch sweet. The home fries have lots of crisp corners. This place really was a grocery store when owner and head cook Eydie Prior was growing up here. Her parents opened the store in 1939. But it was the cooking that brought in the crowds, and so Lankford became a restaurant. And it may be the homiest one in the city. Eydie's grandkids often sit at the counter and watch cartoons while her daughter waits tables. The dining room seems to be located in what was once a garage. The smoking section is on a former driveway where two picnic tables are adorned with orange marigolds growing out of coffee cans. Every couple of months, Eydie goes on a decorating binge and decks the place out with a seasonal theme.

Best Vintage Burger Joint

Lockwood Malt Shop

The malt shop doesn't sell malts anymore, but it goes through gallons of Kool-Aid every day. There is no sign on the building and no way to tell the address. In fact, the red building at the southwest corner of Lockwood and Mulvey looks abandoned. But if you pull into the two-car parking lot and push hard on the screen door, you will find perfection on a buttered bun. The old-fashioned burger is cooked on a hot griddle, so it has lots of dark, crinkly, crunchy edges yet it's still fat and juicy in the middle. Half a pound? Five-eighths of a pound? Who knows. They just grab a big handful of ground meat and make a burger out of it. The beef comes from a nearby meat market, fresh-ground every morning. "All the way" means tomatoes, lettuce, mustard and mayo, onion and pickles. When you get it to go, they wrap it up in wax paper. Now that's vintage.

Best Vintage Restaurant

Felix Mexican Restaurant

When Felix Jr. announced that the city's most historic Tex-Mex restaurant would close its doors for lack of business, he set off a near-riot. People came from hundreds of miles to eat one last meal at the restaurant they grew up in. Families who had been eating there for more than 50 years slipped Polaroids of themselves under the glass tabletops. If the enchiladas at Felix, served in Spanish sauce or bland brown chili gravy, taste absurdly old-fashioned, it's because they're geared toward the Anglo palates of the late 1940s. And according to Geneva Harper, who has worked as a waitress at Felix from the day it opened in 1948, nothing has changed. Except that the Mexican Dinner went for 50 cents back then. So why eat there now? Besides the nostalgia rush, Felix Mexican Restaurant provides a glimpse back to our culinary roots. It is to modern Tex-Mex what a scratchy recording of the Delta blues is to rock and roll.

Best Vintage Steak House

Brenner's Steakhouse

Photo by Houston Press Staff
German immigrant Lorene Brenner and her husband, Herman, opened the first Brenner's Cafe in 1936. When their original eatery was bulldozed to make way for the Katy Freeway, the Brenners relocated to a little house with a big garden and changed the format. From the beginning, Brenner's Steakhouse has served only USDA Prime beef. The 14-table main dining room was softly illuminated by antique light fixtures, and the woodwork was installed with the kind of craftsmanship you don't see much anymore. One wall is made of flagstone with a built-in fireplace, and the opposite one is a floor-to-ceiling window looking out over the enormous garden. The charming little cottage with the excellent steaks became a favorite of Houston's new western suburban set, who were building houses along Memorial in the 1950s and 1960s. Herman Brenner died in 1976, and Mrs. Brenner operated the restaurant alone for many years. When she retired, Tilman Fertitta's Landry's Restaurant Group bought the place. Fertitta spent over $1 million to restore Brenner's to its original state. He even brought Lorene Brenner back as a consultant. In a city that routinely razes its landmarks, Brenner's revitalization is nothing short of amazing.

Best Atmosphere

Strip House

Designed by David Rockwell, the hottest restaurant designer in the country, the Strip House steak house makes a double entendre of the restaurant's name by using erotica as a theme. The banquettes are red leather. The ceiling is red. The sofas, carpets and throw pillows in the bar are red. Pretty much everything is red, except for the dozens and dozens of photos on the walls, which are black-and-white. They come from Studio Manasse, a Viennese photo studio of the 1920s and 1930s that attempted to capture the erotic spirit of the cabaret era in its dreamily retouched photographs of nude or partially clothed women. Together the ruby-red colors and nude photos create an ambience your parents might have called "French whorehouse." To modern sensibilities, the decor might be better described as "ironic, retro-1950s French whorehouse." Or as one male friend put it, "Steak and tits, what's not to like?"
Readers' choice: Vargo's

Best Deli

Kenny & Ziggy's

If the phrase "Gimme some tongue" flows freely from your lips, then you're gonna love Kenny & Ziggy's, where there's more than just tongue. Here you'll also find the tastiest corned beef, pastrami and chopped liver as well as some outstanding smoked fish, such as sturgeon, sable and whitefish, all sold by the pound. Two different kinds of pickles are available: one sour, the other half-sour. Too lazy to make your own sandwiches? Then let the counter staff oblige. Here, they have everything you would find in a typical New York deli, except one: attitude.
Readers' choice: Jason's Deli

Best French Restaurant

Bistro Moderne

Forty-two-year-old Philippe Schmit was born in Roanne, France, and apprenticed at several two-star restaurants in Paris before moving to New York in 1990 and taking a job as sous-chef at one of the best fish restaurants in the world, Le Bernardin. Schmit moved to Houston last year to open Bistro Moderne. The restaurant takes a playful approach to the French classics. Appetizers are dressed up in dessert shapes like bombes, napoleons and tartes. A lamb shank comes with the meat removed from and balanced on a big bare bone. Schmit has a way with French fish dishes. His bouillabaise is the best you will taste on this side of the Atlantic. Even the humble moules frites (mussels and french fries) on the lunch menu at Bistro Moderne take the street food of Belgium to a whole new level. The mussels are an ivory-colored, extra-fat variety, lovingly farm-raised in Washington State. You can get them in a white-wine broth or a chorizo cream sauce. Go for the chorizo. The sauce is cooked with the spicy Spanish sausage, which is then strained out. When you're done eating the mussels, you can soak up the chorizo-and-mussel-flavored cream with crusty French bread.

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