Candelari's owner Michael Mays calls himself "The King of Sausages." He even has the slogan curving across the top of the pizzeria's logo. His sausage pizza is very good, but Mays could put his Italian sausage on Wonder bread and still draw raves. As the story goes, Mays founded Candelari Sausage with his Grandpa Candelari's sausage recipe. It is boldly spiced, with garlic and fennel in the foreground and the subtle flavor of several secret ingredients (orange liqueur?) in the background. At Candelari's Pizzeria you can get this outrageous Italian sausage on pizzas, sausage-and-pepper subs and in several excellent pasta dishes.

Watch out! The innocent-looking paper-wrapped package they hand you when you ask for a cheeseburger at Adrian's is actually a delicious mess waiting to happen. The giant hand-formed meat patty is topped with a sloppy mountain of lettuce, tomatoes, onion and pickles. The burgers are fried to order, so they're piping hot. They're also so big you need a strategy to eat one. First of all, be sure to ask them to cut it in half. This will reduce the likelihood of the entire sandwich coming apart and cascading down your shirt on first bite. Next, consider sharing with a friend. Two people can easily split the $4.35 monstrosity. Try one of the awesome steam-table potato or vegetable dishes instead of french fries. The food here is beautiful, but the dining room is ugly. That's probably why most Adrian's Burger Bar patrons call in their orders and get the food to go.

When you get a meatball sub to go at Zinnante's, get the sauce on the side so you can heat it up yourself at home. Not only will this keep the sandwich from getting soggy, it also prevents the flying meatball problem. See, the meatballs, bread and red sauce on Zinnante's sub are all outstanding, but when you bite one end of it, the sauce-lubricated meatballs have a terrible habit of popping out the other. By cutting each meatball in half and then slathering the bread underneath with the red sauce, you can anchor the meatballs firmly in place. Thus reconfigured, Zinnante's meatball sub is exquisite. The Paisano, a muffuletta-style sandwich, is another standout; the shrimp and catfish poor boys are excellent as well.

Smaller than a hubcap but bigger than your face, the chicken-fried steak at Rio Ranch is actually a thin-cut sirloin steak that has been dipped in buttermilk, hand-dredged in seasoned flour and fried until it's crispier than Grandma's chicken wings. It's served atop a large pile of steaming mashed potatoes with black pepper-specked cream gravy on the side. Rio Ranch, which was opened by Robert Del Grande in 1993, is one of the earliest outposts of the "cowboy cuisine" cooking style that has since gained considerable notoriety in the national press. Designed to resemble a Hill Country ranch house, the interior and exterior are built almost entirely of native limestone and cedar, some of it salvaged from old ranch buildings. The bar and most of the tabletops are made of mesquite. And the place is decorated with quirky knickknacks made by Texas artisans. Don't miss the bizarre deer antler chandelier.

Full of Francophobia but still want good mussels? Switch from French to Flemish at the only Belgian restaurant in town, Café Montrose. When you do, there are four things you need to know. First, even though they list many varieties of mussels on the menu, the best and most traditional are called moules frites, spoken all in one word (that's mussels and french fries, $16). These steamed bivalves are prepared in a white wine sauce with onions, celery and parsley, and they're served piping hot in a huge black pot. Second, it's mayonnaise they serve with the fries -- get used to it. Third, the Belgians brew more beers than the Germans, so wash down the mussels with a Duvel or Chimay ale. Fourth, French is still spoken here. Get over it.

There's an undeniable truth in cooking: Deep frying makes everything better. The law behind it is simple. Frying adds fat -- lots of it -- to anything, and fat means flavor. Exhibit A: the chimichanga. The chimichanga is a beautiful thing, in a horrifying way, like a chicken-fried steak. Take chicken, cheese, onions and cilantro, wrap it all burrito-style in a flour tortilla, and submerge it in really hot oil until it's golden-brown. Plan a trip to the confessional and the gym after one of these bad boys. We're not quite sure what makes the deep-fried log at Chapultepec a notch above the rest. Maybe it's the homemade, non-Sysco quality of the ingredients. Or maybe they've figured out the perfect temperature for the oil to make the shell crispy, but not crunchy. Either way, we've yet to find better proof of the deep-fried theorem than this Tex-Mex dish.

The house special noodle soup at Lucky Pot comes with big chunks of Chinese bacon, shiitake mushrooms, black mushrooms and dried tofu in a thick brown broth. The sublimely flavored bowl of noodles will remind you of fresh, rough-cut pasta in a mushroom and bacon sauce. But hey, if that doesn't appeal, don't worry. This is only one bowl of noodles in a noodle jungle. "There are 10,000 kinds of noodles in China," the Lucky Pot waitress lectures. While you may not be able to find all 10,000 varieties in the unassuming shopping center at 9888 Bellaire, just east of Beltway 8, you will find more than you can eat in a week of lunches. Yunnan-, Peking-, Szechuan-, Hong Kong-, Taiwan- and Mandarin-style noodles are all assembled here for your slurping enjoyment.

Steeped in the old-world European tradition of bread-baking, the folks at KraftsMen Baking produce one of the only organic breads in the city. There's nothing light, airy or dainty about their pain biologique. It's dense and heavy, laden with lots of different kinds of seeds -- like hemp, flax, pumpkin and sunflower. A loaf costs between $4 and $6.50, depending on the size. It has an amazingly fresh taste. One drawback is that it doesn't keep very long, since it has no preservatives. But that's not much of a drawback at all: It's never around long enough to go stale.

House of Coffee Beans has been Houston's gourmet coffee roaster for almost 30 years. You can smell the roasting beans before you're even through the door. The secret to their success is simple: They focus on doing one thing and being the best in their class. They purchase the best green coffee beans from every coffee-growing region known to man, then they roast them in small hand-tended batches. They prefer to roast their beans medium rather than dark, which may mask any imperfections in the beans. Five different coffees are brewed daily. Customers can try a free sample or buy a cupful. In addition to having nearly 100 different coffees, they have a large selection of teas from around the globe. They have both unblended coffees from small estates and blended coffees, in both caffeinated and decaffeinated varieties. Many different flavors are also available. The most expensive variety is the Jamaican Blue Mountain at $42 per pound, although insiders tout the Indian Monsooned Malabar at $14.50 per pound, which is completely free from acidity and astringency. It undergoes an airing and watering by nature as well as hand-picking and turning twice a day during the curing period. That's one nice cup o' joe.

Screw the NyQuil. When you're sick, you need Jewish penicillin. We recommend Kenny & Ziggy's Mish Mosh. Their matzo balls are light and fluffy. You can slice your spoon straight through these tasty dumplings. (That's a sign they're probably unhealthy; the only way to get really light and fluffy matzo balls is to use a gallon of schmaltz -- fat. But who cares? You're sick.) The best part of this soup is that it includes kreplach. Kreplach is a bitch to make -- even Jewish moms make it only once a year, for high holy days. The gentile dictionary defines it as Jewish ravioli -- little ground beef-filled noodles that float in your soup (and make it so special). If you're famished, we recommend a plate of corned beef and cabbage to follow. Oh, to enjoy such flavor. You should live so long.