Diana Ramos used to own Habanero Blue, near the ballpark downtown, but that fell victim to all of the construction that occurred a couple of years ago. She’s back with Brisa Cocina Mexicana (5161 San Felipe, 713-993-9899). “I wanted to give customers a taste of some of the different things that Mexico has to offer,” she tells Dish. “We don’t do Tex-Mex. I don’t know how to make Tex-Mex, and even though a good friend of mine suggested that we couldn’t make it in Houston without serving Tex-Mex, the crowds are telling us otherwise…We have a lot of seafood on the menu and dishes that people have never seen before, like taco chicharrón de fajita, where we take a Chihuahua cheese tortilla stuffed with fajita meat and top it with a roasted poblano tomatillo sauce, or the sea bass with tequila and avocado risotto, or the Kahlúa tres leches. All the sauces we use are made fresh every day. In fact, everything is made fresh here.”
When Dish visited one lunchtime, on Brisa’s second week of operation, we had to wait for a table, it was already so busy. And Ramos is right – the menu is uncommon for a Houston Mexican restaurant. She’s serving dishes like the croqueta de jaiba, or crabcake, grilled achiote salmon salad and a salchi burger, which comes with slices of jalapeño sausage on top of the meat patty. This is a terrific addition to the restaurant scene in Houston and one that will be hard to get into from the get-go.
This article appears in Apr 30 – May 6, 2009.