Cyclone Season

The tortilla chips come to the table in a brown paper lunch bag at Terlingua Texas Border Cafe. Our dining companion, who arrived before us, has already polished off most of them. He has three different salsas arrayed in front of him, a cold cerveza in one hand and a salsa-dipped chip in the other. I settle in at the table and order a beer and some silky-smooth chile con queso, made with a lovely processed American cheese.

“You’ve got to try this one,” the early bird says, pointing at a dark red hot sauce with black charred bits of tomatoes in it. I try some and detect a smoky chipotle flavor and a mellow burn.

“It tastes familiar,” I say.

“Do you ever buy Arriba! bottled salsa at the grocery store?” he asks me.

“Yeah, in fact, it’s my favorite.”

He explains that Arriba! hot sauces come from recipes from the legendary Cyclone Anaya’s Tex-Mex restaurant. And the owner of Terlingua, Chuy Valencia Jr., co-owns Cyclone Anaya’s on Woodway with his brother Ricardo. Famous Tex-Mex restaurateur Cyclone Anaya was their father. There’s definitely a family resemblance between Arriba! and the hot sauce at Terlingua.

For dinner, I get the old-fashioned burger basket, which features a succulent half-pound, hand-formed Black Angus ground-chuck patty served on a toasted bun with lettuce, tomato, onion, and pickles. It may be the best thing on the menu, which is odd, since I expected Cyclone Anaya’s son to be serving just Tex-Mex. In fact, the fare is “something for everyone” eclectic.

“The core of the menu is Tex-Mex,” says Chuy Jr. “But I spent a lot of time surfing, and I used to see lots of little eateries where they had Tex-Mex and Gulf Coast specialties side by side. That’s the concept here.”

The baja tacos come with your choice of grilled fish, roasted salmon or pan-fried spicy shrimp on a corn or flour tortilla with purple cabbage, pico de gallo, queso fresco and cilantro dressing. I sampled the shrimp version on a flour tortilla and liked it much more than the usual mushy catfish or tilapia fish tacos.

There are quite a few shrimp dishes on the menu, including Tex-Mex shrimp brochette, “you peel ’em” boiled shrimp, a fried shrimp basket and shrimp mojo de ajo. We tried the shrimp mojo de ajo, which means “shrimp wet with garlic,” expecting the crustaceans to come swimming in garlic sauce. Instead, the jumbo shrimp at Terlingua are sautéed with the shells on and served dry atop a bed of rice pilaf with a garlic dipping sauce on the side. The shrimp get a little dried out, but it helps to pour the sauce on top of them as soon as you get them out of their shells.

If you like a lot of cheese, you’ll love the Tex-Mex combination plates here. I tried the Rio Grande platter, which comes with two cheese enchiladas, a puffed-up fried tortilla with chile con queso poured on top, tomatoes, guacamole, rice and beans, and a giant fajita taco on the side. By the time I had mopped up the swirls of fluorescent American cheese from the queso, and bright orange cheddar and white jack cheese from the enchiladas, I didn’t have enough appetite left to do justice to the fajita taco. One of my tablemates, who purported to be on some sort of high-protein diet, was happy to steal the salty, well-done beef strips out of the taco. He ate them dipped in salsa.

One morning I tried Terlingua’s vaquero top-sirloin steak with some fried eggs on the side. The steak was pink and appeared to be cooked properly to medium, but it was dry and tough. The eggs were overdone, too. I suppose I should have known better than to order a steak. Most of the things I chose at Terlingua were cooked so well, I made the mistake of thinking they could do it all.

But when a restaurant attempts to offer burgers, steaks, quail, fish tacos, ambitious fish dishes, an entire array of Tex-Mex dishes, Louisiana poor boys, Philly cheese steaks, Mexican hoagies, salads, soups, chowders, baby-back ribs and all kinds of shrimp and chicken dishes, it’s bound to slip up somewhere. The restaurant would do itself and its customers a favor by cutting the menu in half and preparing a few things very well.

With a huge bar, two outdoor dining areas and a big open dining room with dark wood tables and chairs, it’s an inviting space. The ceiling has been removed and the ductwork exposed, giving the room a warehouse feeling. There’s a giant Texas flag hanging from the rafters, in case you were wondering what state you’re in.

When I first walked into Terlingua, I thought the modern stonework, glass room divider and spare lines were a little too upscale for a Tex-Mex joint. But once I looked over the menu and realized that it included upscale items too, I decided it was probably a good fit. Two restaurants have already failed in this shopping-center space, and the interior is little changed since then. If Terlingua Texas Border Cafe succeeds, it won’t be because of the inherited decor. It will because Cyclone Anaya’s oldest son kept up the family’s reputation for quality.

Cyclone Anaya’s real name was Jesus Becerra Valencia. He started his professional wrestling career in Mexico after winning a medal in the Pan American Games. But “Jesus Valencia” wasn’t the sort of name that inspired fear in the ring. So he borrowed “Anaya,” a family name on his mother’s side, and fought in Mexico City under the moniker Apollo Anaya. In the 1940s, he moved to Chicago to break into the lucrative American professional wrestling game. Chicago promoters thought “Apollo” sounded too wimpy, so he changed his name again, this time to “Cyclone.”

The wrestler got into the restaurant business after a back injury ended his career in the ring. His restaurant, Cyclone Anaya’s, opened near the corner of Durham and Washington in 1961. The food there was said to have its own signature flavors, and everything was made from scratch. It was among the most popular Tex-Mex restaurants in Houston until the neighborhood declined. The family filed for bankruptcy in 1994.

To his friends, Jesus Becerra “Cyclone Anaya” Valencia was known as Chuy, a nickname for Jesus. His two sons, Chuy Jr. and Ricardo, are both in the restaurant business today. Ricardo, known as Rico, created the recipes for the Arriba! hot sauces at his restaurant, Cyclone Anaya’s on Richmond, which is no longer in business. In 2003, Rico and Chuy Jr. teamed up to open the Cyclone Anaya’s on Woodway, which has been a huge success. Chuy Jr. opened his own restaurant called Terlingua Texas Border Cafe near Willowbrook Mall. The restaurant didn’t do well at that location, so Chuy Jr. moved it to the shopping center at Studemont and Washington.

Younger brother Rico, who, along with his mother, controls the Cyclone Anaya name, had already begun construction of a new Cyclone Anaya’s on Durham when his brother made the move. The siblings have had a parting of ways. Chuy Jr. never sets foot in the Woodway restaurant, even though he still owns a percentage. And Rico has never been inside the new Terlingua location. The Cyclone Anaya’s on Durham is scheduled to open in late July.

“They are different restaurants with different menus,” says Rico Valencia, dismissing the rivalry. “He is serving hamburgers. Everything we do at Cyclone Anaya’s evolved from what we served at the original place.”

“I wish him well,” says Chuy Jr.

“He’s my brother and I love him,” says Rico. “We just operate differently.”

So here we are, on the ten-year anniversary of the closing of the old Cyclone Anaya’s, with Cyclone’s two sons opening competing restaurants within blocks of the original location. We wish them both well. More Tex-Mex for us!