The first and most important thing to know about La Fisheria is that there's absolutely nothing else like it in Houston, and likely never has been. Walking into La Fisheria — with its electric blue-and-orange cottage and its mustachioed, dreadlocked celebrity chef — is akin to walking off a stuffy plane and into a vibrant, wholly modern beach town in Mexico. Adjust your expectations accordingly from there, because this is not Tex-Mex, and it's not your typical coastal Mexican vacation food, either. Chef Aquiles Chavez wouldn't have it that way.

It's appropriate, in a way, to begin a review of his restaurant with a look at Chavez himself, a celebrity in his native Mexico with three television shows to his name who remains sort of an enigma to most Houstonians. One of those TV programs is a reality show, Aquiles en Houston, about opening La Fisheria in Houston. (I gave my on-camera opinions on Chavez's food for the fifth episode of the show.)

His name — his trademark, as it were — is on nearly every surface of La Fisheria, from the sign out front to the Charlie Chaplin-style photos of Chavez on the walls inside. The restaurant sells Chavez-branded merchandise, from hats to cooking utensils to even the very furniture you dine upon, and Chavez is usually seen in and out of the dining room every single day and night. If I didn't know better, I'd think he lives in the second story of the brightly painted house.

On the surface, it seems as though this would be incredibly obnoxious — and yet it's not. There is an ineffable measure of acceptance of Chavez's in-your-face celebrity, in part because he's so guileless about it — as if he'd been born into the role and can't help but be a celebrity chef, like Elizabeth can't help being Queen — and in part because his boisterous and kind personality draws you into the restaurant as much as the food itself does. The food here is an expression of Chavez, of his home state of Tabasco and of all the misunderstood or poorly interpreted facets of modern Mexican cuisine.

You will not find chips and salsa on his menu, nor enchiladas, nor more typically "authentic" dishes like chiles rellenos or cochinita pibil. You will find instead the updated Mexican cuisine that Chavez left behind when he departed his home country to make a new life for himself and his family in Houston: fresh mussels cooked in red wine and served with a beet coulis; yellowfin tuna steak served on a bed of nopales and lentils, the latter a nod to the Middle Eastern influences in Mexico that brought the country favorites like al pastor; duck stew with chorizo; and a small but smart array of ceviches, carpaccios and other raw seafood treatments.

This is the modern Mexican food that Chavez wants to show the rest of the world: food that's influenced by other cultures but also by their own native ingredients, like an alligator gar-topped tostada he served recently as an amuse-bouche. Gar, he explained as he delivered the tostadas, is prized in Tabasco and rarely found in large sizes — they eat it too quickly for the fish to mature to greater lengths. He was thrilled to find that Americans view the gar as cheap trash fish, and quickly set about buying enormous, five-foot-long filets of the ugly, snouted fish with reptilian scales and transforming it into an elegant homage to his homeland.

Chavez also takes traditional ingredients like hoja santa or xnipec (pronounced "shnuh-peck") and uses them to great effect in elevating simple standards, like a shrimp cocktail with homemade tomato sauce. That sauce is polished and burnished to a gleam with the xnipec, a sort of Mexican mirepoix made with red onions, cilantro, tomato and habanero peppers, and is maddening thanks to the realization that all other shrimp cocktails — even the great ones like those served at Connie's or Tampico — will taste duller by comparison.

I find this to be the case with many of La Fisheria's dishes. I'm currently spoiled rotten by its homemade churros served en croute with a side of homemade chocolate dipping sauce that hides a boozy treat underneath its calm, ochre surface: xtabentún, a fermented honey liqueur that's infused with the herbal bite of anise and punch of rum. Mix the chocolate together with the xtabentún and lose a good ten minutes of your life as you black out with the sweet rush of it all.

I'm also completely smitten with the duck, chorizo and mussels stew that La Fisheria calls pato mariscal. The immediate vinegar and chili powder bite of the fatty pork sausage will easily draw in a Houston palate trained on breakfast tacos full of the stuff, the flavors seeping into the soft bites of duck and soaking the plump, onyx-shelled mussels swimming in the russet broth. And the grilled octopus with confit potatoes in a softly fragrant Mexican vanilla oil may just be the best octopus treatment in the city.