Our 2013 Best of Houston® winners have been announced, but in many cases, picking the best item in any category was no easy task. In order to show off all the culinary greatness Houston has to offer, we're rounding up the "rest of the best" in some of our favorite categories during the next several months. Bon appétit!
I won't even tell you how many milkshake jokes I heard while taste-testing shakes around town the past few weeks.
Thankfully, most of the shakes were good enough to make me overlook the lewd (though apropos) commentary from servers and other diners. Even during our (mild) Houston winters, there's something undeniably comforting about a good chocolate milkshake that makes you forget all your troubles for a while. Milkshakes remind you of your childhood, when time moved more slowly and the world was much more innocent. This list will tell you where to go to recapture some of that magic.
Of course, now that we're adults and we're stressed and the world is a crazy/terrifying place and you can't even get a damn milkshake without listening to a sexual joke, regular milkshakes often just don't cut it. And that's why there are boozy milkshakes. Those are represented in abundance on this list, as well.
You're welcome.
10. Becks Prime Yes, it's essentially a fast-food restaurant, and yes, I'm pretty sure the chocolate milkshake is made with vanilla soft serve and Hershey's chocolate syrup (rather than chocolate ice cream), but no matter. The Becks Prime shake is smooth, creamy and almost impossibly thick, straddling the line between ice cream and milkshake. Initially, you have to eat it with a spoon, because it's too dense to suck up through a straw. Of course, it's so delicious, you might eat the whole thing before it melts enough to drink anyway.
9. Katz's Katz's is great not only because it's open around the clock and makes some fine Jewish deli fare, but also because the place knows how to do a milkshake. Rather than the traditional blending of ice cream and milk, Katz's ups the ante by sticking an entire slice of cheesecake into the blender as well. The cheesecake milkshake (say that five times fast) has an extra tangy bite to it that normal milkshakes don't, and the graham cracker crust gives it just a hint of that hearty graham flavor.
8. Little Bigs Ladies and gents, I give you the first of the boozy shakes on the list. Little Bigs makes two incredible milkshakes, The Dude -- a nod to the White Russians in "The Big Lebowski" -- and a simple, pure white butterscotch shake that tastes just like those Werther's Originals your grandpa carries around in his pockets. It's The Dude that I prefer, though, with its coffee liqueur and icy texture reminiscent of a frappuccino. One isn't strong enough to get you good and buzzed, but the nice patio at Little Bigs invites you to kick back and stay all afternoon. How many of The Dudes can you put back over the course of a few hours? This story continues on the next page.
