Houston’s 5 Best Weekend Food Bets: Crawfish, Chili and Irish Stew

Here’s a look at this weekend’s best culinary happenings:

Camerata and Greenway Coffee are teaming up for an introductory course in deductively tasting coffee and wine, featuring Greenway co-founder and operator, David Buehrer and Camerata Wine Director, Chris Poldoian. Guests will learn how to recognize tastes and aromas, with four different coffees and six different wines over the course of the 90-minute class. Tickets are $50. 

Onion Creek hosting its tenth annual H-TOWN Chili Throwdown, beginning with cooking at noon and tasting from 2 to 4 p.m. The Creeks, local restaurants, distilleries and breweries will be competing to see who makes the best chili around alongside live music and a day of fun. Tasting tickets are available for $10 or $25 with a t-shirt. Note: the event sold out last year, so purchase your tickets in advance to secure a spot.

Now in its 22nd year, the annual Irish Cook-off will pit cooks in categories including Irish Stew, Chili, Chicken, Desserts and an Open Dish, and guests can enjoy tastes of all while listening to music from Snit’s Dog and Pony Show and Spin Cycle.

Kicking off the spring season, the third annual Chef Fest Houston will take place at Harvest Green Village. A lineup of ten local chefs — including Atlas Diner’s Richard Knight, Paul Lewis of Indianola, and Kulture’s Dawn Burrell — will use seasonal produce to create festival style dishes that celebrate the Houston terroir. Attendees will also enjoy craft cocktails, local wine and beer, and live music, all while benefiting local producers and our nonprofit beneficiary — I’ll Have What She’s Having.

Hit up Cottonwood to taste crawfish from local teams alongside Saint Arnold beer and music by Pecos Hank and Garrett T. Capps. A $30 wristband earns you unlimited crawfish tastings at each booth and a voting token. Any crawfish ordered to a table and produced by Cottonwood is sold at an additional cost.

This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2019.