On a sweltering summer Monday in midtown Houston, chef Chris Williams turned up the heat for a recipe-testing session at his new restaurant, Late August. It's an airy space with banquettes swathed in cobalt blue velvet, in an Art Deco building that, until 2018, was a Sears department store. In 2021 the city and Rice University repurposed the site as a business incubator and community events space, part of a joint project to develop a technology park dubbed the Ion District.
Williams, a Black born-and-raised Houstonian who opened Late August last year, has developed a culturally kaleidoscopic menu with an array of collaborators. Sergio Hidalgo, the restaurant's executive chef, created a Mexican American–inspired fry bread, a popular dish in his home state of Arizona, using a recipe for yeast rolls devised by Williams's great-grandmother Lucille B. Smith, one of the state's first prominent African American businesswomen. (She invented a pre-Pillsbury instant hot-roll mix.) The chefs might garnish the bread with mole butter or benne seeds, a sesame brought to the United States by enslaved Africans. Williams also teamed up with a cousin he'd never met, Jennifer Parsons, a Florida-born and Guadeloupe-raised pastry chef who was until recently based in Taiwan, after meeting her father at a funeral last winter. Williams soon invited Parsons to work with him in Houston, where she concocted a decadent banana-pudding-stuffed churro taco for Late August. “It's ridiculous and overwhelming,” Williams says, laughing. “But it's the story of the restaurant in one dessert.”
That story is a blend of African American and Mexican American cooking by way of Texas, where Williams's family goes back 190 years. He has pursued a similar vision at Lucille's, his flagship restaurant in Houston's Museum District, where dishes like oxtail tamales and fish fry with nuoc mam vinaigrette bring global influences to Southern cooking. “Fusion cuisine,” one might argue, is simply “cuisine” in this astoundingly diverse city of 2.3 million, nearly half of whose residents identify as Hispanic or Latino, a quarter as Black, a quarter as white, and 7% as Asian.
That makes Houston, notorious for its urban sprawl and 4,000-mile tangle of freeways and expressways, the fourth-largest city in the US by population. An agglomeration of wards, districts, and neighborhoods spilling over 10,000 square miles, a land area roughly the size of Massachusetts, greater Houston can seem unfathomable to a visitor. Its best-known monikers give away little: Bayou City, after its marshy rivers, including Buffalo Bayou, which bisects downtown, and Space City, thanks to NASA (“Houston, we have a problem”). But other names reveal the cities within the city: Screwston, from chopped and screwed, the hip-hop genre that emerged in H-Town in the 1990s; the Big Heart, for Houston's generosity in sheltering 250,000 refugees from Louisiana in 2005 after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast—and for its own resilience in 2017, when it was itself ravaged by Hurricane Harvey.
In addition to the hotel dining rooms, a clutch of Houston's coolest new restaurants can be found in the city center. In midtown, start the day at Marcus Davis's The Breakfast Klub with “katfish” and grits or wings and waffles; head to Chris Williams's Lucille's for lunch between art tours in the nearby Museum District, then try his blend of African American and Mexican American cuisine at Late August for dinner. While exploring Montrose, fuel up at ChòpnBlok with bowls of chef Ope Amosu's West African fare, like Cameroonian shrimp and yaji vegetables; wind down at Aaron Bludorn's New American spot Bludorn (be sure to order the heirloom tomato pie with tangy Alabama white sauce). This year Houston Heights welcomed Agnes and Sherman, an Asian American diner serving “Kim-Chilaquiles” and pandan French toast; Happy Go Lucky, a casual spot for Hawaiian-style shave ice; and the French-inspired Camaraderie, which offers a $75 prix fixe in the dining room, an à la carte menu at the bar, and patio seating with a walk-up window. For hometown faves, drive to residential Oak Forest for traditional Texas barbecue at Gatlin's BBQ; to the suburb of Bellaire for Viet-Texan dishes like a “pho-strami” sandwich and char siu pork banh mi at Blood Bros. BBQ; and to the city of Katy (part of greater Houston) for Malaysian curry crawfish at Phat Eatery, a local institution opened by the late chef Alex Au-Yeung, where Blood Bros. alum Terry Wong now serves as culinary director.
