Rex’s reviews of anything (but mostly books)

Mike Riccetti: Houston Dining on the Cheap

There are two different kinds of restaurant guides: those aimed at high-rollin’ tourists (e.g., Zagat) and those intended for the common folk who drive the streets every day. As newly-minted residents of Houston, we quickly sought out one of the latter in the local bookstores. A copy of Mike Riccetti’s Houston Dining on the Cheap caught our fancy several months ago, and since then we’ve been using it as a guide to our culinary explorations. After all, you can’t eat at Fogo de Chao, Americas, The Grotto, or Café Annie every meal, right? In a couple of decades of visiting Houston on business, I’ve eaten at a lot of local restaurants and I long ago came to the conclusion that, although Houston is only the fourth largest city in the country, it probably has a larger and richer restaurant selection than numbers two and three (and maybe than number one).

The central premise of Houston Dining on the Cheap is dear to my heart: getting good food at reasonable prices: I’m not the kind of guy who likes to pay more for less food simply because it’s presented on square plates and the waitron is wearing a tux. Apparently neither is Riccetti, for his chief criterion for inclusion among the book’s 300 entries is that the average dinner entrée (not lunch; dinner) cost below thirteen bucks. He also says the food has to be good and that he strove for a “diverse” set of listings. While the first criterion is objective, the others are subjective; and the subjective quality of “goodness” makes or breaks a food critic. We’ll look at that in a minute.

Structurally, Riccetti’s 476-page trade paperback is similar to most restaurant guides. It has all the usual components: alphabetical listings of restaurants, a cross-index by location, a cross-index by cuisine, and a smattering of additional information such as lists of restaurants that are kid-friendly, deliver, serve breakfast daily, are open 24-7, etc.

Individual restaurant listings are likewise typical of the genre, featuring a header with basic data: name, location, phone, hours, credit cards, cuisine, website if any, price range, and average price. Each listing also has a few hundred words to describe the restaurant’s history, special features, and the like. For instance, of Lupe Tortilla (the original location out by BP in the Energy Corridor), he says, “The food might be described as loud and brash Tex-Mex.” Of Kim Son, a Vietnamese restaurant near downtown, he says, “Matriarch ‘Mama La’ arrived in Houston with her husband and their seven children in 1980 from Vietnam with a plentitude [sic] of recipes.” Yes, he said “plentitude”: the writing is clear, but often rather uninspired (so’s the editing). But, just as you can’t eat ambiance, you don’t need great writing to say whether food’s good or not.

If Riccetti especially likes a restaurant, he’ll mark its listing with a single star to signify that it’s “highly recommended.” Fifteen of the restaurants are so marked, between us the Ms and I have eaten at three – we disagree with him on two and are ambivalent about the third… Unlike most other restaurant guides I’ve read over the years, Houston Dining on the Cheap does not rate the restaurants, other than singling out this group as “highly recommended.” On one of them, discussed further later, the Ms heartily agrees with the one-star rating but only if it’s for one out of five. We’d give the other two three of five, though one might struggle up to four. This failure to rank the restaurants in the listings may well be the greatest weakness of the guide.

Houston Dining on the Cheap, according to its author, is meant to be diverse, just like Houston. Riccetti’s concept of “diverse” is different from mine, however. The 300 restaurants include 31 taquerias, 16 Mexican restaurants, and 25 Tex-Mex restaurants – 24% of the listings in total. He also includes a NewMex-Mex restaurant (Santa Fe Flats) under Tex-Mex, saying that it’s “close enough,” (he obviously knows nothing about NewMex-Mex food) and, “[f]or chauvinistic Texans, this is very similar [sic] and almost as good as our own Mexican food.” So much for credibility…

Riccetti also clearly likes Chinese (23 listings), BBQ (16), Vietnamese (26), and Thai (18). On the other hand, he thinks Japanese food is all sushi (just one restaurant listing, plus a sidebar listing “the best places to buy sushi”). So much for “diversity”…

Houston is a large and culturally diverse city, with large African-American (just four soul food restaurants though), Latino (Mexican plus one each of Brazilian, Bolivian, Peruvian, Cuban, and Venezuelan; two Salvadoran; four each Colombian and “Argentina/Uruguay”), and South Asian (Vietnamese, Thai, one Malaysian, four Pakistani, six Indian) populations. Oddly, few if any of the Asian restaurants are in the heavily Vietnamese/Chinese/Thai enclave in the southwest part of the city. In fact, listings are heavily weighted toward gentrified neighborhoods just north, west, and southwest of downtown (the Heights, Montrose, and West University); while listings in the suburbs are, for the most part, limited to outlying locations of local chains. For instance, the golf course communities around Champions (far north Harris County) are the site of just eleven restaurants, of which nine are in local chains. So much for covering the city…

I went through the index and between the two of us, the Ms and I have eaten at 23 of the 300 restaurants, five or six of them on the basis of Riccetti’s recommendations. Of the 23, our reactions were 10 “thumbs up,” nine “meh,” and four “thumbs down.” An interesting feature of those thumbs-down restaurants: at two of them, the waitstaff refused to serve us what we had ordered! Clearly, service was not a criterion; neither, apparently, was cleanliness: one “highly recommended” restaurant not only featured a surly Thai-food Nazi but was also fly-specked and as greasy as a Jiffy-Lube.

As I said somewhere up there, the subjective part of a restaurant guide – whether the food is “good” or not (or whether it’s worth what you pay for it, which may or may not be the same thing) – will make or break a food critic. We’ve enjoyed exploring parts of town where neither of us had spent much time before (mostly the Heights and Montrose, if the truth be told), but frankly we have yet to find a restaurant from this book that either of us would make a special trip to visit again. Admittedly, there are a few in there that one or the other of us found independently that we’d visit again (Lupe Tortillas, for one). By the same token, we found some on our own that we’d pass by without a second thought. On average, however, neither of us much trusts Riccetti’s judgment on the subjective quality of “goodness” of the food: we’ve disagreed with him too many times.

A restaurant guide should inspire you to find new places to eat, and in a sense Houston Dining on the Cheap has done that for us. However, we’ve had better luck in our dining experiments when we merely stopped by an interesting-looking restaurant or asked friends for recommendations. It’s weak for suburban locations – many of Riccetti’s recommendations have been thirty-mile round trips – and heavily concentrated in a few small areas of town. But its greatest weakness is the egalitarian nature of the writing: without restaurant rankings to differentiate the wheat from the chaff, this book just isn’t that great a help.

Buy Houston Dining on the Cheap at The Tattered Cover or at amazon.com

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