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.
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Blythe Young had it all and let it get away – not for lack of trying, of course, but then there was that ill-advised signature on a pre-nuptial agreement. Heck, she wasn’t really a “Blythe”; she’d shed her true first name (a fungus – really) about the time she got a Texas driver license, and she’d never looked back. After fleeing Abilene, it was on to UT Austin (though not the Pi Phis or the Kappas) and then a stint as a wedding photographer. It was at a society wedding that our girl made the big score: Trey Dix, lordling of the Texas oil mafia, with first-hand connections to that governor who would one day become PoTUS. Blythe Young-Dix had it all (or would’ve, ‘ceptin’ for that pesky pre-nup).

Those were heady days in Austin’s Silicon Hills, back when money flowed like water and costly champagne cascaded off fanciful ice sculptures commissioned by those freshly-minted dot-com millionaires for their IPO galas. Blythe Young was there – event coordinator to the “dellionaires,” no passing whim too whimsical for her catering company, Wretched Xcess. And then the bubble burst. And Mama Dix got wind of her daughter-in-law’s trailer-trash roots. And the legs fell off our little social-climber’s ladder. Within two years, Blythe Young’s life had performed a reverse Cinderella: the Escalade morphed into a Kia Sedona; the Dom Perignon flattened into cheap chardonnay fortified with Alka-Seltzer; and Blythe was flushed from Pemberton Palace into a friend’s un-rehabilitated carriage house, an IRS agent hot on her heels. Tarrytown had gotten a little hot…

That’s when Blythe Young found herself on the steps of Seneca House, the coop where she’d lived oh those many (ten actually) years ago as a UT undergrad. She threw herself on the mercy of her old roomie, Millie Ott – Millie the tub o’ lard now transformed into a curvaceous shadow of her former self; a shadow sporting a clerical collar; Millie the saint who delivered tortillas and oranges to the homeless on “Dog Crap Lane” from the back seat of a recumbent bike. Millie gave her shelter – but would Blythe repay that generosity with woe?

Yes.

And maybe, just maybe… no.
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Life has not recently been kind to Cason Statler. Once a Pulitzer-nominated Houston reporter, Statler wasted a promising career on an overactive libido and too many Jim Beams with beer chasers. An Army hitch in Iraq didn’t straighten him out; it just left him with an aversion to hot, dry places and an unsavory buddy known only as “Booger.” Time to start turning his life around with a new job…

Lo, how the talented have fallen: that new position is writing a column for the Camp Rapture Reporter, the tiny newspaper in his east Texas home town. Yep, he moves back in with Mom and Dad – at least temporarily. Among his predecessor’s notes on key lime pie recipes and beauty pageants, Cason finds a short column about a history major at the local college, missing and presumed dead for the past several months. Fodder for a follow-up column, he wonders? but is it the tragedy of Caroline Allison that piques his interest, or the accompanying photo of a woman of astonishing beauty? Whichever… the column gets written.

The “Caroline is still missing” column is well-received – too well-received in certain quarters: an anonymous DVD dropped in his mailbox reveals quite juicy blackmail material involving Caroline and… well, let’s just say that the contents hit close to home. All of which pulls Cason right down the proverbial rabbit hole after a blackmail plot that takes an insane segue into a dark world of murder, assassination, and unspeakable brutality. Cason’s only hope for survival is a well-timed visit from the cavalry: cue the bugles! Read the rest of this entry »