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Monday, June 30, 2008

Diho Square Jungle: Pokemon Pastries, Madagascar Macaroons

June 30, 2008 – 9:48 am

Jungle Cafe and Patisserie, Diho Square, Chinatown, Houston

Tasty Bits blogger Misha catches up with Diho Square on Bellaire:

Where else do you find Sichuan duck tongues, sushi, babh mi, bubble tea, vegetarian pork kidneys and French pastries within steps of each other?

On this (extended) visit: Sichuan Cuisine, Shanghai Restaurant, and the Pine Forest Garden Vegetarian Restaurant. But the Jungle Café & Pâtisserie warrants his closest attention:

I must have passed it a dozen times, but never thought to look inside. If I had, I would have found French-style pastries inflected with pokemon graphics, the likes of which I have never seen in Chinatown before or anywhere else in Houston for that matter.

After the jump: a few more photos from the scene.

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9:48 am | 1 Comment | Read more about Neighborhoods: Chinatown, Restaurants, Shopping Centers
Thursday, May 22, 2008

Neighborhood Guessing Game Over: Sharp Dressed Pad

May 22, 2008 – 7:18 pm

Neighborhood Guessing Game 8: Bath

It looks like a number of our readers thoroughly enjoyed the photo tour of this week’s mystery house. Which is great, because now they’ll be able to enjoy the panoramic virtual tour that comes with the listing as well!

We tallied 3 guesses for Meyerland and 2 each for Montrose, Kingwood, and Humble. The rest of your votes dispersed individually to Tanglewood, Huntwick Forest, inside the loop off Stella Link, Greenwood Forest, Spring, Nottingham in Katy, Meyer Park, Westbury, somewhere within 15 miles of Champions, Glenbrook Valley, Sharpstown Country Club Estates, Atascocita, and Mission Bend.

The winner this week was the mysterious sgs, who made the case for Sharpstown Country Club Estates with this succinct comment, which we quote here in full:

sharpstown country club estates

Did sgs have previous knowledge of the property? It doesn’t matter — but we hope to persuade players who find themselves in that position in future contests to play the advanced version of our game: by sending us an email containing the listing and then submitting well-argued, misleading, and wildly inaccurate “guesses” to the comment pool. Won’t that make it more fun for everyone?

We did have one other participant this week who sent us the correct address . . . but sadly, could not be persuaded to post bald-faced lies about the property in our comments section. Maybe next time?

Picking the best comment this week was tough, because so many of them were especially entertaining. But the honorable mention nod goes to first poster Jeff, for this almost cinematic description:

What an odd house! (seriously…is that a cowboy boot hanging from the ceiling in the kitchen??) Looks like a hippie artist from Sedona took a hit from a bong and then proceeded to transform a 1960’s mod house into a slightly upgraded bachelor pad. The foosball table in the tv room looks like something I did once. Outdoors looks like the garage is in the middle of disrepair.

The character development in this treatment could probably stand some improvement, but the set design shows promise!

After the jump: what you’ve been waiting for . . . the reveal!

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7:18 pm | 2 Comments | Read more about Interiors, Neighborhood Guessing Game, Neighborhoods: Sharpstown Country Club Estates
Thursday, April 24, 2008

Exploring Chinatown: Noodles in Paradise

April 24, 2008 – 1:12 pm

Paradise Cafe, 9889 Bellaire Blvd No. 1128, Houston

A shopping center tucked off Bellaire Blvd. just inside Beltway 8 hosts a particularly intriguing restaurant row:

Within feet of Fu Fu Cafe are something like 7 or 8 eateries offering a bewildering range of options in just a single shopping strip. The gelato shop is right next to a bakery that sells French desserts, Chinese pastries and rice cakes that look like guerilla hand grenades. A restaurant a few doors down serves Braised Lion Head, a Shanghai pork meatball specialty cooked with Napa cabbage I have never come across and have yet to sample (no, it’s not made with real lion meat, I checked). Noodle House 88, which Robb Walsh swears serves some of the best Indonesian food in the country, is in the very same strip. If Indonesian food doesn’t suit you, you can order sushi from the same menu. A new dim sum place opened just days ago and already looks packed.

But some of these food establishments aren’t so accessible for newcomers, warns the author of the Tasty Bits blog:

Tucked in at the end of the strip Paradise Cafe looks almost impenetrable to a non-Chinese American. Other than the name and descriptive signs such as “noodles” and “soups”, the only real clue as to what is inside is a magazine article pasted in the window showing a chef pulling noodles by hand. I got a blank stare when I asked for a to go menu, making me even more curious. For all I know the article could have been about the importance of keeping a tidy kitchen, but the promise of hand made noodles was too much to ignore, so I made it my mission to figure out what was behind the iron curtain.

Keep reading for Tasty Bits’ lowdown on Paradise Cafe noodles!

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1:12 pm | Comment | Read more about Neighborhoods: Chinatown, Restaurants, Shopping Centers, Strip Centers
Tuesday, December 4, 2007

Shade, Subs, Plexes and Suds: A Bissonnet Story

December 4, 2007 – 6:08 pm

Money Stop on Bissonnet, Houston

It’s high time for another street-walking adventure from the writing, singing, photographing, and drinking duo of quasi-professional pedestrians John Nova Lomax and David Beebe. Their latest challenge: a 14.5-mile walk along Bissonnet, from Synott Road (just past Dairy Ashford) to Montrose, which brings Lomax to this stirring conclusion on the sidewalk-transforming power of street trees:

By now, I’ve walked damn near the entire lengths of Bellaire, Westheimer, Clinton, Navigation, and Shepherd, and Bissonnet is nicer than all of them, for the simple reason that its sidewalks have far more shade. Westheimer has none between 6 and the Loop, save for a few landscaping fantasias at scattered corporate campuses; there’s none to be had on most of Shepherd unless you duck under a bridge (where you might sit on human turds); sun-baked Bellaire has none from Eldridge central Sharpstown, and the East Side streets are only a little better. Bissonnet, on the other hand, seems like a stroll through Yosemite.

Below the fold: local color.

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6:08 pm | Read more about Neighborhoods: Bellaire, Neighborhoods: Sharpstown, Neighborhoods: Westwood, Streets
Friday, June 1, 2007

Walking on Bellaire

June 1, 2007 – 10:34 am

Street Sign on Bellaire BlvdOver at Houstoned, professional barfly John Nova Lomax and crooner David Beebe take a long, strange trip down the entire length of Bellaire Blvd.—on foot. Lomax’s conclusion:

If Westheimer is mainly about the fetishes, broken dreams and vanities of Anglo whites, and Shepherd is all about the needs of cars, Bellaire is a world market of a street, a bazaar where Mexicans, Anglos, Salvadorans, African Americans, Hondurans, stoners, Vietnamese, Chinese, Koreans and Thais go to shop and eat.

The report from western Chinatown:

Tall bank buildings are sprouting, with glass fronts festooned in Mandarin. Strip malls fill with Vietnamese crawfish joints, Shaolin Temples, and acupuncture clinics. As we crossed Brays Bayou, a huge temple loomed in the distance, and it didn’t take much imagining to pretend you were gazing across a rice paddy toward a Vietnamese village. A Zen center abuts one of the last businesses in town to carry the all-but-forgotten A.J. Foyt’s once-omnipresent name. A couple of ratty old apartment complexes have changed into commercial buildings, each unit housing its own business.

The rice paddies, of course, have left the neighborhood.

More highlights of their journey, as they walk east: live turtles in the water gardens outside the Hong Kong City Mall; front-yard car lots in Sharpstown; Jane Long Middle Schoolers rushing convenience stores; the “Gulfton Ghetto.” Plus, this illuminating report from Alief:

Alief Ozelda Magee, the town’s namesake, is buried right there, under a slate-gray monument with a touching epitaph: “She did what she could.” And hell, maybe she still is. The adjoining apartment complex, which is rumored to cover some of the graves here, is said to suffer from a poltergeist infestation.

Photo: Cruising down Bellaire, by flickr user corazón girl

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10:34 am | Read more about Neighborhoods: Alief, Neighborhoods: Bellaire, Neighborhoods: Gulfton, Neighborhoods: Sharpstown, Sprawl, Tourism