The Lunchtime Racket at Brady’s Landing

THE LUNCHTIME RACKET AT BRADY’S LANDING Visiting the Houston Ship Channel on a promotional “toxic tour” of sites where the air will likely be invigorated once nearby refineries get chugging on the Canadian tar sands headed for Houston through the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, Perry Dorrell stops by the scenic Brady’s Landing Restaurant during lunchtime: “During the evening the restaurant is like many others in the city: bustling with patrons and staff, the parking lot busy with diner traffic. During the day, however, the region’s oppressive noise is invasive and obnoxious; right next door a facility is dry-docking barges and a team of several men operating industrial-grade pressure washers removes barnacles from their hulls. Cranes swing containers to and from foreign freighters, crashing and booming. The warehouses directly across the channel are beehives of activity, with stevedores operating forklifts, shifting and stacking and slamming pallets of material. It was amazing how loud it was, a phenomenon I never noticed in my visits at night to dine. On the other side of the restaurant a steamshovel was loading and unloading a smoking, 200-hundred-foot high brown pile ofsomething, fertilizer-like in appearance. No accompanying aroma, fortunately. Maybe we were upwind.” [Brains and Eggs; previously on Swamplot]

7 Comment

  • Thanks for the linky love, Swampy!

  • Did Perry ever think who goes to the restaurant? I’m fairly certain this establishment would rather do without Perry rather than their “oppressive” neighbors.

  • Simple answer: If you don’t like it, don’t go there for lunch.

  • I really like the environment around Brady’s Landing and especially Monument Inn (which is even more carcinogenic), just not their prices or their food quite so much.

  • Where else can one find such lunchtime atmosphere? Certainly not in Dallas.

  • Houston’s East End. Beverly Hills it ain’t.

    And thanks for the memory of what used to be the San Jacinto Inn, The Niche, and the bottomless bowls of boiled and peeled shrimp and endless platters of fried chicken, and of course the best memory of all. The drive through Stinkydena!

  • Brady’s Landing is actually a really neat experience – I go to business luncheons there occasionally. It’s on my list of places to take out of towners when they come in. You get up close and personal with the ship channel, which for people from many other places, is a phenonemom unto itself. There is no other place like it in Houston.