Booze and Boobies

Anvil's Alba Huerta crowned Miss Speed Rack Houston — even the "Simon Cowell ofcocktail judges" can't hold her down

Photo by Caroline Gallay

Where most Houston office workers and paper pushers dreaded their year-end performance reviews, drink slangers in H-Town had a different sort of evaluation to look forward to: Speed Rack Houston, a national cocktail competition that pits female bartenders against one another in a test of time and accuracy.

More than a dozen of Houston's best lady bartenders competed, each going head-to-head to impress judges David Alan (best known as the Tipsy Texan), Lillet ambassador Amanda Pumarejo Boccato, LA mixologist Chris Bostick and famed NYC cocktail scholar Audrey Saunders (who made Anvil's Alba Huerta cry, but we'll get to that later).

In each round, each bartender made four different drinks — one for each judge — as quickly and accurately as possible. After the judges reviewed the drinks, time penalties of five to 30 seconds were added at the judges' discretion. If the judge gave a bartender a "0," that was the best possible score.

Judge Audrey Saunders called a garnish offensive at one point and, in the best quote of the evening, declared one cocktail, an Alaska, to be "a fat fucking chartreuse bomb."

If the atmosphere of the event was party-centric, with complimentary cocktails from more than 15 sponsors and passed shots of Becherovka appearing occasionally, the attitudes of the judges were anything but. Feedback was serious, specific, and sometimes harsh.

Saunders, dubbed by the Tweeting crowd as "the Simon Cowell of cocktail judges" told the first two contestants, Liberty Station's Lindsey Ann and Double Trouble's Lainey Cullom, to go back to school; she wouldn't hire either of them. She called a garnish offensive at one point and, in the best quote of the evening, declared one cocktail, an Alaska, to be "a fat fucking chartreuse bomb."

But many of the cocktail nerds in the crowd — and there were many, including Linda Salinas, Bobby Heugel, Alex Gregg, Chris Shepherd and many, many more — found the feedback to be spot-on, if snide.

As the bracket trudged inward for five long, looong hours, the semi-final saw two Anvil bartenders pitted against one another when Huerta and Ornella Ashcraft competed to advance. Ultimately, though, it came down to Lindsey Ann and Huerta, who also helped organize the event, with Huerta taking home the title of Miss Speed Rack Houston and $500 toward planning her trip to NYC in May to compete in the finals.

The grand prize winner of that event will be dubbed Miss Speed Rack USA and get an all-inclusive trip for two to Paris, including a course at the Cointreau Bartender Academie.

But it wasn't just the fastest bartender that left a winner; proceeds from the event went to breast cancer charities.

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New York Times critic awards Houston restaurant 2 stars in glowing review

Courtesy of ChòpnBlọk

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Let’s just call 2025 the year of ChòpnBlọk. In a review published Tuesday, December 16, the New York Times has awarded the Houston restaurant two stars (“very good”).

Written by chief restaurant critic Tejal Rao, the review touts many of the same qualities that the Times already praised when it included ChòpnBlọk on its list of America’s 50 best restaurants.

Rao writes that she usually avoids restaurants that serve food in bowls, but she’s impressed by the way that chef-owner Ope Amosu has put a West African spin on the concept.

“For inspiration, Ope Amosu looked to the kind of chain restaurants that were built to scale, where flavors are often subdued to appeal to the broadest possible audience, focus-grouped to death. But the delight of ChòpnBlok is in its sure sense of self, its lively, multidimensional cooking and clear, delicious vision for modern food from the Black diaspora,” Rao writes.

She singles out specific dishes, including the Nigerian red stew with short rib, the Black Star bowl with shrimp, and the signature Motherland, made with chicken, greens, and plantains. “It’s utterly simple, but draws you in for more with the mouthwatering twang of not-too-much MSG — an international shortcut to building umami that tends to be used carefully, and layered with other forms,” she writes.

The review also touches on the way Amosu switched the restaurant from counter service to full service — described as “warm, informal, and quick with the jokes” — and his time working at Chipotle to learn the basics of the restaurant operations.

A two-star review is only the latest instance of ChòpnBlọk receiving national attention. In addition to the Times 50 best list, Esquire recently named it one of America’s best new restaurants. The Michelin Guide awarded it a Bib Gourmand designation for 2025. Amosu earned a semifinalist nomination for Best Chef: Texas in the 2025 James Beard Awards.

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