Most Unique Restaurant

The most unique tasting menu in the city: A new Houston restaurant dials up the luxury ingredients

Upscale Korean restaurant Nara recently added a six-course chef's tasting menu to its offerings of sushi, hot entrees and Korean barbecue. For $100 per person ($150 with wine/alcohol pairings), chef Donald Chang will guide groups of 10 to 13 diners through an enhanced version of the best of the restaurant's eclectic menu.

Eager to see if the restaurant could deliver on a relatively expensive offering, I recently sampled the menu. While my initial look at Nara expressed some skepticism about the restaurant's place in Houston's dining scene, the tasting menu unequivocally delivers on Chang's goal of utilizing high quality ingredients to deliver inventive, Korean-inspired cuisine. While the menu will change, expect the current version to stick around for at least a little while.

The meal begins with red miso clam chowder. Keeping to Chang's goal of delivering dishes that are lighter than the traditional counterparts, the soup lacks the traditional thick, cream-filled broth in favor of a lighter stock, but the dish itself derives lots of flavor from the combination of dashi and miso. Also, each bite contains at least one plump, sweet clam.

No Houston restaurant currently delivers quite the same experience.

From there, it's a greatest hits menu of luxurious ingredients. Spanish toro comes in a raw salad preparation with Korean shingo pear creme anglaise and a soy vinaigrette that balances the tuna's natural fattiness with a sweet/salty kick. Then, Chang serves Texas T Kobe beef tartare that's blended with pine nuts, sesame oil and baby leeks, proving that not every ingredient on Nara's menu comes with a proverbial passport stamp.

Poached lobster claw is the meal's only misstep. The side of spicy cucumber kimchi completely overwhelmed the lobster's natural sweetness.

The meal's highlight came from Japanese A5 Kobe. Speckled with fat that glistened in the light, Chang showed off the piece of meat prior to instructing his kitchen to sear it quickly on as hot a pan as possible. While the phrase "melts in your mouth" is certainly overused, it does capture the sensation of this beef yielding in the mouth to the slightest pressure.

For dessert, a traditional red bean soup that's enhanced with brown sugar and sesame-stuffed rice cakes, was served. It was fine, but I'd probably ask to substitute the restaurant's green tea tiramisu if possible.

Chef Knowledge

Beyond the food, dining with Chang adds to the overall quality of the experience. The chef is a friendly and garrulous host who's there to explain how each dish is prepared and what its influences are. Have a question about a sauce or an ingredient? He's there with as much detail as anyone could reasonably want.

As the meal wrapped up, Chang discussed Nara's progress in the three months it's been open. He said he's pleased with the extent to which diners are embracing the Korean dishes on the menu. In his quest to fine tune those offerings, he recently added a traditional oxtail soup, bibimbap and fried whole fish. Nara's take on Korean fried chicken comes via chicken wings with a spicy kick from gochujang.

The word seems to be spreading, too. By 7 p.m. on a Thursday, the dining room had almost completely filled in.

As good as the meal was, the price point does limit the audience. Even ignoring the difficulty of finding 10 friends to agree to spend that kind of money on a meal, one can have a superb dining experience at almost any restaurant in Houston for $100, including the eight-course tasting menu at The Pass or a pretty thorough taste of the various reasons Uchi is so successful.

This chef's tasting menu experience won't be must-try for most people, but diners who have fallen for Nara and want a unique experience with Chang should consider taking the plunge. No Houston restaurant currently delivers quite the same experience.

Not all of Nara's ingredients come from overseas. This beef tartare uses beef from Texas T Kobe.

Nara Facebook

Not all of Nara's ingredients come from overseas. This beef tartare uses beef from Texas T Kobe.

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bring on the Bacalhau

Michelin-starred Houston restaurant heads to Portugal for new season

Photo by Zach Horst

No conversation about Houston’s best restaurants would be complete without mentioning March, Goodnight Hospitality’s Mediterranean-inspired, fine dining, tasting menu restaurant in Montrose.

For its 12th season, which begins this Friday, August 7, March will take a broad look at Portugal. Over the course of pre-dinner snacks in its lounge, seven courses in its dining room, and take away desserts, chef-partner Felipe Riccio and his team will guide diners through all aspects of Portuguese cuisine, including its trade routes with China, India, and North Africa.

Riccio tells CultureMap that Portugal was the logical follow up to March’s 11th season, which examined northern Spain. He began the research process a few months ago, drawing upon published literature, cookbooks, and his own experiences as a stage at a restaurant in Lisbon. More than a menu update, seasons at March also include changes to the beverage offerings and creating service touches that enhance the experience.

Photo by Zach Horst

Rabbit cozido.

“Portugal is so close geographically to the north of Spain, and there’s a lot of similarities,” he says. “The menu really explores a lot of places outside of the Mediterranean where the Portuguese had influence and were influenced by. It’s all these trade routes.”

Priced at $230 plus drinks, tax, and gratuity, a meal at March begins in the lounge with four snacks, including a peri peri-spiced duck rillette, a delicate tart with lobster and caviar, a tempura-fried fish (peixinhos da horta) and the Macau-inspired porcho balichao made with manilla clams.

As always, March brings premium ingredients to its take on classic dishes. For example, it sources Japanese Almaco Jack for a crudo that’s inspired by Portuguese salt cod (bacalahua). Cozido, a slow-cooked stew that’s a staple of Portuguese cooking, gets reinterpreted as a house made rabbit sauce with foie gras. Riccio acknowledges that diners expect a certain level of luxury at this price point, but diners may not always realize how valuable properly-sourced ingredients are.

“I don’t think it always has to be so overt. I think the majority of people, the experience as a whole delivers that value,” Riccio says.

Similarly, the Portugal menu continues March’s move to a set, seven-course menu instead of giving diners the choice of either six or nine courses. Riccio see that as another sign of the restaurant’s maturity.

“A tasting menu is restrictive. We needed to earn that trust and give people options. I felt like people trust us and we’ve proved we can create an experience,” he says.

Since part of the criteria for a Michelin star is consistency across visits, March’s ability to hold its star while still changing its menu twice a year is a testament to the kitchen’s skill. Add in the server’s deep knowledge of every dish on the menu, its comprehensive beverage offerings, and a dining room that features museum- quality art, and it’s reasonable to think that March might become Texas’ first restaurant to earn a two-star rating. For his part, Riccio would welcome the recognition.

“I think March as an entire experience, as a restaurant day-in and day-out, we can be at that level. We strive to give people that experience to where they have that menu and feel it’s well worth it,” he says. “That recognition. I’ve seen what it means for the team, for the guests, and for the validation of the experience, and, obviously, for my career and the restaurant as a business.”

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