While it's name is so stereotypically Southern that it almost seems like a joke, Garden & Gun is actually a lush visual celebration of all things new and wonderful below the Mason-Dixon line.
And for the April/May issue, they've turned their sights on Houston's Catalan. In a story titled "A Taste of Texas", writer John T. Edge finds not an ode to the Barcelona's environs (that was tried and quickly discarded when the restaurant opened in 2006), but a culinary ode to Houston's multicultural melting pot. That, and plenty of pork.
"On my most recent visit, [executive chef Chris] Shepherd's inclusive vision of his city translated on the plate as lettuce wraps, girded with ropes of pork shoulder that he had braised in Dr. Pepper — the pride of Waco. Seated at the rear of the restaurant, beneath a looming Guastavino arch, and staring at a platter piled with Soba noodles, pickled carrots, and romaine sheaves, I recognized the lettuce wraps as a vaguely Vietnamese dish. Biting through the lettuce, I tasted Japan, in the guise of the soba. Then came the backtrack towards Texas by way of roasted pig flesh, the sweet and piquant siren call of the American South .... It was an epic feast. A virtual tour of the South's new creole city.
