Food for Thought

The finest French dining in Texas — Meet the chef with his own champagne

Chef Albert Roux at work in his kitchen.
Chez Roux at La Torretta Lake Resort & Spa
If Keri Russell can go get all kinds of attention for a movie like Waitress, whycan't they make a good food TV show?
And yes, the real Chef Roux is still friends with Lenny Henry from "Chef!"
When is the food movie love going to reach TV?

When I wrote recently about The Places I’ll Never Eat at…only because they don’t exist, I raved about the mid-1990s BBC series Chef!, a loving, funny tribute to food and fine French restaurants where the fictional tyrannical chef Gareth Blackstock wields a sharp knife and even sharper tongue at Le Château Anglais.

As I mentioned, the best episode was “The Big Cheese” in which legendary chef Albert Roux makes a guest appearance as himself and is smitten with the cuisine and especially the illegal unpasteurized English Stilton cheese.

I surmised that the closest I would ever get to dining at Le Château Anglais was dining at Roux’s Chez Roux again at Lake Conroe, which happens to be his only American signature restaurant.

Who knew I would get the chance again so soon?

This past weekend I was once again at the lovely La Torretta Lake Resort & Spa, snuggled into a booth at Chez Roux, gazing out upon the sun setting over Lake Conroe. And Chef Roux himself was in the house.

Fine French dining is something everyone should experience at least once, and there is probably no finer place to do it this side of the pond than right here.

Dinner began with a delightful flute of chef’s very own Grand Cru, Blanc de Blanc Damery. You’ve got to love a chef who has his own brand of bubbles and this one was indeed delightful.

Accompanying this flute of fun was a large portion of duck rillette. A wonderful sort of salty pâté, not gamey at all, that went down in quick bites with the housemade baby baguettes and creamy butter. Next came the most amazing veal sweetbreads, simply sautéed with just a hint of garlic and plated with Gulf shrimp over a bed of cauliflower salad. Paired with a Meursault Burgandy, 2005, from Louis Jadot, I thought I was already in heaven, or at least at Le Château Anglais.

But wait — as they say in those cheesy late-night commercials — there’s more. Next came a delectable Long Island duck tourte with port jus paired with a 2005 Vincent Giradin Gevrey Chambertin Burgandy. Another hit.

Then chef rolled out a pot au feu of salted pork cheeks with sauce Albert, with just a hint of horseradish to the tender, perfectly barely-cooked pork cheeks. This came with a glass of 2004 Domaine Ligneres “Aric” Montagne d’Alaric.

At that point I was done in. Seriously, how much fine French food can a Texan inhale in one setting? Apparently, just a little bit more.

The trifle au Roquefort came as a surprising glass of sweet and pungent flavor. The French cheese with its delicate veins of blue mold melded with the creamy fruity flavors to put a supreme polish on the meal. Oh, and there was a slightly sweet Tokaji Aszu 6 Puttonyos Oremus from 1995, a Hungarian wine that is even mentioned in the country's national anthem.

That was it for me. There was desert and coffee with petit fours but I couldn’t manage anymore.

It was like an evening spent feasting at Le Château Anglais, only instead of the irascible chef Blackstock we had the company of the very real chef Roux. An adorable 73-year-old sparkling-eyed master, who, actually is pals with the British comedian Lenny Henry who portrayed Blackstock.

“He is a friend of mine,” Roux says. “And he really cooks beautifully. I was delighted when he asked me to be on the show.”

And getting back to TV shows, why is it that we can’t get loving food fiction on the small screen?

With such hits on the big screen as Julie and Julia, Ratatouille, Waitress, Big Night and the great Babette’s Feast you’d think some Hollywood producer, one of those folks who likes to duplicate BBC hits like The Office, would snatch up a premise like Chef! Please. I’m begging you.

Just bear in mind that the third and final season of Chef! does not live up. Why? Because the focus is on the characters and ignores the food. Sigh.

“The mood of the people has changed,” Roux says. “People want the reality TV and sweeping sagas.” And not a simple little entertaining, intelligent, and loving tribute, to food.

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Chris Cusack explains

Houston bar owner speaks out about surprise arrest for health code violations

Photo by Sergio Trevino

Chris Cusack owns two locations of Betelgeuse Betelgeuse.

Certainly one of the most unusual interactions between a restaurant and City of Houston officials took place on Wednesday, May 6 when Betelgeuse Betelgeuse owner Chris Cusack was arrested for health code violations at his location on Washington Avenue.

News of the arrest spread quickly across social media over the weekend. Now, Cusack is ready to tell his side of the story.

Cusack, whose time operating restaurants in Houston goes back more than 15 years to Down House and its affiliated restaurants such as Hunky Dory and D&T Drive Inn, tells CultureMap the problem began on Monday, May 4 when a health department inspector came to Betelgeuse Betelgeuse and asked to see the restaurant’s grease trap.

The only problem is that location has never had a grease trap. Prior to becoming Betelgeuse Betelgeuse, it was Liberty Station, a pioneering bar in Houston’s craft beer and craft cocktail scenes. In the early days, Betelgeuse served food from a food truck. More recently, it prepares its food next door at The Bell and Crane. Cusack acknowledges he didn’t share this information with the inspector.

“Usually I’m a charmer with the health department, but I was a little defensive. She kept asking me. I said, ‘ma’am, we don’t make food here,’” he explains. “The tone wasn’t my finest moment, but there was no name calling or anything like that. She said, ‘where does the food come from?’ I said, ‘it doesn’t matter where it comes from. It’s produced in a commercial kitchen.’”

Cusack says he knew there would be a follow up, but he was shocked when the inspector returned two days later with more colleagues from the health department, TABC inspectors, and Houston Police Department officers.

“I got somewhere between 21 and 25 citations,” Cusack says about the return visit. He got dinged for everything from graffiti in the bathroom to a missing Harris County tax stamp on the photo booth he leases from a vendor (it has both State of Texas and City of Houston stamps, Cusack says).

One inspector told Cusack he needed a food dealer’s permit. He showed the inspector that a food dealer’s permit had been issued for the restaurant's address under the former food truck’s LLC but not to the LLC that operates Betelgeuse Betelgeuse. Cusack says he had renewed the food truck’s permit in March, but that wasn’t good enough for the inspector. In Cusack’s telling, he was arrested for not having the permit, since it was also flagged as missing in an inspection from October 2025. He's the only person he knows who has ever been arrested for a misdemeanor violation of the health code.

Cusack says he spent 21 hours in the Harris County Jail. When he got out, he says he was contacted by a more senior official within the Health Department. Once Cusack confirmed he owned both LLCs, he was told he could reopen. Both locations of Betelgeuse Betelgeuse have been operating normally since Friday, May 8.

Cusack maintains he never knew about the October 2025 inspection, which is why he renewed the food dealer’s permit for the food truck’s LLC rather than applying for one under Betelgeuse Betelgeuse’s LLC. “There’s no paper trail that shows I was given this information,” he says. “I did not get the email [from the Health Department].”

As for why things got so out of hand, Cusack theorizes he was a victim of Houston Mayor John Whitemire’s crack down on “reckless behavior” on Washington Avenue and stepped up enforcement on bars generally that led to the temporary closure of near northside cocktail bar Rabbit’s Got the Gun.

Cusack says he’s a “huge supporter” of efforts to reduce crimes like street racing, drug dealing, and sex trafficking along Washington and in its surrounding neighborhoods. Still, he feels targeting by the city for being impolite to a health inspector.

He plans to fight both the arrest and the citations in court. “I want the charges dropped, and I want it expunged completely from my record. That’s the first thing, and I’m going to try very hard to do it,” he says.

“That’s going to end up costing thousands of dollars just to deal with the sheer volume,” he adds.

CultureMap contacted Mayor Whitmire’s office. A representative said the mayor was not aware of the situation and has no comment on an open investigation.

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