11 things to know

11 things to know in Houston food right now: Openings, restaurants on TV, and hot new menus

Editor’s note: Houston’s restaurant scene moves pretty fast. In order to prevent CultureMap readers from missing anything, let’s stop to look around at all the latest news to know.

Openings

The Houston area’s first Dutch Bros. Coffee has made its debut in Spring at 19366 I-45. Known for its customizable coffees (including vegan options), its handcrafted proprietary coffee blend, smoothies, freezes, teas, and specialty drinks like nitrogen-infused cold brew and its private-label Blue Rebel energy drink, Dutch Bros has been a favorite on the West Coast since it debuted in 1992. Overall, the company plans to open 100 Texas locations in the next couple of years.

Rooster Vietnamese Grill has opened its third location in the East End at 2929 Navigation Blvd. Like its siblings in Spring Branch and the Galleria area, the new restaurant serves traditional banh mi made with high quality ingredients, including housemade garlic aioli and locally-baked loaves. In addition to sandwiches, the menu features noodle bowls, chicken wings, and soups (try the alphabet). Both dine-in and to-go customers may pair their meals with an extensive selection of craft beer as well as tea, cold brew coffee, and sodas.

Coming Attractions

Good news for those seeking an update on the Houston location of Loro, the Asian smokehouse concept developed by Uchi chef-owner Tyson Cole and Franklin Barbecue chef-owner Aaron Franklin. The restaurant, which will open in The Heights later this year, has named Marcos Leal as its chef de cuisine. Leal will oversee execution of a diverse menu that ranges from smoked meats to rice bowls and small plates.

Set those DVRs

This week offers Houstonians two opportunities to catch locals on the Food Network. Joseph Quellar of JQ’s Tex-Mex Barbecue competes on Chopped: Playing with Fire, a five-episode miniseries devoted to live fire cooking. Tune in on Tuesday, August 10 at 8 pm to see if Quellar advances to the finals and a shot at the $25,000 prize.

On Friday, August 13 at 8 pm, Montrose restaurant Traveler’s Table will be featured on the season premier of Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives. CultureMap has contacted the Food Network for information about when episodes featuring the five other restaurants host Guy Fieri visited in April will air and will share the news when it’s available.

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Now serving dinner

Homestead Kitchen & Bar, the recently opened restaurant in the Heights M-K-T development, has added dinner service to its offerings, which means the restaurant is now open from 7:30 am-9:30 pm Tuesday-Sunday. In addition to its diverse array of breakfast offerings, chef Fernanda Alamilla’s menu includes Mexican-inspired dishes such as enchiladas and carnitas, Cajun/Creole-style fare such as fried chicken and crawfish etouffee, and Southern favorites like chicken fried steak. Still the opportunity to have pancakes for dinner remains tempting, especially when paired with cocktails.

Agnes Café & Provisions, the all-day cafe in Boulevard Oaks, added dinner service last month. While breakfast and lunch remains fast casual, dinner is a sit down, candlelit experience that features a mix of favorites from the lunch menu with some more luxurious items such as filet mignon and redfish on the half shell. John Mason (River Oaks Country Club, Camerata) consulted on a beverage list that includes wines as well as cocktails such as a tomato martini and a blood orange mezcal margarita.

New menus

Diversión Cocktails has a new food menu created by Burger-Chan chef-owner Willet Feng. Prompted by a request from customers for more substantial dining options, owner Steven Salazar enlisted Feng to create dishes such as braised short rib with white bean puree, Catalonia fish sticks, and white asparagus with prosciutto and salsa almadroc.

“The project forced me to research and test dishes outside of my comfort zone,” Feng said in a statement. “I also got to experiment with new culinary equipment, such as a freeze-drier! I'm extremely proud of the results, and I think the food goes perfectly with the well-crafted cocktails.”

Julep, Alba Huerta’s Southern-inspired, Washington Avenue drinking destination, rolled out new food and cocktail menus in July. The eight new house cocktails feature “migrant ingredients,” defined as items such as tamarind and cardamom that originated in one place and became staples in another culture. Highlights include the tepache julep, made with sous vide Verdejo, pineapples, and tamarind; the nightshade hideball, made with white port, Manzanilla, red bell pepper, and tonic; and the Swimming Upstream, made with tequila, yellow Chartreuse, strawberry, and ginger.

On the food side, former Tony’s chef Kate McLean has created dishes such as the Oyster Picnic (six oysters, sausage, bread from Magnol French Baking, and butter) and a burger that uses Texas akaushi beef.

“We’ve existed in a world where ingredients are globally sourced,” Huerta said. “During the pandemic, we witnessed the breakdown of the supply chain—how quickly items arrive, what items are no longer available or less readily available, how prices have changed. Origin stories have always been important, but now the awareness of where ingredients come from and how they migrated here is crucial.”

Chef-owner Travis Lenig has rolled out a new menu at Field & Tides, his Southern-inspired restaurant in The Heights. New tastes that include crab tostada, pistachio-crusted halibut with celery root puree, and Low Country fried chicken piccata with garlic mashed potatoes and green beans join customer favorites like the she crab soup and crispy fried oysters with Brussels sprouts. Look for dishes with vegetables sourced from Huckleberry Farm, a property in Round Top that’s owned and operated by Lenig’s in-laws.

Tonight & Tomorrow, the restaurant at the recently renovated La Colombe d’Or hotel in Montrose, has new food and cocktail menus. Chef Jonathan Wicks offerings include an heirloom tomato salad, campechana, a Berkshire pork chop, and a butcher’s cut of lamb. Food and beverage director Chris Fleischman’s new additions feature the Rajasthan Royale (passion fruit, Amaretto, vodka, and sparkling wine) as well as the Excelsior that’s a spin on the familiar carajillo (cold brew coffee, cognac, liquor 43, and cardamom bitters). In addition, the bar menu features new snacks that are available daily from 11 am-11 pm.

Agnes has begun dinner service.

Photo by Kirsten Gilliam

Agnes has begun dinner service.

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eat real food

Houston DJ-turned-TikTok star cooks up a cult following one recipe at a time

Courtesy of Uncle Dibbz

Uncle Dibbz, a.k.a. A.H. Bowden, has built a devoted following for his viral recipes.

For the past month, Uncle Dibbz has been, shall we say, going ham on social media with the myriad videos of alternative Thanksgiving dishes. He’s dropped how-to clips for such recipes as Cajun-roasted turkey, honey-baked ham/hens, oven-bag turkey, and six-piece fried turkey (to go). Basically, if you don’t want to cook a bland ol’ Butterball this Turkey Day, Dibbz has you covered.

Who is Dibbz, you say? Well, he’s a North Jersey-born, Georgia-bred, Houston-based chef who’s been building quite the foodie rep online. Several videos across his TikTok, Instagram and YouTube pages, from his Cajun-boiled fried chicken (2 million on IG) to his “Propose to Me Pasta” (12.3 million on TikTok), has amassed millions of views. But Dibbz (government name: A.H. Bowden) wasn’t always a culinary content creator. He used to spin music back in Atlanta as DJ DiBiase, named after retired wrestler Ted “The Million Dollar Man” DiBiase. “DiBiase is a mouthful to say, so people just always call me ‘D’ or ‘Dibbz’ for short,” says Bowden, 37, during a Zoom interview.

@uncledibbz PROPOSE To Me PASTA 💍 🍝 Trust your Uncle! This SEAFOOD Pasta will seal the deal 👌🏽 Get my recipe below ⬇️ or on uncledibbz.com [@uncledibbz Link in Bio] 🌐 **Ingredients:** - 8 ounces spaghetti - 1 lb mixed seafood (shrimp, scallops, crab meat, etc.) - 2 tablespoons olive oil - Fresh chopped basil - 2 cloves garlic, minced - 1/2 cup white wine - 1/4 cup heavy cream - 2 tablespoons unsalted butter - Salt and pepper to taste - Uncle Dibbz Delta Dust [link in bio] - Fresh parsley, chopped (for garnish) - Grated Parmesan cheese (for garnish) **Instructions:** 1. Cook the spaghetti pasta according to the package instructions until al dente. Drain and set aside. 2. In a large skillet, heat the olive oil over medium heat. Add the minced garlic, chopped basil and sauté for about 1 minute until fragrant. 3. Add the mixed seafood to the skillet. Season with Uncle Dibbz Delta Dust to taste and cook for 2-3 minutes until cooked through. Remove the seafood from the skillet and set aside. 4. Pour in the white wine to the skillet and let it simmer for 2 minutes, allowing the alcohol to cook off. 5. Stir in the heavy cream, butter, Uncle Dibbz Delta Dust seasoning, salt, and pepper. Cook for another 2-3 minutes until the sauce thickens slightly. 6. Add the cooked spaghetti and cooked mixed seafood to the skillet. Toss everything together until well coated with the sauce. 7. Remove from heat and garnish with fresh parsley and grated Parmesan cheese. 8. Serve hot and enjoy the flavorful Seafood Spaghetti. That's good Shawty! #UncleDibbz #ThatsGoodShawty #Pasta #marryme #proposal #bride #wife #husband #relationshipgoals #datenight #easyrecipe #seafood #cajun #cooking #fyp #foryou #viral #houston ♬ original sound - Uncle Dibbz 🍴

He was making a nice living as a DJ, even serving as rapper Big K.R.I.T.’s touring DJ for a while. But when the pandemic hit, the gigs obviously dried up.

“I was living in Miami at the time,” he says. “And, you know, when you have a lot of time on your hands to think – but also need to figure out a way to, you know, sustain an income and everything like that – the ideas start coming,”

Like most DJs at that time, he was doing live mixes on Instagram. But his days throwing cookout parties in Atlanta inspired him to start doing his cooking videos, where he used his very own seasoning. Of course, he had a lemon pepper blend, which he used in a lemon pepper hot wings video that currently has over a half-million views on TikTok.

“I'm about to go live to DJ later that night, and my phone was just going off with orders,” he recalls. “So I'm like, where are these orders coming from? And it's not from my friends. I'm seeing the cities and the states. I don't know these people.”

Thanks to his videos, which usually end with him saying his signature line “That’s good shawty!” (that’s also the name of his cookbook he released last year), Dibbz went into the seasoning business full time. He eventually hired another person to help send out the piles of orders he was receiving.

He even got an order from former Dallas Cowboy Emmitt Smith, one of his favorite athletes. “I remember doing a book report on him when I was in fourth grade,” he boasts.

Although Dibbz has a flair for making meals that border on decadent, he’s an ardent practitioner of cooking with natural ingredients, especially in his seasoning. He has several low-sodium seasoning, including Bebe’s Salt Free – named after his mother, who had open-heart surgery a few weeks before the pandemic started.

“I don't think a lot of people understand the amount of toxins and chemicals that go into a lot of these seasonings,” he says. “You're starting to see it in the news now. A lot of the foods with certain dyes are being taken off the shelves and things like that.’

Soon, Dibbz moved himself and his new business to Houston, a favorite place to perform as well as a town whose hip-hop got him into music. He cites local chopped-and-screwed gods DJ Screw, Michael 5000 Watts, and OG Ron C as his holy trinity of influences. To give props to the music of his new home, he created a hot sauce – called HXT Sauce – whose uncharacteristically large bottle resembles Promethazine cough syrup (aka the key ingredient in lean, the preferred purple cocktail for the city’s rap community).

“It's not necessarily about promoting that usage,” he says. “But, at the same time, it’s just a homage to one of the factors and influences of screwed-and-chopped music.”

Dibbz still indulges in spinning records from time to time. The Waxaholics’ DJ Big Reeks has gotten him to break out the vinyl a few times during his Thursday-night sets at Alley Kat Bar & Lounge in Midtown. But creating new recipes, dropping delicious content and proving you can eat and live in a hearty, healthy fashion still remains his full-time mission.

“I’m not just talking about eating cauliflower rice all day and every day, but just eat real food,” he says. “We're eating fake food. That's the bottom line. We're eating fake food and my whole purpose is to inspire people to eat real food and that starts with real ingredients, real herbs, you know – real natural seasonings.”

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