the wine guy speaks

Chris Shepherd, CultureMap's new Wine Guy, makes a splash with his first column devoted to his grape love

Chris Shepherd wine first column glass Southern Smoke

Introducing our new wine columnist.

Photo by Julie Soefer

Editor's note: Long before Chris Shepherd became a James Beard Award-winning chef, he developed enough of a passion for wine to work at Brennan's of Houston as a sommelier. He maintains that interest to this day. When Chris expressed interest in writing about wine-related topics for CultureMap, we said yes.

Expect him to pop up once or twice a month with the wines that he's most excited about right now, conversations with people in the wine world, and other wine-related topics.

In his first column, he explains how he first developed an interest in wine. Take it away, Chris.

I love wine. I love food. I love the connection between the two. I love that I can nerd out on wine or simply just enjoy it. I love the conversation it brings, the joy, and the excitement of saving something for a special occasion or opening something cool for no other reason than it’s a Tuesday.

If you haven’t been in Houston very long, you may not know that I ran the wine program at Brennan’s for two years in the early 2000s. But my fascination with wine started long before that.

When I was in culinary school, I worked full-time and went to school full-time, which left very little time for anything else. I was learning about food at school and at my job at Tommy’s Patio Café in Clear Lake but I wasn’t learning anything about wine. Since there is a magazine called Food & Wine, I knew it was important for me to educate myself.

Uncorking a passion
Every time I got a paycheck, I’d take $100 and purchase four bottles of a single varietal from different regions in the world — for example, Sauvignon Blanc from Napa Valley, Loire Valley, Italy, and New Zealand. I’d taste through each one to understand the differences and nuances that one grape varietal can have thanks to different terroir and weather. I’d try to taste the place of each wine.

About a year into this study, Tom Tollett (the owner of Tommy’s Patio Café where I was still working) asked me to sit down and taste 1984 Dunn Howell Mountain Cabernet. This was the first bottle of wine I’d ever had that cost more than $20. It was elegant and powerful, but it showed restraint. That was the moment that I knew I had to know more, and it was a moment I haven’t forgotten. This is the beauty of tasting wine — it’s about a sense of place, the people you’re with, the memories created.

Fast forward a decade, and I’m the executive sous chef at Brennan’s of Houston. Just for fun, I took the first level exam for the Court of Master Sommeliers and passed. I competed in the Chaîne des Rôtisseurs Young Sommeliers Competition and won — solely due to blind tasting. This earned me a trip to Sonoma to compete nationally.

Oen big move leads to another
Our wine director at Brennan’s left, and I asked my chef Carl Walker if I could take over the wine program. The way I saw it, I was already managing the purchasing on the food side, and this would give me the opportunity to learn more about wine but also how to communicate with and better understand our guests. Carl said yes, and I worked the floor for two years wearing a chef coat labeled “Wine Guy.” I felt like I was stuck in between two worlds — wine people only talked to me about food, and food people only talked to me about wine.

I loved working with the Brennan’s wine program. Three to four days a week, I would tell all the suppliers and distributors to bring me everything. I wanted to taste it all. I wanted to know more about wine makers, about regions. My friend Tony McClung, now the estate director for Bryant Family in Napa, came to Brennan’s once a week to teach me about Italy. To this day, one of my favorite things to do is share a delicious bottle of wine with Tony.

Why wine — now?
Why do I want to write a wine column? It’s the same reason I wanted to be the Wine Guy at Brennan’s. So many people think wine is stuffy or hard to understand, but it shouldn’t be. It should be fun, interesting, and thoughtful. I want this column to be interactive — I want you to share what you’re drinking with me. I’ll talk to wine professionals about what they’re drinking. Let’s start a conversation, and drink some cool shit. LFG!!!

----

Chris Shepherd won a James Beard Award for Best Chef: Southwest in 2014. He recently parted ways with Underbelly Hospitality, a restaurant group that currently operates four Houston restaurants: Wild Oats, GJ Tavern, Underbelly Burger, and Georgia James. The Southern Smoke Foundation, a non-profit he co-founded with his wife Lindsey Brown, has distributed almost $10 million to hospitality workers in crisis through its Emergency Relief Fund.

chefs wine

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.

crime interview