On this week's episode of "What's Eric Eating," Kevin Maxey, Ford Fry's vice president of Tex-Mex, joins CultureMap food editor Eric Sandler to discuss Superica, the Tex-Mex restaurant that recently opened in the Heights. Maxey traces a culinary career that led him from his home in East Texas to working for Tom Colicchio at Gramercy Tavern and in the Craft empire.
Initially hired by Fry to help grow his company, Maxey shifted into developing Superica. In addition to the Houston location, the restaurant has four outposts in Atlanta and one in Charlotte; additional locations are slated for Charlotte and Nashville. Sandler asks Maxey how much the menu needed to be tweaked for Houston.
"We had to make a lot of changes Maybe not so much to the dishes, but in the way we thought about the restaurant," Maxey says. "A lot of the dialogue and the training and what we talk about in any of our restaurants in the story behind what we're doing and the story of the cuisine and things like that. In Atlanta, nobody knows that story, but in Houston that story has been told and people have grown up eating that style of food. There were changes in that sense. We've got to think about what does this mean to people who already understand the cuisine. As far as the cuisine goes, we were conscious that it needed to have a higher heat level than it did in Atlanta."
Prior to Maxey joining the show, co-host Felice Sloan of local lifestyle blog Urban Swank joins Sandler to discuss the news of the week. Their topics include the closing of Kitchen 713 and the openings of 2840 at Dukessa, B.B Lemon, and Sing. In the restaurants of the week segment, the duo share some first impressions of Agricole Hospitality's new EaDo trio — Vinny's, Indianola, and Miss Carousel — based on a media preview they attended. They also discuss the new Memorial Green location of Jonathan's the Rub.
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Superica's decor pays homage to Felix.
