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    Put Down the Pot Holders

    4 hot Houston restaurants add catering to their menus

    CultureMap Create
    Apr 10, 2024 | 12:00 pm

    If you're a foodie fan who adores dining at Coppa Osteria, Gratify Neighborhood Bistro, Flora Mexican Kitchen, and Graffiti Raw, we have good news: catering is now available for all four restaurants.

    Big Vibe Group catering

    Photo by Leah Wilson Photography

    The street tacos are hot, fresh, and tasty.

    Whether you're opting for a laid-back celebration with Flora's Taco Cart or a fully catered Italian feast from Coppa Osteria, there are diverse options for both food and service that check all the boxes.

    “A catering service felt like a natural expansion for our business” says Grace Zelaya, catering and private dining director for The Frida Room at Flora Mexican Kitchen. “Our clientele has been waiting in anticipation since we opened Coppa Osteria a decade ago. We’re excited to bring the big vibes to venues across Houston.”

    Hungry now? Here's what you need to know about catering from The Big Vibe Group's restaurants:

    Types of events: Everything! We're talking daily corporate events, intimate home dining, large gatherings, or entire wedding weekends that encompass pre-wedding showers, welcome dinners, rehearsal dinners, wedding receptions, late-night after-parties, and day-after brunches.

    Tiers of catering:

    1. Full service: BVG prepares and serves the meals onsite with clean-up after.
    2. Food delivery: BVG drops off fully prepared (or easily reheated) meals within a two-hour window, and you handle clean-up yourself. Minimum of $1,500 required, and a gas fee applies to deliveries outside the service area.
    3. Food pick-up: You pick up the food yourself within a one-hour window and then take care of everything else yourself. No minimum required for pick-up.

    What's always included with full service:

    • Basic staffing
    • Food set-up and service
    • Serving vessels and utensils is needed
    • Disposable plates, flatware, cups, and napkins
    • Top-notch cuisine

    What you can add on:

    • Custom menu consultation, including food allergies and preferences
    • Bespoke buffets and stations
    • Rental coordination for chairs, tables, linens, flatware, china, glassware, etc.
    • Beverage service and specialty service staff (bartending, cocktailing, bussing)
    • Entertainment coordination, including dancers, DJs, and even a Spanish guitarist
    • Valet and security
    • Custom signage, photo booth, florals, décor, and more

    Menu options:

    Flora Mexican Kitchen prepares all its meals at the restaurant, and there is a Taco Cart available to rent if you want a little extra flair.

    Queso, guacamole, and chips can of course start the meal, but you can also opt for passed apps like taquitos, chalupitas, and sopecitos.

    Three salad options further whet appetites, with main entrees that range from quesadillas and enchiladas to grilled snapper, brick chicken, and Flora's Parrillada, a chef's selection of seafood and meats that get rounded out with homemade tortillas and salsa.

    Don't forget crispy potatoes or escabeche on the side, and flan or tres leches cake for dessert. Beverage packages — both alcoholic and non — are also available.

    Coppa Osteria, Graffiti Raw, and Gratify Neighborhood Bistro can all come to you. Start with mushroom arancini, mini crab cakes, or deviled eggs, then it's on to salads and charcuterie.

    When it's pasta time, good luck choosing just a few. From the famous spaghetti carbonara to short rib ragu, Parmesan rigatoni to to penne a la Coppa, it's a carb-lover's dream.

    Mains span grilled fish, veal scallopini piccata, beef tenderloin, and Gratify sliders for the more casual parties. If you're feeling extra fancy, you can even order caviar and chips.

    And these are just starting points — remember, you can fully customize your menu to include (almost) whatever you wish. Contact The Big Vibe Group today to get started planning your celebration.

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    What's Eric Eating Episodes 523 and 524

    Acclaimed Austin duo dish on their wine-obsessed neighborhood restaurant

    CultureMap Staff
    Jan 16, 2026 | 1:08 pm
    Birdie's Arjav Ezekiel Tracy Malechek-Ezekiel
    Photo by Mackenzie Smith Kelly
    Birdie's owners Arjav Ezekiel and chef Tracy Malechek-Ezekiel are this week's guests.

    On this week’s episode of “What’s Eric Eating,” chef Tracy Malechek-Ezekiel and beverage director Arjav Ezekiel join CultureMap Houston editor Eric Sandler to discuss their Austin restaurant Birdie’s.



    Widely considered one of Austin’s top restaurants, Birdie’s has earned local, regional, and national acclaim, including a place of the 2025 Time100 Next list, Food & Wine magazine’s 2023 Restaurant of the Year, and a 2025 James Beard Award for Outstanding Professional in Beverage Service to Ezekiel. In a 2024 column, James Beard Award winner Chris Shepherd recommended that Houstonians visit Birdie’s the next time they’re in Austin.

    Sandler’s conversation with the duo begins with a little bit about how they met while working together in New York and their decision to move to Austin. From there, it turns to Birdie’s counter service model that’s unusual for a restaurant of its quality. Sandler asks whether not offering traditional table service has lowered the restaurant’s profits.

    “It’s the opposite. Because we have a leaner labor force in the dining room, our margins are probably double what they would be if we were a traditional restaurant,” Ezekiel explains. “What we’re able to do is take a portion of that margin and invest it back into our team. We talk about ‘Conscious Capitalism’ a lot. That extra margin pays for paid family leave that we offer to everybody on our team, the month of paid and planned vacation every year, the subsidized health insurance, the subsidized mental therapy we offer. We needed to find more change under the cushions, so we could invest it back into our team.”

    Initially, Birdie’s opened with an a la carte menu. In 2025, it switched to a prix fixe format that offers diners six courses for $80. The switch means the restaurant serves fewer diners per night, which has shortened the wait to order from up to an hour to 20 minutes or less. Chef Malechek-Ezekiel explains that this change has also expanded the range of dishes she’s able to serve and broadened the techniques she uses to create them.

    “We can cook fish confit. We can use the Japanese robata grill to cook on charcoal. We can hot smoke fish to order. Now, I feel like, wow, look what we can do now. Before, we had the skills, but we couldn’t physically do it with how tiny our space is.”

    Listen to the full episode to hear more about how Birdie’s guides diners through its wine list, which of the monthly prix fixe menus has been the most successful, and the couple’s thoughts on potentially opening a new restaurant.



    In this week’s other episode, Craft Pita chef-owner Raffi Nasr joins Sandler to discuss some recent news in the world of Houston restaurants. Their topics include Tex-Mex restaurant Superica transforming into a casual steakhouse; the imminent opening of delivery-focused Shredders Pizza; and a change in operations at Weights + Measures.

    In the restaurant of the week segment, Nasr and Sandler describe their recent meal at Oru, a new sushi restaurant in the Heights from the team behind Michelin-recognized omakase counter Neo and Upper Kirby hand roll concept Kira. Listen to hear their favorite dishes as well as Sandler’s quibbles with a couple of aspects of the experience.

    -----

    Subscribe to "What's Eric Eating" on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hear it Sunday at 9 am on ESPN 97.5.

    Birdie's Arjav Ezekiel Tracy Malechek-Ezekiel

    Photo by Mackenzie Smith Kelly

    Birdie's owners Arjav Ezekiel and chef Tracy Malechek-Ezekiel are this week's guests.

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