F&W on Hou

New Food & Wine lists rank Houston restaurant and bar among best in US

Texas restaurants and bars are well-represented in Food & Wine magazine’s Global Tastemakers feature. Published Tuesday, April 2, the magazine sought recommendations from 180 food and travel journalists to select the best restaurants, bakeries, bar, airports, cruise lines, and more both in America and around the world.

Houston establishments make two of the lists: Montrose fine dining restaurant March comes in at No. 14 on the list of the Top 20 Restaurants in the US and Southern-inspired cocktail bar Julep earns No. 11 on the list of the 15 Top Bars in the US.

Photo by Julie Soefer

March is America's 14th best restaurant.

March earns praise for chef-partner Felipe Riccio’s menu that takes inspiration from different regions on the Mediterranean, while master sommelier June Rodil and the restaurant’s sommeliers get a shout out for the 11,000 bottle wine cellar. “You won’t find a more impressive and exciting wine list in the state,” Chadner Navarro writes.

Julep’s entry recognizes its use of ingredients such as marigold leaves and baked apples. “The drinks are served with artful garnishes and priced for repeated consumption,” the magazine notes.

Austin earns spots on three lists, including a No. 4 ranking on the list of 10 Top US Cities for Food and Drinks — up from its No. 10 ranking in 2023 and the only Texas city to make the cut. In addition, two of the city’s restaurants rank in the top 20, and Japanese-inspired cocktail bar WaterTrade earns an honorable mention on the top 15 bars list.

“Home to 2023 F&W Restaurant of the Year Birdie’s as well as 2023 F&W Best New Chef Edgar Rico of Nixta Taqueria, each year the city manages to find new ways to impress,” the magazine writes about Austin.

Birdie’s, No. 4 in the top 20, gets recognized for its fine dining touches within a counter service format. “Husband-and-wife team Tracy Malechek-Ezekiel and Arjav Ezekiel elevates every part of your experience with thoughtfulness, from the chuggable wine selection to the surprising New American menu where expensive steak shares the spotlight with an addictive portion of creamy soft-serve ice cream,” the article states.

Nixta Taqueria, No. 17 in the top 20, gets recognition for both its a la carte menu and chef Edgar Rico’s taco omakase. “Either way, you’ll want to go into it with excitement and a ravenous appetite for dishes like a snapper soup with udon noodles and oyster sauce, a golden beet salad further brightened with a pickled fennel salad, and a duck mole tamal.”

WaterTrade, the companion bar to omakase restaurant Otoko, offers an intimate environment and precisely made cocktails. “Like its neighbor, it offers up a transcendent tasting menu. Only here, of course, it’s all presented in liquid form,” the magazine writes.

Midnight Rambler, a bar at The Joule, comes in at No. 5 on the list of the 15 Top Hotel Bars in the US. In addition to properly made martinis, the magazine appreciates the bar’s lively atmosphere. “Regular DJs are always on rotation, and the cocktail menu accounts for that with thoughtful shot pairings,” it writes.

Overall, the American sections of the list have a bit of a coastal bias. New York is the country’s best food city, and three of its bars rank No. 1-3 on that list. Los Angeles’ Anajak Thai tops the best restaurant list. Silver Lyan, a Washington, D.C. cocktail bar in the Riggs hotel, leads the best hotel bars list.

lists awards

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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