stay golden

Veteran Houston pastry chef bakes up new biscuit-based ghost kitchen

One of Houston’s most experienced pastry chefs has added a new offering to his repertoire. Chris Leung recently launched Golden Biscuit Company, a breakfast-focused ghost kitchen concept.

Open weekdays from 8 am until 2 pm, Golden Biscuit Company serves traditional biscuits, including a classic biscuit with butter and jam; a bacon, green onion, and cheese biscuit topped with bacon caramel; and biscuit sandwiches such as egg and cheese; sausage, egg, and cheese; bacon, egg, and cheese; and a Monte Cristo with ham, turkey, Swiss; and jam.

While those offerings would probably be enough to find an audience, Leung’s true innovation is the “stuffed biscuit,” a kolache-style pastry that uses biscuit dough to contain fillings such as mushrooms and gravy; egg white, feta, and spinach; and sausage, egg, and cheese. Leung tells CultureMap that he sees several benefits to using biscuit dough instead of a traditional kolache dough.

“To me, it’s a completely different product because of the dough. Kolaches, depending on where you get them, the dough could be nice and fluffy but other places just wrap the dough around the sausage,” he says. “The biscuit dough is much more buttery and flaky. I think it lends itself as a great dough for scrambled eggs and cheese and things like that.”

Those who know Leung as the CultureMap Tastemaker Award-winning chef and co-founder of Cloud 10 Creamery might wonder what an ice cream maker knows about biscuits. Veteran Houston restaurant obsessives may recall that, prior to starting Cloud 10, Leung worked alongside Randy Rucker at Bootsie’s, the innovative Southern restaurant that briefly flourished in Tomball in the late aughts. Similarly, Leung developed the bacon and cheese biscuit with bacon caramel for Museum Park Cafe, the acclaimed but short-lived Museum District restaurant that operated in 2014 and 2015.

Ten years later, Leung sees an opportunity to utilize the same commercial kitchen that powers Cloud 10 as a venue for serving office workers, teachers, and anyone else who’s looking for a convenient, freshly-made breakfast. Available for delivery via DoorDash (and coming soon to other platforms), diners can order individual biscuits, handheld biscuits, or biscuit sandwiches, but Golden also makes ordering for groups easy with 6-packs of biscuits and 12-packs of stuffed biscuits.

Customers may also schedule larger catering orders through a form on the restaurant’s website. Like kolaches, 15 seconds in the microwave is enough to reheat the biscuits back to an optimal temperature.

So far, Golden has mostly been a word-of-mouth endeavor, but Leung is ready to increase the volume. “It’s going as well as we thought it would,” he says. “We’re getting the logistics down so we can get the product out.”

Of course, the chef remains deeply involved in Cloud 10. The ice cream shop has locations in Midtown, the Heights, and Katy. It sells pints at Houston-area locations of Whole Foods Market and at Central Market locations throughout Texas.

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Courtesy of Golden Biscuit Company

Golden Biscuit Company sells biscuit sandwiches.

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Relish responds

Houston restaurant breaks silence about wage theft allegations

Photo by Julie Soefer

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A Houston restaurant has broken its silence about a lawsuit that accuses it of wage theft. Relish Restaurant & Bar issued a statement about allegations made by an employee that it improperly allocated money from the restaurant’s tip pool:

For more than a decade, we've worked hard to build a restaurant where our employees feel valued and respected. Our team is central to everything we do, and we take our responsibilities to them seriously. We remain committed to fair and lawful employment practices, and firmly deny the allegations that have been made. Given that this is an ongoing legal matter, we will not comment further at this time. Thank you for understanding.

According to an article in the Houston Chronicle, employee Michael Baron alleges that Relish and its owners, Addie and Dustin Teague:

Used his and other employees’ tips to pay the maitre’d, who also had managerial roles, such as disciplining employees. The maitre’d was allegedly paid at least $21,000 in 2026 from pooled tips, according to the lawsuit. The maitre'd position is not included in the restaurant's notice about which workers get paid from the pool, according to the lawsuit.

The lawsuit further alleges that the practices at Relish’s Town & Country location violated the Fair Labor Standards Act, the federal law that governs how tipped employees are paid. Under the law, restaurants are allowed to pay tipped employees as little as $2.13 per hour, because the vast majority of their income is generated by customers’ tips. The law also governs which other employees — such as bartenders and other customer-facing positions — are eligible to receive a share of an employee’s tips. Salaried managers or employees in supervisory roles are not eligible to receive tips.

Baron is represented by attorney Josef F. Buenker, whose firm specializes in employment law, as noted by its domain name houstonovertimelawyer.com.

In March, a federal court ruled that Perry’s Steakhouse & Grille must pay $21 million for misallocating tips to more than 700 servers.

Relish is known for its classic American fare such as burgers, fried chicken, steaks, salad, and seafood. Its River Oaks location, which has been open since 2016, will soon close before moving to the RO mixed-used development next year. Relish’s Town & Country location will remain open.

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