strike up the band

Inventive new Heights restaurant blends European flavors with Texas traditions

Houston has a lot of restaurants, but none of them are quite like Blue Tuba. The restaurant, which is opening soon in the former Harold’s in the Heights space on 19th St., will bring a fresh perspective by blending European and Texan culinary traditions.

Photo by Eric Sandler

Blue Tuba is opening soon in the Heights.

Before diving in to the menu, a bit of background. Blue Tuba owners Vlado Kolenic and Giga Leszayova come to Houston via New York, where they operated an Italian restaurant called Bettola. Prior to entering the restaurant business, Kolenic worked for years as a musician and composer — that’s him playing bass on ‘80s classic “Somebody’s Watching Me” — who had a successful career in Europe as well as in Los Angeles and Las Vegas. He became a professional chef when he met Leszayova, who worked as a manager at restaurants around New York.

After surviving the pandemic in New York, they decided to move to Texas. They quickly fell in love with Houston and saw an opportunity to open a new restaurant, but it took awhile to find the right space.

“Nobody gave us a chance. We lost three spaces, because they gave it to groups,” Kolenic tells CultureMap. “Except Alli [Jarrett, the owner of Harold’s], she took a chance on us. She’s fantastic. She really helped us.”

Jarrett explains that she appreciated the couple’s background it hospitality. “They’re delightful people. I think they really are the American dream,” she says.

Part of what appealed to Jarrett is the couple’s vision for the restaurant’s cuisine. Blue Tuba will pull from a range of European influences — “everything from Scandinavia to Greece,” Kolenic says — and blend it with Texas traditions. For example, the menu includes a number of tacos, but they’ll be filled with options such as escargot, smoked kielbasa sausage, schnitzel, and octopus and served on “Slovak tortillas” made with a mixture of wheat and potato flour. Similarly, Blue Tuba’s take on fajitas will be made with sausage and shrimp that are wrapped in a crispy potato pancake instead of a flour tortilla. For another entree, the chef plans to bring Spain and Texas together with his take on paella, which will take some inspiration from jambalaya.

“Texas paella, which is like a Spanish jambalaya, I’ll mix it with crawfish tails,” Kolenic says. “It’s like music. I improvise. In New York, we were always creating some different stuff.”

Other dishes will be more classically European, such as a Hungarian-style chicken paprikash and traditional schnitzel made with chicken or pork tenderloin. For the self-taught chef, the goal is to focus on flavors rather than what’s considered traditional.

“It’s food. It’s not rocket science,” he says. “You put love into it, it shows. My grandmother didn’t go to school, she cooked great. We just have fun.”

Jarrett agrees. She thinks Houstonians are ready for something new.

“I think Houston is saturated with restaurants, but I think what they’re doing is interesting. There’s no one doing that type of cuisine, taking European dishes and putting a Texas flair on them,” she says. “I think that coupled with their operating experience and hospitality, hopefully the neighborhood will support them.”

Commercial real estate broker David Littwitz, who represented the couple in their search for a space, thinks the Heights will also appreciate the couple’s upbeat attitude.

“The Heights has always struck me as a very wide ranging population,” Littwitz writes in an email. “They also seem to be a neighborhood that likes to ‘eat local.’ I believe the Heights will warmly embrace Vlado’s personality! Hopefully, they will also embrace his creative menu.”

When he’s not in the kitchen, Kolenic plans to perform in the dining room with other musicians. The couple aspire to be the kind of place where chefs and artists hang out. They hope to cultivate a strong group of regulars.

“In New York, we knew 70 percent of the people by their first name. That’s what I want here,” he says. Later, he adds, “When we came from Europe, we didn’t know anybody. It’s exciting. I’ve moved thirteen times in my life. To me, it’s no problem. I was born on Earth.”

Blue Tuba will initially open for dinner. Brunch, which will feature Leszayova’s classic Czech recipe for traditional kolaches, and lunch will follow once the restaurant is more established.

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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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