chef on the move

Theodore Rex's Beard Award semifinalist chef departs after 'beautiful,' 8-year run

Kaitlin Steets will depart Theodore Rex this month.

Courtesy of Littlefoot

One of Houston’s best chefs is leaving the kitchen she’s called home for eight years. Kaitlin Steets will cook at Theodore Rex for the final time on New Year’s Eve.

Winner of Chef of the Year in the 2021 CultureMap Tastemaker Awards and a semifinalist for a James Beard Award in 2020, Steets started working as a cook at Oxheart in 2015. She rose through the ranks and earned the title of head chef at Theodore Rex in 2022. She tells CultureMap that she and Theodore Rex executive chef-owner Justin Yu have been planning for this transition.

“We’ve been talking about it for awhile now, just figuring out the appropriate timing. To me, it’s always been important that it feel like a transition,” Steets says. “A lot of people don’t get to do that, to feel like it’s a grateful transition. My goal is that my last day I don’t feel like I’m needed.”

Steets’s son dictated part of the timing. He started kindergarten this fall. “If I’m going to want to play the mom role while working service five nights a week, those two worlds don’t overlap in the way I wish they could,” she says.

Yu acknowledges that Theodore Rex won’t be the same without Steets in the kitchen, but he’s proud of what she’s accomplished.

“It’s a very fruitful, a very beautiful 8 years,” he says. To help her find her voice as far as how food is made and how the kitchen is run. I’m extremely thankful. That kitchen, because of its size, is a hard place to work. For her to thrive in it and succeed personally, for me, it’s a huge win.

“It’s a happy and sad thing for it to go away. For me, it’s extremely happy. It’s like when I closed Oxheart, it’s on the terms you want someone to leave on.”

One of the highlighters of the chef’s tenure at Theodore Rex took place during 2021 when she operated the French-influenced Littlefoot pop-up for three months. It earned raves from diners for dishes such as roast quail with green Chartreuse and fennel and farro verde with smoked vegetable fumet.

Steets acknowledges that tasting menus still appeal to her, but it’s not necessarily what she’ll do next. She says she doesn’t feel ready to open her own restaurant and wants to learn from at least another chef or two before making that leap.

“Technically, I’m looking for a job. I just don’t know what that is yet,” she says. “I’m open to seeing what’s out there. It’s going to be interesting to see what kind of opportunities come up and what I can learn from those scenarios.”

As for Theodore Rex, Yu says he’ll already identified the restaurant’s next chef de cuisine but won’t formally name him until Steets departs. While Steets leaned French, he thinks the restaurant might move in a slightly different direction that brings it closer to the Oxheart days.

“T. Rex is one of those places that follows modern trends,” he says. “To me, we’ve started to embrace that Asian American side. Definitely, I think we want to get back to the roots of vegetable cookery. The goal is always there to try to be one of the best, if not the best, restaurants in the city.”

Of course, Steets also has more immediate goals. She dined regularly at Oxheart before she worked there, but has never experienced Theodore Rex as a diner. That could change on December 31.

“The unofficial plan is I work the first half of service. Then I sit down to eat,” she says.

chefs

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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