Monthly Archives: March 2011

Jenni Tran-Weaver, who came to Houston from Saigon as a young girl in the “first wave” of immigrants after the Vietnam War, insists her restaurant’s food is pan-Asian - with Japanese, Chinese and Thai dishes, plus lots of crossover tastes and techniques. But happily for us all (who love “Grandma cuisine” from any culture), most of what her three Jenni’s Noodle House locations serve is food she remembers from childhood. For instance, TNG (for “Teddy’s Not Gay,” but maybe you shouldn’t ask or tell about that) is possibly the best noodle dish I’ve ever tasted. Created by a customer named Teddy, it started out Japanese but ended up tasting Vietnamese. And I’m glad it did.

Having never been a fan of steamed or poached anything, the first fried dumplings I ever tasted were at Brandi Ho in San Francisco’s Chinatown. They changed my life. Thanks to Jenni’s, fried dumplings are changing my life in Houston all over again. These are filled with meat, though you’d never know it from looking. Like so many dishes at Jenni’s, though, they are available for vegans. I’m pretty sure anything soaking up this soy-garlic-ginger sauce would be amazing.

There are several versions of beef salad served at Jenni’s - I think this one is called Scotty’s (yes, as in Beam Me Up), named after the guy who put the Weaver in Jenni Tran-Weaver’s married name. The Vietnamese apparently see nothing strange, perhaps with the hot, humid climate they came from and Jenni came to, ahout putting proteins with lots of cool, crisp greens. The red onions are a super-nice touch.

One of the niftiest touches Vietnamese places like to dish up comes under the title “salt and pepper” - even though, yes, almost every savory dish on earth has salt and pepper in it. These salt and pepper shrimp are light and delicious, thanks to those two namesake spices and a little sugar to help things caramelize. If I can ever get past those dern TNG noodles, I’ll want this for lunch.

Finally, just to remind us that cultures in Asia don’t just stay put any more than they do anyplace else, Jenni serves several spins on curry. She considers this one (called Infernal Chicken, with its vegan variant known as Art Car) an “Indian curry,” but then she adds coconut milk in the style of Thailand. It isn’t anything like, say, Chicken Tikka Masala, or any other Indian masala, but it sure is great.

I never mind one bit getting dragged into a tasting at Haven. Few places I’ve been to in this country seem as well suited to my love affair with slightly sophisticated foods that come packaged with deep redneck flavors. It’s my New Orleans upbringing, I’m sure - in my hometown the most expensive restaurants try their best to cook food invented in homes and mastered in the least expensive restaurants. The appetizer sampler pictured above featured several of Haven’s greatest hits, from the unique spin on oysters Rockefeller to the devilishly good deviled egg to the quasi-tongue-in-cheek corndog shrimp.

As most folks in southeast Texas know by now, Haven is about nothing if not cooking with local and seasonal ingredients. Since strawberries have just started to come in, the path was clear for chef-partner Randy Evans and his gifted right-hand Kevin Naderi to serve this crisp salad with a strawberry vinaigrette to match. That toasted crouton was slathered with a soft Texas goat cheese, the perfect salty-pungent balance to the sweet-leaning everything else.

I’m very happy that the Carolina Low Country classic called shrimp and grits has anything but disappeared from the menu with the great social changes of the past thirty years. Some regional dishes have disappeared, but this one seems more popular in more parts of America than ever before. Of course, it helps to have wild-caught super-jumbo shrimp and grits stone-ground up around Waco. Who knew that Waco would become our nearest and dearest grits destination?

Despite my New Orleans roots, I’ve always been ambivalent about softshell crabs - and even more so about softshell anything else. But the chefs at Haven found the spoonful of “sugar” to help the softshell go down -first off, by frying it, then by surrounding it with light-springy Vietnamese flavors and lots of pickled vegetables.

Naturally, you couldn’t have a seafood tasting menu without actual fish - well, come to think of it, I’d be happy with nothing but shrimp. But at Haven, where they’d go that direction if I asked, they won’t if I don’t. This was an amazing pan-seared grouper with a few Matagorda oysters lying about (when it comes to oysters, Matagordas are apparently the new black), plus a creamy cabbage saute underneath that felt like delicate pasta.

We ended where we began at Haven, with a tasting from the greatest hits album. In this case, some terrific desserts. Think of all the desserts you ever loved - ice cream, bread pudding, rice pudding, icebox pie, creme brulee, toasted meringue - and just about any sweet finale you order at Haven will incorporate one or more components of it. No foams, no gels, no wisps of silly smoke, no colors not found in nature. Like everything else at Haven, these desserts are all about giving us what we love.

The other day, when I shared what it felt like to interview restaurateur Piero Selvaggio of Valentino again 25 years after the first time in Los Angeles, I mentioned that the radio show featured me tasting “a whole bunch of items.” Thanks to my usual eloquence, many readers wondered, “OK, so what items, John?” Here are the dishes I took photos of, starting with the light-wonderful crudi pictured above, an Italian response to Japanese sashimi.

Executive chef Cunninghame West joined us for the radio taping, but happily not until after he’d fixed this super mild-tasting squid-ink pasta topped with lobster, catching the perfect balance between peasant food and special occasion. If you were a peasant with access to fresh Maine lobster, I think this would be the perfect food for you. The rest of us will have to settle for access to Valentino at the Hotel Derek.

I am, I’m told regularly, one of the few people on earth who doesn’t think salmon is God’s gift to Humankind in the form of a fish. Despite my own reservations, I’ll have to seriously reconsider after Selvaggio and West set me up with this luscious, moist piece of salmon riding high atop a rustic, lusty Roman-style puttanesca sauce and roasted potatoes. I can’t picture the hookers who give this sauce its name eating half so well.

As a lifelong carnivore, one thing I do think is God’s gift to Humankind is rack of lamb - and, working with his Italian paint set, West created a masterpiece. For one thing, it’s a visual delight, complete with bones pointing off in every direction. For another thing, it’s delicious, the grilled meat dancing perfectly with a sauce rich in orange. Eat your heart out, mint jelly!

A million years ago, in the mid-1980s, I traveled to Los Angeles as the food editor of United Press International - with two basic assignments. One was to interview Julia Child at her home on the ocean outside Santa Barbara for a huge UPI profile cleverly called Lifesize. Nice work if you can get it. The other was to interview a guy in hip West LA who had a new restaurant “concept” (I was just getting familiar with the word) combining the notion of Spanish tapas or “small plates” with Italian food. The place was called Primi, short for “primi piatti,” which in Italy might be an appetizer and certainly, if you ask me, must include some pasta.

Little did I know that the guy I interviewed at Primi, Piero Selvaggio, would end up expanding his other restaurant brand, Valentino, from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, and then to the Hotel Derek in Houston. Even littler did I know that I’d be in Houston to catch up with him again.

So that’s what Piero and I did yesterday in Valentino, a concept (I’m quite familiar with the word now) that takes in a delightful restaurant of that name plus a casual drinkery-eatery called VinBar. We enjoyed tasting a whole bunch of items prepared by executive chef Cunninghame West, who must be more Italian than his name sounds, and then we settled into recording a radio show. For me, though, the big story was the one that had to take a backseat to owner and chef talking about their restaurant. And that’s the idea that not everybody you knew way-back-when, especially those who are smart and charming and successful, has to remain way-back-when forever.