Houston, TX

I

The first thing we did in Houston was get the hell out of Houston. I’ll admit it might not sound like the most endearing beginning to a travelogue, but that was indeed our first course of action. Immediately after picking up Brian, the last of our foursome to arrive, we were on our way to Austin, a short 3 hr drive away that would hopefully offer up a little more entertainment than Houston might be able to.

It wasn’t that we were avoiding Houston, but following a string of email discussions back and forth prior to our arrival, it was decided that 4 nights in Houston would be one too many to fill with interesting things to do in a city whose main attraction seemed to be its ample number of surface parking lots. One night in Austin would serve as a nice alternative prior to us returning to Houston to watch our Northwestern Wildcats play the Texas A&M Aggies in the Meineke Car Care Bowl of Texas. Yes this was indeed a college reunion trip: a chance to watch our alma mater play in a crappy bowl game with an even crappier name….but just as important a chance to enjoy some 70 degree weather in late December.

As we drove away from Houston, finally escaping its ever expanding suburban tentacles about 40 minutes later, the landscape began to evolve from the swampy lowlands of Houston into the dry ranch land of central Texas, arguably the terrain with which one would more closely associate the Lone Star State.

We passed ranch after ranch as our rented Silver Camry rolled along in the afternoon sun, a common occurrence along the highways of Texas. Despite the iconic overhead signs with adorned with the names of ranches, I was surprised at the number of run down and dilapidated structures lining the road as we went along. The scenery wasn’t necessarily breathtaking (lots of cattle), but it certainly wasn’t helped by the endless array of run down shops, barns, houses and general junk lying out in yards that framed each view. “I guess this is the real Texas: looks kind of like a flea market” I opined to no one in particular.

We approached Austin as the sun dipped towards the horizon, just as the evening traffic was beginning to pick up. In the flatlands of Central Texas the 56 story Austonian in downtown Austin was visible from many miles out as we made our approach. With a metro population of 1.7 million, the area is more populous than most would surmise. Our hotel was conveniently located just across the interstate from downtown and the ever famous 6^th St. corridor in Austin. It wasn’t the most luxurious hotel, but I could easily look pass the cigarette burns in the comforter in order to have close access to the Austin nightlife at a reasonable price.

Considering the limited luxuries of our hotel, we opted to just drop off bags and head out to explore the city, taking a leisurely stroll in the general direction of 6^th St., the area one headed in order to find entertainment in Austin we had been told. To my surprise, 6^th St and its bars, music venues and general notoriety as a center of nightlife, was located right in the heart of downtown. For some reason I had always imagined it in more of a university setting (despite the fact that the university was actually not far away), where it could be accessed by the tens of thousands of college students who try to find a few minutes a day to concentrate on school before heading out to the bars to celebrate having no real responsibilities in life

But instead it was located right in the middle of a cluster of shiny post modern skyscrapers, low rise parking structures and the rest of things you would associate with a downtown business district. It was an interesting juxtaposition of everything that makes Austin unique, different, weird if you will, right next to the shimmering towers that signal the growth of the area as a growing city and economic center. But businessmen have to get drunk somewhere, so why not do it in front of some live music?

Stretching for 4 or 5 blocks, plus a host of spurs onto neighboring side streets, the 6^th St corridor is the heart of what Austin is known for. Block after block of the street is filled with bars/restaurants/clubs, virtually everything you could imagine in an entertainment district. Of course what really makes it special is the alternative vibe and live music pumping from nearly every locale: The Live Music Capital of the World, as Austin has fairly deservingly claimed itself.

I was quite impressed with our ability to bar hop along 6^th St and continuously wander into places that either offered some form of live music or a nice selection of Texas Microbrews, both things that I had had difficulty encountering in Dallas only one year prior. Without so much as a plan or a recommendation we chose bars based solely on name, appearance, and the sound of any music emanating from within, and yet came away pleasantly surprised time after time. There are precious few spots in the world I have found myself able to execute such nomadic drinking with the same amount of satisfaction.

After a few stops it became time to satiate the need for some good food in Austin, despite the fact that none of us were exactly starving following our large Tex Mex lunch along the route from Houston. Little did I know that eating even when we weren’t hungry would prove to be one of the themes of the trip.

Across the Colorado River, south on Congress Ave, was where we found Hopdoddy, a burger bar that specializes in craft brews, essentially heaven on earth for our mid twenties brat pack. It was at Hopdoddy that I had the 2^nd greatest burger of my life. The Llano Poblano : an angus patty topped with pepper jack cheese, roasted poblanos, Apple-smoked bacon, and chipotle mayo was nothing short of amazing, and the ingredients were only part of it. Served on a made from scratch bun and cooked to a beautiful medium rare (it’s such a wonderful miracle when a place known for its burgers can actually cook a burger properly), this burger was the whole package.

Now I would be lying if I didn’t admit that my unyielding affinity for Hopdoddy and their glorious burgers wasn’t at least partially fueled by a hefty buzz resulting from several hours drinking prior to our arrival at the restaurant. I mean every word I write now a sobering distance away now, but my mood at the time couldn’t have been better. With the restaurant out of indoor tables we opted to sit outside in the slightly chilled evening air rather than wait, and to our enjoyment found our meal accompanied by the band playing outdoors at the bar next door, their guitar driven rock flowing over the wall as we consumed every last morsel. It felt as if it was impossible for things to go wrong in Austin.

From there we spent the remainder of the night bar hoping some more and taking in the late nightlife, which to my surprise turned away from live music and more towards the DJ crowd. I might have been disappointed, but it was hard to claim surprise. Either way, we had managed to hit up well over half a dozen bars over the course of the evening, our short time in Austin had most assuredly been well spent. It was on the walk home that I poorly decided to purchase and devour a large piece of mediocre pizza that gave me a terrible food hangover and an extreme case of buyer’s remorse the following day.

This was the first and only thing to go wrong in Austin.

II

Texas is known for its bar-be-que. You might not have heard this before. Sure, it’s surprising that a place with thousands of miles of ranchland settled by Germans and Czech with hundreds of years of expertise in smoking and curing meats would be known for such a thing, but here we were in Luling, about 45 minutes south of Austin, waiting in line with dozens of other customers who appeared to be from all over Texas, if not all over the country, to get some of the best BBQ Central Texas has to offer at City Market.

The smell as you walk into the smoking room at City Market, yes you enter this smoky paradise when ordering and paying for all meats (drinks and sides are ordered separate at another counter) is enough to bring you to your knees. They have been smoking their briskets, ribs and sausages in this room for quite some time, and it looks and smells just as you would expect. Perhaps nothing spoke more to the old time, down home nature of the establishment than the dumbbells made of scrap metal tied to the heavy, cast iron lids on top of the smokers that provide counterweights, allowing the pitmaster to raise the lids with ease to access his prized meats. But I tried not to let the old school charm fool me too much. I watched many bills pass hand to hand over the course of our visit. There is serious money in BBQ in Texas.

Along with the meats came a series of questions of about accessories to the several pounds of beef and pork we had just ordered: bread? Pickles? Onions? Jalapenos? Cheese? Having no idea how such a meal was to be properly devoured by a true Texan I said yes to all of the offerings and assumed we would figure it out at the table. This involved some various attempts at creating sandwiches or pairings of the different meats, condiments, and sides. According to lore, true Texas BBQ requires no sauce (the meat should be flavorful and juicy enough as is being the prevailing mantra), but City Market did offer a bottle of a tangy, vinegar based sauce upon request.

I couldn’t help but add some to my sandwich constructions, even though I felt it betrayed me as an outsider. I’ve always loved sauce with my BBQ, and I just couldn’t stop myself. Perhaps it’s due to the fact that the closest BBQ center to where I grew up was Kansas City, which is so sauce based that I believe just chugging a bottle of their sweet and tangy sauce constitutes a meal. I cast a few leery glances around the room as I constructed my various sandwiches, hoping that I wasn’t embarking on some sacrilegious act that would get me mocked or maybe even arrested in such a carnivorously pious part of the country.

Right or wrong, we did the one thing that I was sure was a must around these parts, and that was devour every morsel of meat and lick every bone clean before all was said and done, our bellies now bulging in a way that any true Texan would be proud of. It was excellent to the last bite, though I claim a personal preference for the pork ribs and my own favorite. A well deserved drive off the interstate to find BBQ nirvana in Luling, Texas, population 5,458.

We arrived in Houston just in time to make it to our first planned activity in the city. Despite a lack of interesting entertainment options for 4 young males in their 20s, Dan had managed to scrounge up information about a brewery tour at a local brewer: St. Arnold’s Brewery.

I wasn’t sure what to expect about our foray into Texas brewing. My trip to Dallas a year before had left me less than impressed on the idea of microbrews in Texas, but we had tried some interesting brews in Austin and I was beginning to warm to the idea that there might be more than meets the eye. In fact St. Arnold’s claims the distinction of being the oldest craft brewery in Texas, having started sometime in the late 1980s.

The crowd we witnessed upon arrival was something unlike I’d ever seen before. There were hundreds of people there on this Friday afternoon, many to tour the brewery, but a sizeable amount who were there to only drink beer from the brewery while chatting away or playing cards. This was clearly much more of a social event than I realized, and looking around at the crowd, I felt we have stumbled upon one of the major social outlets for Houston’s beer snobbing hipster crowd.

The tour itself was quite good, which is not a distinction usually reserved for tours of micro breweries. Given by Brock Wagner, the co-founder and owner, it was informative, engaging, and genuinely funny as well. Brock is a man who obviously lives for his beer and his passion for it was easy to identify. I could only pray that someday I might love something as much as this man loved beer. And if that something turned out to be beer as well that would be just fine with me too.

At one point during the beginnings of the tour while mentioning St. Arnold’s venture into distributing in their 2^nd state, Louisiana, our guide made a sly comment that at first did not pick up on.

“After all, we’re a lot closer to New Orleans than we are to Texas” he added after mentioning that St. Arnold was now beginning a push into the Catholic Stronghold of southern Louisiana. I had taken this to be a joke at first, but as I looked around at the rest of the Houston crowd nodding their heads in agreement, I sensed there was something more behind the statement.

I had always thought that Texas was Texas, but maybe that sentiment was a bit of a half truth around these parts.

III

After the tour and some samplings we headed back to our hotel in downtown Houston. I had spent several hours before the trip diligently researching a variety of restaurants that we could try out during our time there, but I was now beginning to realize two fatal flaws in my original plan. The first was that the Houston metropolitan area was much more spread out than I had ever imagined, and many of these options were a long ways away from where we were staying. The second was that after our meals of Tex Mex, burgers, and BBQ to begin the trip, I was starting to realize that I would probably not be hungry again for several days.

This being the case, we decided to bag any ideas of a nice dinner and instead just found a cab to take us to the Midtown area of town, just a little ways south of downtown, where we hoped to find some drinks and entertainment for the evening. Midtown was both fun but slightly disappointing. Much like Dallas, I thought some of the places we ventured into were entertaining enough, but still as a whole the district hardly seemed much of a nightlife hotspot for a metro area of over 5 million people.

I had to remind myself that it was the night before New Year’s Eve, and thus for a Friday many of Houston’s socialites were probably taking it easy, so not finding a hopping bar district might not have been totally indicative of the scene. In fact we decided to include ourselves in that category, and the night was called shortly after midnight and a handful of drinks.

This was due partially to the impending New Year’s celebration as well as to our need to arise early and begin preparations for the real reason we in Texas: Northwestern University versus Texas A&M University in the Meineke Car Care Bowl of Texas. We did have one obligation during our 4 day trip to take care of.

Dan, Mike, Brian and I are all friends from during our undergraduate years at Northwestern, and such an event seemed like the perfect excuse to book a plane ticket to a warmer climate during December/January. While the game itself didn’t produce the outcome I had hoped for, it did give us a reason to begin drinking at 7AM and a chance to visit Reliant Stadium, home of the Houston Texans.

The entire trip proved to be quite enjoyable and painless. The new light rail in Houston ferried us quickly from our hotel downtown to the stadium, and I welcomed the chance to try out the new mass transit system. My trip to Dallas the previous year had been for similar circumstances, meaning to also witness Northwestern lose a bowl game in Texas, but we were not able to use the new rail system there to get to the game at the Cotton bowl, located in the heart of the Texas State Fairgrounds. The simple fact that the Houston light rail seemed to connect destinations which people actually wanted to go to once again gave it a leg up in my opinion over Dallas.

Though the game did not produce the result we had hoped for, with the Aggies jumping out to an early lead which they never relinquished, I was still impressed by Reliant Stadium. This might have been augmented by the fact that we walked past an amazingly dilapidated and run down looking Astrodome on our way to the shiny, new Reliant Stadium. Building modern stadiums that encompass any charm or atmosphere to them these days is a difficult requirement. True to form, Reliant had few options to readily break this trend, but it was built in a compact and intimate manner for such a large venue, and with the roof closed it proved to be a loud and memorable atmosphere even with a less than capacity crowd.

IV

New Year’s Eve in a new city where you don’t know anyone else is always more or less a crap shoot. The irony is that even though the night means there are endless entertainment options abounding, the sentiment of elevated expectations for such a night means it still often ends in disappointment. Luckily for our group of 4 Yankees this did not prove to be the case.

Rather, we found ourselves reveling in the New Year at Prohibitions, a 1920’s era speakeasy themed bar in the Washington Avenue bar district a little west of downtown Houston. But though we were in what I could best understand described as some sort of nightlife and entertainment “district”, the establishments and bars still seemed to be quite distant from one another. Such is Texas I suppose.

But that didn’t matter as Prohibitions provided more than enough entertainment for the evening, even though their craft cocktail menu dragged the service on a busy night down to such a crawl that I almost had to throw a fit at the bar in order to get served. It was a good way to ring in 2012 though, and I was happy to watch the trio of cabaret dancers perform their act, though no one besides their friends and families were paying attention. They seemed to love what they were doing in the end, and that made me happy enough. Happy enough to go an order another drink in fact. And another…

New Year’s Day was sunny with highs in the low 70’s, another gorgeous day in Houston. For it now being January I couldn’t think of better conditions to welcome in the New Year as I strolled around downtown Houston. It was an afternoon walk intended to clear my head, get some fresh air, and generally fight the feeling one often gets after a night of overconsumption.

Downtown Houston posed an interesting question as to whether I actually liked it or not. Though it immediately seemed more modern, lively and hospitable than downtown Dallas, I still had a hard time thinking of it as anywhere representative of what a truly large city should have at its core. There was a string of bars and restaurants located along the light rail, and the skyline was appealing to the eye.

But still there were so many parking lots, low rises, and uninspired buildings that it was hard to really fall in favor with it. Not to mention Minute Maid Park where the Houston Astros play which is located on the eastern edge of downtown Houston. The park, which was built to encompass much of the structure of the original train depot on the site, left me confused and inquisitive. It sort of looked like a baseball stadium, but was it really one? I guess I felt the same way about downtown Houston as well. Given my post New Year’s state it was difficult to muster the energy for much more than an hour of walking, so I headed back to the hotel to recuperate some more.

The fresh air had felt good. Even for January there was a slight tinge of humidity in the air, enough to make me shudder at the thought of spending a summer in Houston, where hot, overly humid days are the norm. I felt a moment of compassion for the massive number of overweight people living in the area when thinking of what they must endure in those treacherous months.

I was beginning to regain my composure by the time we decided on a place for dinner in our last night in Houston. Max’s Wine Bar in the Washington Avenue Corridor was the destination of choice, a trendy gastro wine bar that featured a nice selection of intriguing New American dishes while not being overly expensive. But even though all this sounds quite nice, a big reason we selected it happened to be that it was open late on Sunday, New Years Day.

Despite the chic atmosphere promised on the website, I was disappointed to learn that its location happened to be in a strip mall on a non-descript intersection in one of the “trendier” areas of town. This seemed to be a recurring theme in Houston, where despite individual establishments attempts to create a culture and construct some semblance of a neighborhood atmosphere, their ambitions are almost always undone by the sprawl and chaos that emanates wildly in a city with no zoning laws. And on top of all this, the location meant I was going to have to violate one of my principles of dining out: never eat non-ethnic food from an establishment in a strip mall.

Perhaps my principles are a little misguided for Texas, where strip malls are omnipresent, because our final dinner in Texas was wonderful. In fact I loved everything about the place: the creative and diverse menu, the vast wine selection, the casual, warm and cozy atmosphere. From the inside it was damn near perfect, which made it even more of a shame it was located in such a shit building.

In a corny, over analyzed sort of way, this seemed to fit quite well with our stay in Houston overall. I had enjoyed the city more than expected, and was pleasantly surprised by many of the establishments, people and places we had visited. But at the same time, it was still lacking in a unified sort of way. I couldn’t particularly picture any neighborhood that I could see myself living in, or any areas that stood out as being descript or unique.

I don’t know if I could say I liked Houston, but I know what I don’t like, and Houston wasn’t it. Although I felt a pulse and culture there more so than in Dallas, it was still miles away from anything that New Orleans could offer, only a few hundred miles east along the gulf coast. Still, as a northerner, an urbanist, and a democrat, I left with the impression that outside of Austin, for obvious reasons, Houston would offer me the best chance of survival in Texas.

Hell if anything was going to get me there, it would be the humidity.