Saturday, July 31. Houston For A Grand. Hugo's. To Antoine's For Champagne. Yesterday morning, I came down to Quattro in the Four Season Hotel in Houston for breakfast. Pastries, fruit, orange juice, and coffee. The only way I can get something like the café au lait I treat myself to at home every morning when I'm on the road is to get a latte or a cappuccino. I had two of those, then Mary Ann appeared. She had eggs and toast, and we planned the day. The check: a shade over $60. She was scandalized by this. Today I was back down there, this time just getting the $15 continental combo. She joined me again, but just looked on, not wanting to give this place another nickel.
I keep telling here that when you stay in luxury hotels, everything's more expensive. This is one of the paradoxes of travel. If you check into a Marriott Courtyard or a Best Western, almost everything but the room is free. Phone calls, breakfast, use of the business center. In luxury hotels with room rates two or three times higher, they charge you for all of that.
The punchline to this bad joke was the total bill for our stay in Houston: $785. Add to that dinner last night and lunch today, and we have spent just under a grand for these two days. The ratio of pleasure to money spent on this junket is about as low as it's ever been in all my travels.
Mary Ann wanted to put off leaving Houston until as late as possible so we could have lunch. Some relocated Orleanians we spoke with during dinner two nights ago recommended that our required Mexican repast be at Hugo's. Everyone else we checked with was equally sanguine about the place.
Hugo's is in the Montrose section, not far from downtown, in what I think is an old industrial building. It was renovated in a sharp way, with high ceilings and big windows. It doesn't look Mexican, but that's the way it is these days with the new wave of ethnic restaurants. They're not competing with all the other restaurants of its ethnicity, but with ambitious restaurants of all kinds.
There's no mistaking that Chef Hugo Ortega is going all out to be as impressive as any other chef. He leaves behind the cliches of Mexican cooking as we know it in the United States, and builds on the unique, rich palette of flavors Mexico developed over the centuries. This is what Taqueros would be if it were a little more intensive. (And if New Orleans diners knew more about Mexican food.) Hugo's menu includes dishes and ingredients I've never encountered in any other restaurant. How about these chapulines, for example: pan-sauteed grasshoppers with guacamole and chilpotle tomatillo salsa?
We started with something much more conventional: queso flameado, a sort of gratin of grilled steak with onions and chile pepper strips, with fresh cheese. The waiter, using a couple of spoons, filled the tortillas with the concoction. Fantastic.
Mary Ann's entree was pork ribs marinated in achiote (hence the yellow-orange color), interspersed with pickled onions, black beans underneath. She loved this. But the great dish was mine. Pato en mole poblano (below): roast duck with one of the world's greatest sauces, made with non-sweet chocolate, chilies, and a few dozen other ingredients. In any place where Mexican cooking is endemic (Houston is such a place), mole is commonplace. But we have almost none of it in New Orleans. This one was the finest I ever tasted. Pairing it with duck was brilliant. A platonic dish, to use Richard Collin's encomium.
By coincidence, the people who turned us on to this place two nights ago showed up in the middle of our meal. They had some great-looking food, too: a whole red snapper Veracruz style, and seafood tacos.
Hugo's put a bright period at the end of our Houston sentence. And now we really had to get going. I am expected this evening at Antoine's, for a tasting of sparkling wines. A large percentage of the attendees will be there at my urging, so I must be too.
To shorten the trip by at least an hour, I let Mary Ann do the driving. We weren't out of Houston before we allowed ourselves to slip into a rip-snorter of an argument mixing politics and personal values. I maintain that our values are the same, otherwise we would forever be in disagreement with how our kids should be raised. In fact, we are in lockstep about that. But she says results be damned: nobody who votes the way I do could possibly have the same values that she does. So I ask: tell me which of my values you disdain. And that's where the dialogue either comes to a complete halt. Or heads off in a radically new direction.
We calmed down by Lake Charles, and arrived in the Japanese Room at Antoine's about forty-five minutes late. Two hundred people had come, the waiters told me. The array of sparklers included nothing really expensive, but plenty of good bubbly wines from many countries. The spread of food included Antoine's more popular appetizers, including an endless supply of oysters Foch. Mary Ann said that the strips of beef in a brown sauce were spectacularly good.
She was lucky. I hardly had anything either to eat or drink. That's how it always is. People walk up to ask or tell me something, and then we get into an actual conversation. I excuse myself after a few minutes to refill my glass (for a long time it never gets filled the first time) and get some food, but en route someone else stops me and another exchange begins. If I only ate at parties like this, I would lose much weight.
A number of people were waiting for me to give them a tour of Antoine's. (I made that offer on the radio.) Downstairs and found that my tour could not be as comprehensive as usual. Almost every private room on the first floor had a party going on. The only two empty ones were the Proteus Room and the little Tabasco Room. Even the Mystery Room, with its photos of Franklin Roosevelt's famous visit to Antoine's in the 1930s, was occupied.
The main dining rooms were busy, too. Wait a minute. This is the last day of July. What's going on? This is supposed to be the dead time of the year for restaurants. The oil spill is supposed to have kept people from visiting, too.
My answer: things aren't as bad as they seem. They never are, if you ask me.
Hugo's. Houston: 1600 Westheimer, 713-524-7744.
Antoine's. French Quarter. 713 St. Louis. 504-581-4422.
