Houston’s culinary scene continues to get exciting new culinary additions, and Texas Monthly takes notice in its March 2020 issue. Three Houston restaurants made the publication’s list of Best New Restaurants in Texas for 2020 and Indigo chef Jonny Rhodes got accolades in a profile that asks whether he is the country’s most subversive chef.
Squable, the venture of Bobby Heugel and James Beard award winner Justin Yu, came in at number two on the list of 10 Best New Restaurants in Texas. “At Squable, opposites don’t just attract. They jump into bed with each other,” writes Patricia Sharpe, calling the restaurant upscale but easygoing, and sophisticated but reasonably priced. About the food of Squable chefs Mark Claytona and Drew Gimma, she writes it’s “deliciously on target.”
Davis St. at Hermann Park, a restaurant that reopened after a two-year hiatus, came in at number three. Sharpe heaped praise on chef Mark Holley and his seafood dishes like Boutte’s Gumbo and blacked grouper. Chef Luis Roger’s Spanish restaurant, MAD, which Sharpe describes as a “carnival of a restaurant” came in at number five. Two other restaurants – One Fifth Gulf Coast and Rosie Cannonball – got honorable mentions.
As for chef Jonny Rhodes, whose restaurant Indigo was one of Texas Monthly’s best new restaurants in Texas last year, he continues to get accolades, although in this latest Texas Monthly profile, the praise is not so much for his food, but rather for how he’s reimagining what a restaurant can be.
This mash-up of haute soul food, mom-and-pop warmth, and provocative racial and cultural commentary has improbably turned an 819-square-foot, thirteen-seat, four-night-a-week restaurant into a national sensation,” writes Eric Benson.