Have you ever seen a parking lot filled with funky food trucks and lines of hungry people waiting their turn to order up?  These aren’t your everyday taco trucks you see hovering around construction sites.  They are fancy, funky, fresh, and everything in between, mini-restaurants on wheels and the latest craze among the foodie crowd.

A festival celebrates these mobile bistro’s called Haute Wheels Houston Food Truck Festival.  Food trucks cluster together on a city block or parking lot offering items ranging from fish tacos to quiche, all types of cuisine, and chocolate and desserts in every way you could imagine.  The Mighty Cone, for example, serves items like fried shrimp with a unique sesame oyster sauce in a large cardboard cone to make it easier to hold and eat if you must.

Catchy names are part of the lure, like NOLA’s Creole 2 Geaux, Pocket To Me, Monster PBJ, It’s a Wrap, Fork in the Road to name a few. Popular restaurants are jumping on the mobile wagon as well.  James Coney Island has the Coney Cruiser. Tila’s now has Tila’s Taco Bus.

Fort Bend has certain health department requirements for these mobile bistro’s, which often cluster with other mobile food trucks and have scheduled event locations that can be tracked online.  Austin and San Antonio have events scheduled almost every weekend.  You can track the Houston and surrounding area mobile food scene at www.houstonfoodtrucks.com. .

If you have a favorite recipe you would like to share, please submit to denise@fortbendstar.com for consideration.

16019 City Walk, Sugar Land

Cuisine: 

Turkish Mediterranean

Price Range: $12.50 – $16.00 entrees

Menu: The menu is quite lengthy, but is well categorized to make it easy to narrow your choices. Some items offered are stuffed grape leaves, hummus, tabuleh, fried calamari, smoked salmon roll, various marinated beef and lamb kabobs, Turkish beef meatballs, grilled pacific salmon, bulgur pilaf, jasmine rice, piyaz, baklava, and Kadayif, along with a nice offering of Turkish and American wines.

Food: The fried calamari was piping hot and crispy. The Turkish meatballs were generously portioned, quite tasty with a slight mint flavor, served with jasmine rice and roasted vegetables. The grilled salmon was excellent, cooked perfectly and lightly seasoned with a crisp sear to it. Every item ordered was attractively plated. The Turkish white wine was quite pleasing and similar to American Chardonnay, but smooth and crisp.

Service: The wait staff was attentive without being overly present, prompt and eager to please. The manager made a point to come ask how our service was, being cordial and accommodating.

Comments: The restaurant is in a prime location in Sugar Land Town Center. It is small, with a casual, relaxed atmosphere. On a Friday night it was not overly noisy, yet had a generous number of patrons present. It was easy to carry on a conversation without having to listen over loud kitchen noise or overbearing background music. The overall experience was quite positive. It would definitely be a place to return to.

Overall Rating: 4 stars.

If you have a favorite recipe you would like to share, please submit to denise@fortbendstar.com for consideration.

Have you noticed some strange names when shopping for beef or pork lately?   There is a group heading up the Uniform Retail Meat Identification Standards (URMIS) who claim that people are confused by the old meat cut names such as pork chops, rump roast or port butt.  URMIS thinks people will be less confused by names such as Porterhouse chops, Ribeye chops or New York chops.  You might also find such new names as Denver roast or Boston roast.  Well that clears the confusion right up!  Being a native Houstonian, I might better understand what a Houston roast is, but even that’s a stretch!

Naming a cut of meat from where it comes from on the cow or pig makes perfect sense.  Furthermore, calling it by the breed such as Angus, is equally descriptive of the quality. How a pork butt roast is associated with the name Boston is anybody’s guess.  So whose idea was it to rename meat cuts after major cities? Aren’t most cattle ranchers and pig farmers from the country?  Perhaps this is not a move toward clearing up confusion among the American people as much as it is to appeal to the growing middle class in Mexico who is buying more American products including Texas beef.  The people from Mexico may not recognize the American names for parts of a beef or pork carcass, but they would recognize the names of American cities.  So there you have it, the culprit behind the confusion.

On another note, Allyson Huston, owner of Russo’s Coal Fired Kitchen participated in a dessert contest at the capitol in Austin last week for Missouri City day with her Pantone Bread Pudding.  It was a labor of love as she soaked her own dried fruit for the Pantone, which she also made from scratch and dried in the coal fired oven before adding a plethora of other ingredients.  Having tasted it myself, it is truly a delectable experience.

If you have a favorite recipe you would like to share, please submit to denise@fortbendstar.com for consideration.

Cajun Crawfish Cornbread

• 1 lb. peeled crawfish
• 2 boxes Jiffy cornbread mix
• 1 can creamed corn
• 2 cups milk
• ½ cup oil
• 3 eggs
• 1tsp. salt
• 1 ½ cups shredded cheese
• 1 onion, chopped
• 3 cloves garlic, minced
• 4-6 jalapeno’s, chopped
• ½ stick butter

Preheat oven to 375.

Sauté onions and garlic in butter until soft.  Add crawfish and remove from heat.  Mix all remaining ingredients in a separate bowl.  Combine with crawfish mixture.  Pour into a well-greased 9 X 13 baking dish and bake for 1 hour or until toothpick inserted in middle comes out clean.  Cool for 15 minutes before cutting into squares.  You may substitute shrimp if crawfish is not available.

If you have a favorite recipe you would like to share, please submit to denise@fortbendstar.com for consideration.

By Denise Monroe

Salata
2170 Town Square Place, Sugar Land
Cuisine: Upscale Salad Bar
Price Range: $8 – $10.00 entrees

Menu: The menu offers Salad Bowls such as Cobb, Greek, Southwest, Asian, and Caesar; the Salata Bar, offering any combination of lettuces, toppings, breads, dressings, chicken or seafood; salad wraps, with a choice of 5 flavors to wrap a salad in; Soups include Tomato Basil, Tortilla, and Broccoli. Cookies & brownies for dessert; and an assortment of flavored teas. Some fat free dressings were offered.

Food: The cold ingredients are very fresh and crisp, with some extraordinary options. Six different flavors of chicken and four kinds of seafood made for a hard choice to make as all of them looked delicious. The dressings are all their house brand and available for purchase by the bottle as well. The fresh herb vinaigrette was very good. The food was quite pleasing all the way around.

Service: The person building the salads as selections were being made was very helpful, attentive, and quick. Another person attends to the tables to assure customers are satisfied.

Comments: It is hard to imagine a typical salad bar being anything other than, well…a typical salad bar. But this restaurant clearly stands out above the rest. The ingredients were all very fresh, with a large variety of healthy and delicious toppings. You won’t find your assortment of pasta salads, but a few side options were offered as well. But you walk away with a satisfied feeling of having eaten a healthy, delicious, designer salad.

Overall Rating: 4 ½ stars.

Menu: The menu provided pictures of each entrée and was categorized by House Specials, Classic Grilled or Blackened, Fried Combos, and Fried Meals. They also offer boiled crawfish when in season at $7.99/lb. It was nice to be able to see what you get before you order.

Food: The food generally was tasty and very hot. The fried boudin balls were a little greasy, but had a good flavor. The portions were moderate, but not as generous as what was represented on the menu pictures.

Service: This is a casual place where you order at the front, seat yourself, and your food is brought to table. The table surface was clean, but every condiment container on the table was sticky or greasy (grab with caution). When the food was brought to the table, only half the amount of shrimp was on the plate as was pictured on the menu. When questioned by the manager about the discrepancy, his response was “they could never offer that plate with the full amount of shrimp as pictured because they were too expensive”. The next question was why the quantity was misrepresented on the menu. No response was given and no attempt was made to rectify the plate with the menu.

Comments: This is a small casual restaurant that serves up food often eaten with your hands. So extra effort should have been taken to keep the condiment containers clean. That was not the case. Generally the food was good, but over-priced for what you get.

Overall Rating: 2 ½ stars.

Diego’s Cantina
1531 Hwy. 6, Sugar Land, TX 77478

Cuisine:
Upscale Mexican seafood

Price Range:
$16 – $38 entrees

Menu: The menu offered numerous options in all categories, mostly seafood and traditional. Some very interesting pairings were offered, but they were out of four of the standard menu items. The menu had food spilled on it from a previous customer.

Food: The food was well plated and generously portioned. It was fresh, crisp, and aesthetically pleasing, but had a somewhat disappointing flavor. The vegetables had a demi-glace that was different and pleasing. The flan, which didn’t have egg in it, was light and creamy with a rich flavor.

Service: On an early, slow Sunday evening, they were out of three of the standard menu items. The food was slow in coming out after someone else’s food was brought to the table and taken away to the right table.

Comments: This is a beautiful restaurant on the third floor of a building with awesome views of Lake Pointe Plaza and the city of Sugar Land. It is the only restaurant in Sugar Land that offers an elevated view of the city. The ambiance is perfect, with modern Aztec art on the walls and white table cloths on the tables. The appearance of the food is impressive. The service was rather disappointing. It has great potential to be a premier upscale restaurant in Fort Bend County, but the experience was anything but upscale.

Overall Rating: 3 STARS for the view and ambiance only.

Irish Stew
2 Tbs. olive oil
1 ½ lbs. beef or lamb stew meat, cut into 1-inch pieces
6 garlic cloves, minced or crushed
1 cup red wine
1 bottle stout Irish beer
5 cups canned beef broth
3 Tbs. tomato paste
1 Tbs. sugar
2 Tbs. worcestersire sauce
1 Tbs. dried thyme
4 bay leaves
2 Tbs. butter
1 lb. ea. Russet and baby red potatoes, cut into ½-inch pieces
4 stalks celery, chopped
2 cups carrots, peeled & cut into ½-inch pieces
1 lg. onion, chopped
1 Tbs. ea. Cornstarch and water

Salt & pepper to taste large, heavy pot, brown stew meat in the olive oil.  Add the garlic and cook 1 minute.  Then add the next 8 ingredients.  Bring mixture to a boil.  Reduce heat to low, cover, and simmer for one hour, stirring occasionally    Meanwhile, in another large pot, melt the butter and add the vegetables.  Sautee until golden.

When stew has simmered for 1 hour, add vegetables and simmer uncovered another 45 minutes or until vegetables and beef are tender.

Mix cornstarch with cold water and gradually add to stew.  Cook and stir until thickened.  Remove the bay leaves and any fat from the top.  Salt and pepper to taste.

Menu: Other than the pages sticking together, the menu was easy to read; offering a nice variety of options without having too many to choose from. Some of the best items to note are the Artichoke Spinach Formaggio appetizer, the Mediterranean Salad and Cucumber Salad with feta cheese, olives, and red onion, and the Parmesan Trio was a trio of eggplant parmesan, veal parmesan, and chicken parmesan.

Food: The food is superb!! Everything tasted was well seasoned with light, not overbearing flavors. Very generous portions, fresh ingredients, and well plated. Nice selection of wines and local beers.

Service: The service was excellent. The owner/manager was very intuitive to the customer and wait-staff interaction and quickly stepped in to make sure the customers got what they needed quickly.

Location: The restaurant is tucked away inside Greatwood. Unless you have heard about it from someone else, you would never know it’s there. It is definitely a hidden jewel, well worth finding.

Overall Rating: This restaurant far outshines most Italian restaurants in the area. The food was excellent, the appetizers and salads are a little pricey but the entrée’s are reasonable, the service was fast and great, they went the extra mile to please, and it is convenient.

He began the five-course dinner with the house wine.  Each wine was introduced and explained why it was uniquely chosen to pair with the food items with which it was served. The wines were spectacular, the food was outstanding, and the conversations flowed throughout the evening.  Each guest was sent home with a complementary bottle of wine as a gift from the chef.   By the end of the evening, the entire restaurant did indeed feel like one big happy family.

The quality and taste of the food is superb and the best part is it does not cost an arm and a leg.  This event was offered for $15 per person.

So if you are a wine enthusiast and love top quality food, stay tuned for the next wine tasting dinner.