in its youthfulness, diversity, and explosive growth, houston looks like the american city of the future. shrugged o≠ its reputation as a city of steak houses and chains to become increasingly mentioned as one of the nation’s great restaurant cities. In these pages, David Chang called Houston the next food capital of America. This year, it earned two spots on my annual list of Best New Restaurants, a distinction shared only with New York City and Los Angeles. And as stories like Odam’s showed, there were signs of more afoot. Not only of a cool city but of a city that was cool in a way that wasn’t just another replication of Brooklyn built in some reclaimed industrial downtown (for one thing, Houston doesn’t really have one). Last summer I made plans to head to Houston, to explore further. Then, on August 25, Hurricane Harvey came churning
into Texas from the Gulf of Mexico. As though tired from its Caribbean journey, the storm circled lazily above southwest Texas for a catastrophic four days. The images, on the ground and TV, were otherworldly: water, pushed by swollen bayous and overwhelmed pumps, running uphill; highway signs hovering mere feet above the waterline, the roadways beneath them filled up like giant bathtubs. By the time it was over, the numbers, too, were surreal: Harvey had disgorged as much as 48 inches of rain—a trillion gallons—on the Houston metro area. Some 154,000 homes had flooded and tens of thousands of people had needed rescue. “The takeaway from Harvey is that it expands our understanding of what is possible,” a state climatologist later said, which is precisely the kind of thing you do not
“Shade Tree” Barbecue
want to hear from a The Bookity Bookity Boudain Man is the state climatologist. king of Houston’s I firmly believe pirate barbecuers, that there’s no such who set up shop anywhere—in his case, thing as a city that a Walmart parking lot. has more “grit” or “resilience” than any other; some are just unlucky enough to get the chance to show it. Still, the cracked-open metropolis that the rest of the country gazed upon in the immediate aftermath of Harvey was clearly one of deep communal ties, fierce civic pride, and wells of creative energy. There were the four employees of El Bolillo Bakery who, trapped by rising water, spent two days of the storm baking 4,400 pounds of flour’s worth of bread and pan dulce to distribute to flood victims. There was the Houston Ballet, whose home theater was inundated but who pressed on with its season in makeshift digs all over the city. Something special, it became clear to those who might not have been paying attention, was going on here. In its youthfulness, its diversity (by some measures, the most diverse large city in America), and its explosive growth (an astonishing two decades of 25 percent in the greater metro area), Houston was looking more and more like the American city of the future. Part of the change has been intentional. In recent years, a series of public-private partnerships has worked to develop the kind of amenities and public spaces that cool cities tend to have: bike lanes; downtown attractions; ambitious and beautiful green spaces like Bu≠alo Bayou Full-Spectrum Park, with its crissHouston Grub crossing pathways Chef Chris Shepherd across the bayou turned his James and astonishing Beard Award–winning restaurant Underbelly Cistern—a massive into UB Preserv, a underground resershrine to Houston’s voir now used for art multicultural cuisine. installations—and
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