Spare a thought this week for the Houston-area restaurants affected by those crazy Thursday derecho winds, and the power outages that followed. It's been tough and unpredictable for lots of operators as power came back online (or didn't).
On Sunday, I drove up to The Woodlands to revisit a bakery-cafe for our breakfast guide that's dropping this week. Levure sits on the north side of Creekside Park Village Green, a public green space that's a central feature of this collection of shops and restaurants. The outage maps made the expedition look dicey, but a call to the bakery confirmed it was open.
As I made my way towards Levure past Fielding's Local Kitchen + Bar, which sits at the head of the green, I noticed that the outdoor furniture on the front terrace was pushed to one side. Through the glass front, I could see chairs stacked in the dining room. There was a paper notice taped to the front door, and as I peered at it, proprietor Cory Attar appeared.
"You don't have power?" I asked him, wondering how Levure — mere yards away — could be open. "We got it back last night," he told me. "And you won't believe this," he added, pointing to the string of restaurants just across the drive. "They're in Montgomery County, and we're in Harris, so they had power the whole time, and we didn't."
That outlined how arbitrary the luck of this storm was, how narrow the difference between business as usual and taking a significant financial hit. Inside Fielding's, the staff was busy preparing the restaurant to open again. "Tuesday lunch, if we're lucky," chef Edel Gonçalves said, with a wry grimace. They had started throwing out food from their cold storage the night before, and now were madly prepping everything from the ground up — sauces, ingredients for the cooks' mise en place, ad infinitum.
"It's like opening a restaurant all over again," Gonçalves told me resignedly. The whole time we chatted, would-be brunchers kept approaching the door, peering at the sign, and exchanging condolences with Attar, who would dart out to greet regulars.
It was painful. Right across the way, at Levure, a staffer told me that because they had had power throughout, they had stored some perishables from a restaurant directly across the green who didn't.
Back in Houston yesterday and craving some Tex-Mex (always a salve for uncertainty), I dropped into Superica in the Heights, uncertain it would be open.
It was— barely. They had been without power until Sunday, and now they were trying to serve lunch with exactly one server to take care of the entire dining room and the bar counter, which I shared with two insurance adjusters who'd flown in from New Jersey.
"What happened?" I asked our heroic server, who goes by the nickname Siren, and who drives an Uber when she's not at Superica. "A lot of our staff had to leave town," she told me — yet another hidden cost of the storm, which made swathes of the city unlivable for the moment.
The kitchen kind of messed up my order, which eventually came, but the red and green salsas still sang, and I was glad I had come despite the hitches.
If there's a restaurant you cherish, pay them a visit soon. No, soonest. We rely on them, and many are going to need some extra support to dig out of the financial hole.
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