Houston Is Having a Cultural Renaissance, Thanks to Its Melting-Pot Communities

On a sweltering summer Monday in midtown Houston, chef Chris Williams turned up the heat for a recipe-testing session at his new restaurant, Late August. It’s an airy space with banquettes swathed in cobalt blue velvet, in an Art Deco building that, until 2018, was a Sears department store. In 2021 the city and Rice University repurposed the site as a business incubator and community events space, part of a joint project to develop a technology park dubbed the Ion District.

Houston’s combination of heart and diversity naturally play out on the plate, chef Chris Williams says, “if you’re willing to pay attention to what’s right in front of you.”

Nico Schinco

Williams, a Black born-and-raised Houstonian who opened Late August last year, has developed a culturally kaleidoscopic menu with an array of collaborators. Sergio Hidalgo, the restaurant’s executive chef, created a Mexican American–inspired fry bread, a popular dish in his home state of Arizona, using a recipe for yeast rolls devised by Williams’s great-grandmother Lucille B. Smith, one of the state’s first prominent African American businesswomen. (She invented a pre-Pillsbury instant hot-roll mix.) The chefs might garnish the bread with mole butter or benne seeds, a sesame brought to the United States by enslaved Africans. Williams also teamed up with a cousin he’d never met, Jennifer Parsons, a Florida-born and Guadeloupe-raised pastry chef who was until recently based in Taiwan, after meeting her father at a funeral last winter. Williams soon invited Parsons to work with him in Houston, where she concocted a decadent banana-pudding-stuffed churro taco for Late August. “It’s ridiculous and overwhelming,” Williams says, laughing. “But it’s the story of the restaurant in one dessert.”

That story is a blend of African American and Mexican American cooking by way of Texas, where Williams’s family goes back 190 years. He has pursued a similar vision at Lucille’s, his flagship restaurant in Houston’s Museum District, where dishes like oxtail tamales and fish fry with nuoc mam vinaigrette bring global influences to Southern cooking. “Fusion cuisine,” one might argue, is simply “cuisine” in this astoundingly diverse city of 2.3 million, nearly half of whose residents identify as Hispanic or Latino, a quarter as Black, a quarter as white, and 7% as Asian.