Chef Mina’s Tuna Sushi Poppers arrived under a glass cloche, cunning garnet towers aswirl with smoke tendrils. A server started to whisk off the clear dome and then paused to ask my dinner guest, who was fumbling with his smartphone, “Are you getting the video?”
Such is the solicitous, social-media-savvy service vibe at International Smoke, the joint project of Michael Mina and Ayesha Curry.
He’s the Bay Area-based celebrity chef who oversees nearly 40 restaurants across the county. She’s the Instagram star whose YouTube food vlog catapulted her to Food Network and cookbook fame over the past four years. Oh, yeah, she also happens to be married to NBA megastar Steph Curry of the Golden State Warriors.
I admit to dragging my feet about dining at International Smoke, which opened in the posh west side CityCentre development last July. Not because I had a problem patronizing a spot associated with Steph Curry, a formidable foe of the Rockets, like the jaundiced fans who started nailing the restaurant with one-star Yelp reviews before it had even opened.
International Smoke
Two stars
800 Sorella Court, No. 940; 713-714-0126
Hours: Lunch 11:30 a.m.-4 p.m. Mondays-Fridays, noon-4 p.m. Saturdays & Sundays. Dinner 5-11 p.m. Mondays-Saturdays; 5-10 p.m. Sundays.
Credit cards: all major
Prices: Starters $6-$19; entrees $17-$49 (lunch $16-$26); desserts $10-$12
Must-orders: Curry Cornbread; tuna sushi poppers; shaking beef lettuce cups; smoked shrimp and curry soup; smoked burrata and beets; sesame-gochujang pork ribs; 44 Farms beef burger; grilled branzino; smoked Korean shortrib; brown butter cake; Wynwood Hipster pisco cocktail
Reservations: Via opentable.com; walk-ins welcome; bar seating
Noise level: Moderate to moderately loud
Parking: Complimentary valet at Hotel Sorella stand; or navigate the least intuitive parking garage in the universe, in the northwest corner of CityCentre, for free parking.
Website: internationalsmoke.com
STAR RATINGS
Four stars: superlative; can hold its own on a national stage. Three stars: excellent; one of the best restaurants in the city. Two stars: very good; one of the best restaurants of its kind. One star: a good restaurant that we recommend. No stars: restaurant cannot be recommended.
No, grim experience over the decades had made me wary of celebrity restaurants as a genre. I knew chef Mina was well regarded. I respected E.J. Miller, their chosen executive chef, for his work as chef de cuisine at both SaltAir and Riel. But I lifted a skeptical Houston eyebrow at the “global grilling” motif, a loose definition of barbecuing by the deep smokehouse standards that apply in our region.
How wrong I was. International Smoke is lots of fun, with a well-run kitchen that delivers a wide range of dishes with unusual consistency. Miller was a genius hire, and his seafood expertise from SaltAir serves him well on a menu that I had expected to be more strictly carnivorous.
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Those tuna sushi poppers whose arrival in a cloud of oak-chip smoke was such high, video-friendly drama? Utterly delicious, from their crisped-rice base to their ruby-red mince of raw tuna piled high and electrified with bits of ancho, sesame, habanero, pine nuts and tiny pops of finger lime. I could eat a whole plateful all by myself.
Immaculate grilled branzino, the Mediterranean bass, wowed our table one night with its slick, pearly flesh and its lilt of Greek vinaigrette, livened with capers and olives. Redfish on the halfshell, a nice nod to local foodways, was just as expertly prepared. And its accessories — wonderfully savory garlic fried rice and a fresh tangle of chicory greens — rang an unexpected bell.
Many of the global ideas do here. Both Mina and Curry have interesting backgrounds that inform the flavors in play. Mina’s roots are Egyptian, so a sliced 44 Farms sirloin Steak Frites comes with a haunting herbal twist of thyme and oregano. Curry’s mother is Afro- and Chinese-Jamaican, which brings still more sets of ingredients into the mix.
The two principals are citizens of the world, too, and some of the most striking dishes on their menu borrow Southeast Asian ideas. Smoked shrimp star in a Thai red curry soup, gentled with coconut and edged with lemongrass and makrut lime leaf. Fleshed out with fresh peas, silky tofu squares and peanuts, this soup is the real deal, not some pale wannabe.
It comes with one of the menu’s most ingratiating items, Ayesha’s Curry Cornbread in muffin form, sweet and crumbly and ever so soft, with a stirring red curry butter to pick things up. At $6 for an order of three, the cornbread is one of the cheapest things on a fairly expensive menu. Indeed, were the execution not so solid across the board, I might gulp a bit at the prices.
But solid it is. My quibbles were few: big wild-caught shrimp, grilled over charcoal, that were too salty by half; rib tip mac-and-cheese with too much sweet barbecue sauce; Jamaican jerk chicken wings that didn’t really deliver on the Caribbean spice; a wan pudding trio dessert.
International Smoke draws an urbane, diverse west side crowd that seems to include a healthy cohort of Energy Corridor types from around the globe. So the menu seems fitting rather than a frantic ricochet, even though it leaps from intensely herbed fava falafel patties on mildly smoked hummus, to shaking beef lettuce cups, its cubed filet mignon sizzled right at the table with sprightly nuoc cham. You spoon the beef and sauce into Bibb lettuce cradles pre-assembled with all the right crunchy stuff. It’s an appetizer to share, but I’d eat it for dinner.
I’d go for the tender, sticky-barked sesame gochujang ribs, too, neatly trimmed St. Louis style and imbued with post-oak smoke. In a demanding barbecue market, these ribs will definitely do, although a half-rack price of $19, sans sides, gave me pause. Something about this dark, informal room, with its big booths and unclad tables, its flickering big screens lining the long bar section, made me anticipate a lesser tab.
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But if you don’t want to spring $34 for a first-rate slab of wild-caught Alaskan salmon smoked over cedar, and served with serious stone-ground grits and a clever bacon vinaigrette, you can always grab a sandwich here for under $20. Yes, that 44 Farms Texas Angus burger is 19 bucks, but it is cosmic: tall, juicy, fierce of sear and underlain with a pimento cheese that functions as a sort of exuberant cheese-and-secret-sauce mashup.
It’s wonderful with a good glass of red from general manager Mark Jaeschke’s list, which has some of the more interesting by-the-glass choices in town. The cocktail game is strong, too. While I was amused to see couples sharing huge, theatrical punch bowls — popular for consumption on the big, jasmine-clad patios that wrap the room — the small-format drinks are both smart and well made. There’s an elegant gin and tonic with grapefruit, sage and just a hint of elderflower, and a smoke-cloched Old Fashioned variant with an oversized ice cube.
Not to mention a coupe of pisco, the clear South American brandy, shaken up with lemon and egg white and … get ready for this … CBD, the cannabis derivative that supposedly makes you feel good without getting you high. I am attributing my pleasure in the cocktail to pisco, but who knows?
There’s an appealing happy-hour menu in the hospitable bar, where I sat for dinner one evening while a Golden State playoff game spooled out overhead on multiple screens. Watching Steph Curry shoot a three-pointer in his wife’s fancy bar seemed very 2019.
So, as I departed, did the bench outside the restaurant’s entrance. Its backdrop of greenery and neon script declaring “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire” fairly begged to be Instagrammed. As I started to walk away, a stranger offered me her smartphone and asked me to take a group portrait of her and her friends.
Of course I would.
Alison Cook is the Chronicle's James Beard Award-winning restaurant critic. Follow her on Twitter, and keep up with Houston's latest dining and drinking news and reviews by subscribing to our free Flavor newsletter.
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/entertainment/restaurants-bars/reviews/article/Restaurant-review-International-Smoke-in-13786671.php 2019-04-23 05:00:00Z
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