It’s hard not to gaze in wonderment when the taco variant known as a costra hits your table at La Vibra. Its hidden layer of thin-sliced Angus ribeye curls within a bronze-lace sheath of griddled Gouda cheese, its dark sheen set off by a pale disk of flour tortilla.
Wrapped up, the costra constitutes a world within a world within a world — one of those rare Russian nesting dolls of the taco cosmos. Add one of La Vibra’s six excellent salsas and taste something new under Houston’s Mexican-food sun, which is not something you can do every day.
Costras, which roughly translates as “crusts,” are popular in contemporary Mexico City. They’re among the attractions at this suavely minimalist semi-serve taqueria. Owned by a group with family connections in Mexico City, it opened in late January anchoring a sleek new strip center near the foot of Yale Street in the Heights.
Zipping by toward Better Luck Tomorrow, Postino and points north, you might miss the skinny hot-pink graphics announcing the La Vibra name. Aside from the hue, the lettering’s too tasteful to call attention to itself.
La Vibra Tacos
Two stars
506 Yale; 713-389-5783
Hours: 11 a.m.-10 p.m. Monday-Saturday; 11 a.m.-9 p.m. Sunday
Prices: Tacos $2.75-$5.85, griddled Oaxaca cheese $1 extra; sides $2.50-$3.50; aguas frescas $3.25
Must-orders: Classico taco of rajas with Oaxaca cheese; costra taco of ribeye; fried shrimp or fish tacos classicos; volcan de costilla (Angus strip steak); nopal with Oaxaca cheese; cambray (grilled spring onions); guacamole with totopos; chicharron de queso; pineapple mint or lime cucumber aqua fresca
Reservations: First come, first served
Noise level: Quiet to moderate
Parking: On-site strip center lot
Website:lavibratacos.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.
Inside lies a crisp, airy dining room that is just as understated, all shades of gray and distressed concrete, animated by pops of geometric chrome-yellow on abstract grillwork and angular chairs. It’s serenely gorgeous, right down to the flowers tucked into string-wrapped glass tubes on the tables, and the ceramic-stoppered bottles that dispense your filtered water.
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I’d enjoy sitting here even if the food weren’t so lively and so much itself. But I always leave smiling and marveling at the pure and clean flavors and textures; and how I exit feeling light and alive, satisfied rather than full or sluggish.
Not every Houstonian will agree with that take. If you are adamant that Mexican food should be inexpensive, or that portions should be large, La Vibra will not be your glass of horchata.
The tacos are relatively small, wrapped in Mexico-City-size tortillas rather than our salad-plate or dinner-plate versions; and they come alone, rather than in flocks of three.
Personally, I’m cool with that. The ingredients are good, the quality high; the choices distinctive. Fillings are cooked to order, a big plus. Bargain-minded friends claim to have left hungry, but my problem has always been when to stop ordering, because everything is so good.
I’m obsessed with the smoked nopal, the cactus pad griddled till it crinkles on its shiny dark surface, anointed with a bit of garlic and guajillo chile oil. Why, yes, I’ll take an optional layer of griddled Oaxaca cheese on top, pale and stretchy beneath its bronzed surface. Halfway through, I might get fancy and add some dark, deep mole salsa from the constellation of tiny white bowls supplied to each table; or the toasty red brew they call Salsa Asada.
And invariably, I must have an order of the grilled spring onions called cambray, their rounded bulbs fatter and juicier than their scallion cousins, their green tops singed to a crisp in places. They are sweet and savory and outdoorsy from the fire, so alluring that they pop into my consciousness now at odd junctures.
Sometimes I wonder how they make the shiny, slightly puffed-up batter for their fried seafood tacos of sweet, fat shrimp or mellow whitefish. There’s always about twice as much filling as the little gold-yellow corn tortillas — made in-house of imported Mexican corn — can handle. So I move one or two pieces aside, dip them into the hot, thin tamarind salsa that’s one of the options here, and eat them with bits of their creamy slaw garnish.
They’re lovely. But I did find myself wishing that the corn tortillas were a bit bigger, so that it wasn’t so hard to get a balanced taco bite. The flour tortillas aren’t quite so diminutive, but they are far from the brawling specimens we Houstonians are used to, with a texture that seems stretchy and a little tough in places. If La Vibra can step up its tortilla game, I’ll be all out of quibbles.
In the meantime, it’s fun to order a so-called Volcan, which adds meats and cheese to a crisped, slightly cupped corn tortilla that fairly crackles. I loved mine with little flaps of griddled costilla, thin-cut from locally sourced Angus strip steak; and a layer of Oaxaca cheese. And I’m already planning to try a Volcan with an earthy dice of mushrooms, onion and a slight bounce of sea salt — with Oaxaca cheese melted and supple instead of griddled, if you please.
That’s how I order a rajas taco classico, its poblano and onions strips bathed in an ooze of white cheese, riding high on its corn tortilla. The rajas are good inside a costra, too — perhaps even better than the various beef costras, in which the meat tends to be overshadowed a bit by the emphatic wrapper of Gouda cheese.
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Besides thin Gouda wrappers and crowns of well-singed Oaxaca cheese, another cheese treatment tends to draw gasps here: the Chicharron de Queso, an airy tunnel of fried to a crisp Manchego. It’s like an Italian frico gone tubular, salty and satisfying to break apart noisily, eaten straight or dipped in creamy jalapeño salsa, say; or a hotter green blast of serrano salsa.
Do not pass up the guacamole, either. It’s as fresh and pure as it gets in Houston, picked up with a pinch of sea salt and jalapeño — and, if you wish, with a scatter of diced onion and cilantro from your tabletop set of salsas and condiments. The guac comes with totopos that break apart with a crunch, a sturdier breed than the fragile chips more common in Houston’s Tex-Mex halls.
Get the carefully brewed aguas frescas, too. They are subtle and winning, whether it be a lilting, summery lime-cucumber number or graceful pineapple touched with fresh mint; milky horchata or the bracing tart-sweet hibiscus-flower infusion called jamaica.
I almost wish I could keep La Vibra to myself. I’ll feel wistful when the ease and peace I find in its sparsely populated dining room evaporates; and the preternaturally gracious staffers must turn their warm, detailed attentions to the horde of new customers they richly deserve.
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-La-Vibra-Tacos-in-the-Heights-13934312.php 2019-06-04 15:20:19Z
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