Seen from above, a bowlful of jhol momo at Momo House billows and furls like an elaborate mountain range.
Rippling Nepali dumplings — the momos that lend their name to this interesting little restaurant — rise from a sesame-tinged broth the color of golden-brown mustard. The soup vibrates with the bite of chiles and lime, the smooth nuttiness of sesame, the rounded pungence of garlic.
The dumplings themselves, plump with a fluffy minced chicken mixture, bristle with garlic and ginger, flecked green with cilantro and onion. They are irresistible — both in this bracing soup, so comforting in chilly weather, and in the manifold ways in which Momo House serves them.
I think about momos a lot lately, thanks to this disarming new Nepali spot just east of the Mahatma Gandhi District in United Plaza, a U-shaped Hillcroft strip center that is home to a wild array of international restaurants and markets. Nepali dishes have cropped up before over the decades in a Houston Indian establishment or two, but Momo House is one of very few restaurants solely dedicated to the cuisine of this high Himalayan nation stretched between India and Tibet.
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Momo House
One star
6121 Hillcroft; 713-505-1300
Hours: 11 a.m.-midnight. Tuesdays-Thursdays & Sundays; 11 a.m.-1 a.m. Fridays & Saturdays
Prices: Starters $3.99-$5.99; entrees and thali sets $7.99-$14.99; milk tea $1.99
Must-orders: Pan-fried momos; chicken jhol momo; chilli momos; veg or goat thali sets with regular rice or beaten rice; marinated and grilled goat sekuwa; milk tea
Reservations: First come, first served
Noise level: Quiet to moderate
Parking: Ample lot adjacent
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.
This is very much a starter project, without the pacing and amenities of more polished, better-capitalized restaurants. It’s an adventure. A charming one, in my opinion, with a warm welcome from co-owner Sajani Prajapati and the tiny team of staff, which includes her boyfriend, Ashesh Rai, a chef who wears a jaunty ninja headband when he emerges from the kitchen.
You may not find every item on the six-page menu, newly minted with helpful photos, available when you visit. (One of my dining companions was relieved to hear that the stir-fried goat offal I had set my heart on was not being served on a recent evening. “No intestines today,” reported the cheerful young woman who was running the floor.)
There’s mint lemonade and delicious black-peppered, cardamom-scented milk tea and sodas, but until the liquor license comes through, it’s BYOB.
The décor is modest but clever, with robin’s-egg-blue walls rising to a stupa-shaped dome set into the ceiling, its rim edged in prayer flags and its bowl lit by revolving colored lights, which can make those Instagram moments a challenge.
The flavors pretty much rock. Nepali cooking incorporates some elements of Indian and Chinese cuisines in a way that is distinctive, very much itself. Chinese-style stir-fries and surges of tongue-numbing Sichuan peppercorn coexist with currylike stews and brothy dals. High-altitude considerations make themselves felt with lots of potato dishes and buckwheat, pounded into a paste that’s eaten like the African fufu. And although some of the spicing has a familiar Indo-Pakistani feel, it’s easier to pick out individual flavors in the Nepali cuisine at Momo House: the twinge of mint or fenugreek here, the edge of black pepper or mellow bloom of sesame there.
Just try the dynamic Nepali chicken wings, and you’ll see what I mean. The wings — which are not on the menu but always seem to be available — come daubed with a dark, sticky paste that is salty and sour, atingle with Sichuan peppercorns and a bit of red chile. They’re alive, and so are you when you’re eating them.
Same goes for the manic Chilli Momos, in which the house dumplings are pan-fried with onions, peppers and a vivid red sauce whose stealth ingredient is … wait for it … ketchup. It’s unreasonably good — or at least it was the first time I tried it, at a midweek lunch when the dumplings had been gently pan-fried so that they were crisp without losing the supple quality of their wrappers. (On a second occasion, at dinner, they had been fried to leathery distraction. We ate them all anyway.)
Perhaps my favorite way to eat momos here is simply pan-fried, like potstickers. You dip them into a light, lilting sauce with an unexpected base of puréed eggplant, thinned out with tomato and garlic and a bit of sesame oil. There’s another, redder sauce on the side, and be warned: It’s incendiary enough to interest your competitive “who can eat the hottest?” friends.
Momo House doesn’t make its own momo wrappers, which may put off purists expecting a floofier pouf to their dumplings, but the thin rice paper it uses is beautifully crimped and satisfying, and the minced-in-house chicken filling has an excellent fluff factor.
In Nepal, Prajapati told us, water buffalo might fill the momos. Goat is another frequently used meat there, and Momo House does a lively kebab-like dish of marinated and grilled goat called goat sekuwa, with a tart chile-and-ginger snap to its seasoning. There’s a lime wedge for squeezing, and a side of the fascinating beaten rice that’s central to many Nepali meals. The flattened grains smash out to resemble oatmeal flakes, and they have a gratifying crackle and crunch to them, so that to an American palate, they read as snacky and fun.
In Nepal, the beaten rice is eaten with all sorts of stews and stir-fries and meats. My colleague St. John Barned-Smith, who has spent months in Nepal, demonstrated proper beaten-rice technique to me at a couple of lunches, pinching up handfuls and swirling them through the various dishes on a generous thali tray, arrayed with interesting vegetables and a bit of spicy goat curry.
Nepalis eat with their hands, a pleasant custom for somebody like yours truly, who likes to be in contact with her food. I may never achieve St. John’s technique, but I love tearing through a thali tray here every which way, grabbing some thin batons of fried potato flecked with cumin seeds here, or a piercing baton of radish or gingerroot pickle there, chasing it all with a sip of the gentle, soupy lentils called dal.
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The dishes on the thalis at Momo House change daily, so they’re like a surprise box. I loved one day’s cool potato salad, brightly seasoned and percolating with heat. Another visit produced a dusky minced spinach stir-fry that set off the spicier dishes. You might get a zippy tumble of eggplant or a pleasantly bitter scramble of dark Chinese greens.
It would be nice to report that the cooking is consistent across all these dishes, and in my daytime visits, it mostly was. At dinnertime, though, those formerly delightful skinny fried potatoes (aka “Nepali fries”) were listless and oil-soaked, the dal blander than before and the chilli momos grievously overfried.
The Nepali milk tea, with its cardamom scent and faint sweetness, was as good as ever, though, as was the welcome and helpfulness of the staff. As the evening wore on, trios and couples of stylish young South Asians drifted in for a late meal. Momo House is already a gathering place for the owners’ Nepali friends and countrymen.
And it’s already a promising “must-visit” for adventurous Houstonians of all sorts. As for me, I’ll keep going back for my momo fix, and in the hope of finally scoring one of the Newari thalis St. John and I kept trying to order.
Newari cuisine is a subset of Nepali cooking native to the Newar people of the Katmandu Valley, where the rich alluvial soils yield a more elaborate range of ingredients. But the Newari thali promised one afternoon eluded us when one of the owners confessed, quite charmingly, that she’d overslept that morning.
A few weeks later, the Newari thali had popped up on the new laminated picto-menus, but alas, it was not on offer that day.
I’ll get it yet.
alison.cook@chron.com
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https://www.houstonchronicle.com/entertainment/restaurants-bars/reviews/article/Restaurant-review-Momo-House-on-Hillcroft-14912317.php 2019-12-17 14:00:00Z
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