On a sweltering summer time Monday in midtown Houston, chef Chris Williams turned up the warmth for a recipe-testing session at his new restaurant, Late August. It’s an ethereal house with banquettes swathed in cobalt blue velvet, in an Art Deco constructing that, till 2018, was a Sears division retailer. In 2021 town and Rice University repurposed the location as a enterprise incubator and group occasions house, a part of a joint venture to develop a know-how park dubbed the Ion District.
Williams, a Black born-and-raised Houstonian who opened Late August final yr, has developed a culturally kaleidoscopic menu with an array of collaborators. Sergio Hidalgo, the restaurant’s government chef, created a Mexican American–impressed fry bread, a common dish in his dwelling state of Arizona, utilizing a recipe for yeast rolls devised by Williams’s great-grandmother Lucille B. Smith, one of many state’s first distinguished African American businesswomen. (She invented a pre-Pillsbury immediate hot-roll combine.) The cooks may garnish the bread with mole butter or benne seeds, a sesame introduced to the United States by enslaved Africans. Williams additionally teamed up with a cousin he’d by no means met, Jennifer Parsons, a Florida-born and Guadeloupe-raised pastry chef who was till not too long ago primarily based in Taiwan, after assembly her father at a funeral final winter. Williams quickly invited Parsons to work with him in Houston, the place 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 mix of African American and Mexican American cooking by means of Texas, the place Williams’s household goes again 190 years. He has pursued a comparable imaginative and prescient at Lucille’s, his flagship restaurant in Houston’s Museum District, the place dishes like oxtail tamales and barbeque with nuoc mam French dressing carry international influences to Southern cooking. “Fusion cuisine,” one may argue, is just “cuisine” on this astoundingly numerous metropolis of two.3 million, practically half of whose residents determine as Hispanic or Latino, a quarter as Black, a quarter as white, and seven% as Asian.