Image
  • Writing
    • Andy Gavin: Author
    • About my Novels & Writing
    • All Writing Posts
    • The Darkening Dream
      • Buy the Book Online
      • Sample Chapters
      • Reviews
      • Info for Reviewers
      • Press Coverage
      • Awards
      • Cast of Characters
    • Untimed
      • Buy Untimed Online
      • Book Trailer
      • Sample Chapters
      • Reviews
      • Info for Reviewers
      • Press Coverage
      • Awards
      • Cast of Characters
    • Scrivener – Writer’s Word Processor
    • iPad for Writers
    • Naughty Dark Contest
  • Books
    • Book Review Index
    • Favorite Fantasy Novels
    • Andy Gavin: Author
    • The Darkening Dream
      • Buy the Book Online
      • Sample Chapters
      • Short Story: Harvard Divinity
      • Reviews
      • Info for Reviewers
      • Press Coverage
      • Awards
      • Cast of Characters
    • Untimed
      • About the Book
      • Buy Untimed Online
      • Book Trailer
      • Sample Chapters
      • Reviews
      • Info for Reviewers
      • Press Coverage
      • Awards
      • Cast of Characters
    • Naughty Dark Contest
  • Games
    • My Video Game Career
    • Post Archive by Series
    • All Games Posts Inline
    • Making Crash Bandicoot
    • Crash 15th Anniversary Memories
    • World of Warcraft Endgames
    • Getting a Job Designing Video Games
    • Getting a Job Programming Video Games
    • Naughty Dark Contest
  • Movies
    • Movie Review Index
  • Television
    • TV Review Index
    • Buffy the Vampire Slayer
    • A Game of Thrones
  • Food
    • Food Review Index
    • Foodie Club
    • Hedonists
    • LA Sushi Index
    • Chinese Food Index
    • LA Peking Duck Guide
    • Eating Italy
    • Eating France
    • Eating Spain
    • Eating Croatia
    • Eating Vietnam
    • Eating Australia
    • Eating Israel
    • Ultimate Pizza
    • ThanksGavin
    • Margarita Mix
    • Foodie Photography
    • Burgundy Vintage Chart
  • Other
    • All Posts, Magazine Style
    • Archive of all Posts
    • Fiction
    • Technology
    • History
    • Anything Else
  • Gallery
  • Bio
  • About
    • About me
    • About my Writing
    • About my Video Games
    • Ask Me Anything
  • Contact

Archive for Texas

Eating Houston – Bombay Pizza

Jul30

Restaurant: Bombay Pizza Co.

Location:914 S Main St #105, Houston, TX 77002. (713) 654-4444

Date: June 15, 2018

Cuisine: Pizza and Indian!?!

Rating: Not bad

_

One of my son’s math contests brought us to Texas and so I returned to Houston for the first time in 25 years.


This was next to our hotel and I was intrigued by the name/concept and had to try it.

Looks like a pizza parlor.


The menu features normal pizzas, slightly Indian ones, and kati rolls.

Fries.

Cheese pizza. My wife liked it.

Tandoori Chicken Kati Roll. Basically a CTM burrito (with naan). Not as good as the smaller, plated, Akbar version, but still pretty tasty. A touch dry.

Tandoori Masala Shrimp Kati Roll. Not bad either, particularly with the mint chutney.

I wish I had had time to try one of the more interesting pizzas, like “Gateway of India” or something. I’ve long argued with some of my Indian restauranteur friends that they should make naan based pizzas with curry toppings. These aren’t naan on the pizzas though.

For more Texas dining reviews click here.

Related posts:

  1. Eating Houston – Tony Mandola’s
  2. Eating Houston – Brennan’s
  3. Ultimate Pizza – Day 3
  4. Ultimate Pizza 2012
  5. Ultimate Pizza in Review
By: agavin
Comments (0)
Posted in: Food
Tagged as: Bombay Pizza Co., Eating Houston, Eating Texas, Houston, Pizza, Texas

Eating Houston – Brennan’s

Jul26

Restaurant: Brennan’s of Houston

Location: 6692, 3300 Smith St, Houston, TX 77006.  (713) 522-9711

Date: June 14, 2018

Cuisine: Creol

Rating: Fancy tasty!

_

One of my son’s math contests brought us to Texas and so I returned to Houston for the first time in 25 years.


The second place my dad recommended was even older school than the first, having been open since the 70s and located in a lovely (by Houston standards) brick and tree neighborhood.

The inside was attractive, formal, and up to date except for the cove lighting.

The menu.

Garlic bread, of course.

They had some real wine on the list: 2014 Francois Carillon Puligny-Montrachet. BH 91. The slightly curious nose mixes reduction and floral aromas. On the plus side there is an excellent sense of underlying tension and detail to the utterly delicious medium-bodied flavors that possess a caressing mouth feel, all wrapped in a sleek, focused, complex and well-balanced finale. Note that this classy villages is well worth your interest and it should also drink well early.

My son didn’t order a first course but they brought him this berries and cream on the house!

House salad.

Fried Green Tomato Ravigote. Jumbo Lump Blue Crab Ravigote, Over a Citrus Reduction, Topped with Fresh Shaved Serrano & Garlic Chips. I don’t even like tomatoes but the waiter recommended this and it turned out to be fabulous. The crispy fried tomatoes, soft perfect crab, and the intriguing crunch/punch of the pickles all meshed perfectly. Great sweet/sour/savory combo.

Gulf Fish Pontchartrain. Jumbo Lump Crab, J&J Shrimp, Crispy Louisiana Oysters, Parmesan Mushroom Rice, and Brennan’s Creole Butter. Here it is again, fish with the “works” on top. Hard to go wrong friend and piled with all that goodness.

Pecan Crusted Speckled Trout. Lemon Scented Crushed Corn, Pickled Onion, and Hericot Vert Salad, Spiced Pecans with a Creole Meuniere Saucer.

The dessert menu.

Vanilla ice cream.

Pecan Pie again. My wife liked Tony Mandola’s slightly better, but this was still good.


Lemon Meringue Pie with blueberry coulis. Classic again, and delicious. Perfectly textured and balanced.

They have grab all you can Pecan Pralines at the door. I took A LOT and developed a rather extreme sugar hangover back at the hotel — so good!

Brennan’s had awesome service. Our waiter was superb. It really had a classy old school charm. Genteel and refined. Food was great too, particularly that crab and fried tomato appetizer.

For more Texas dining reviews click here.

Related posts:

  1. Eating Houston – Tony Mandola’s
  2. Eating Rome – Roscioli
  3. Eating Maryland – Tidewater Grille
  4. Eating d’Agliano – La Quercia
  5. Eating San Sebastian – Zuberoa
By: agavin
Comments (0)
Posted in: Food
Tagged as: Brennan's, Brennan's of Houston, Creol, Eating Houston, Eating Texas, Houston, Texas

Eating Houston – Tony Mandola’s

Jul24

Restaurant: Tony Mandola’s

Location: 1212 Waugh Dr, Houston, TX 77019. (713) 528-3474

Date: June 13, 2018

Cuisine: Creol

Rating: Old School but tasty!

_

One of my son’s math contests brought us to Texas and so I returned to Houston for the first time in 25 years.

My dad, who used to travel frequently to Houston for work, sent us to a few of his (old) favorites.

Tony Mandola’s had been around since well back into the 80s. It’s rocking that Houston feel.

And a somewhat dated interior, the heavy solid white plates, heavy glass stemware, and all that.



The menu, however, is full of creol goodness, which we don’t get a lot of in Southern California.

Not my usual fare.

And a glass of rose “champagne.”
Garlic bread.

Here the butter and garlic are inside — what’s not to love?

Oysters Domenico. Grilled oysters with bacon and sun-dried tomato butter. Bright tasting, salty, and delicious. Like pizza oysters!

Mama’s Gumbo. Mama Mandola’s seafood gumbo recipe served with rice. Had to try some classics. Nice.

Buttered pasta for the boy.

In Texas, even side Caesar salads come with bacon by default!

Salmon Sophia. Grilled salmon steak topped with jumbo lump crab meat and avocado dill relish (minus the crab in this photo).

Texas Red Fish Pontchartrain. Fresh red fish filet topped with rich brown butter Madeira wine sauce with crab, shrimp, and mushrooms. Good stuff and classically creol!

The dessert menu.

Vanilla ice cream.

Pecan pie! My wife loved it.

Coconut Creme Pie. This was one of the best coconut cream pies I’ve had since the Babalu bakery went out of business. I love coconut cream pie. sigh.

Tony Mandola’s felt a little 80’s Texas, and the plating isn’t the most elegant ever, but the food has held up well. Some very tasty stuff — with butter and crab and bacon on top!

For more Texas dining reviews click here.

Related posts:

  1. Quick Eats: Taverna Tony
  2. Tony Terroni
  3. Eating Majorca – Forn De Sant Joan
  4. Blue Plate Oysterette
  5. Eating Hanoi – Green Tangerine
By: agavin
Comments (0)
Posted in: Food
Tagged as: Creol, Eating Houston, Eating Texas, Houston, Texas, Travel

Western Smoke House Meats

Nov17

Restaurant: Western Smoke House

Location: 10640 Woodbine St. Los Angeles, CA 90034. (310) 837-3544

Date: November 12, 2011

Cuisine: BBQ

Rating: Solid Texas BBQ

_

This time of year we have a lot of birthday parties to go to (my son is three). Due to rain (drizzle) one got moved to this western (Texas) style BBQ joint! Boy, is that a lot better than luke-warm delivery pizza!

The unassuming Palms frontage, literally across the street from the amazing N/Naka.


The menu.


Lemonade (sweet but real, not packaged) came in jars! Moonshine style!


The decor is full-on Lonestar State.


Slaw.


Potato salad.


Cornbread, one of my secret weaknesses.


Greens, in case you get stopped up.


Chips for the kids.


Likewise with the chicken fingers.


Brisket! I love good BBQ brisket, and this was good.


BBQ chicken. This was tender and very smokey. Not the heavily sauced style, but just nicely smoked.


Sweetish and tasty baked beans.


Some birthday cake!


And two kinds of cobbler.


I’m not sure what this is. Trifle? I didn’t get a chance to try it, but I’m actually a big fan of these custard-based old school desserts.

Not a fancy joint, but tasty. I have to go again and try the ribs. I love ribs.

For more LA dining reviews click here.

Related posts:

  1. Mark’s Duck House
  2. Food as Art: Sushi House Unico
  3. Waterloo & City
  4. Fogo de Chao – Beef!
  5. Brunch at Tavern 3D
By: agavin
Comments (6)
Posted in: Food
Tagged as: Baked beans, Barbecue, bbq, Brisket, Cake, Chicken fingers, Cooking, Corn bread, Dessert, Lonestar State, Los Angeles, Meat, Palms, Restaraunt, Restaurant Review, Smoking, Texas, Western Smoke House

Bleeding Violet

Mar24

Title: Bleeding Violet

Author: Dia Reeves

Genre: Paranormal YA

Length: 84,000 words, 454 pages

Read: March 14-20, 2011

Summary: Unique, good, and very different.

_

This is a weird weird book, and I mean that in a good way. Nominally, it’s about a schizophrenic girl, Hanna, who’s dad has died and who decides to move in unannounced with her mom she’s never met. But her mom doesn’t live in a normal town. She lives in some kind of weird place in Texas where gates between universes have let all sorts of strange monsters and realities in. A town with its own supernatural police.

The voice here is really fun. It’s first person past, but with a sort of cavalier devil-take-care crazy-girl style. I liked it. Some sentences were fantastic (both literally and figuratively). Not exactly in the lyrical kind of way that you might expect, but because of their deft wit, and quick and creative way of describing utterly fantastic goings on.

Because this book is FILLED, PACKED, STUFFED, with weird monsters and magic. Reeves uses the protagonist and POV character very deftly to explain it, or mostly just show what happens. She doesn’t feel the need to combine herself to easy concepts either. For example, sound sucking, student grabbing, invisible squids live inside the high school windows and one of the characters defeats them with a deck of playing cards! It’s a tribute to her skill that I could follow nearly all of this stuff. And it’s compact too, not being a very long book and containing dozens of strange encounters. The descriptions are lean but vivid. Occasionally she violates POV slightly on the side of clarity because the protagonist is new to this stuff and she explains it with a bit more understanding than she might be expected to have. But this isn’t very noticeable. Now I do wonder if someone with less experience reading speculative fiction in all its forms might have trouble with this novel. I mean, I’ve read A LOT (5000+ speculative novels), and played hundreds if not thousands of video games with magical systems etc. We won’t even count the movies and TV shows. Certainly someone who likes their reality… well… real, would be put off by the book. I wasn’t. The supernatural flavor was really interesting and unique, reminding me ever so slightly of something like the eerie Lost Room, or the wonderful but very out of print Marianne series by Sherri S Tepper.

The choice of using such a fractured POV character was interesting. There could be an argument that the entire book was some sort of delusion. I myself just treated Hanna’s view point as literal, and everything she saw as factual. The protagonist, and some of the other characters for that matter, don’t feel entirely real. They aren’t cardboard per se, as they feel well rounded, they just have a bit of surreal style to them that comes from their rather depressed moral compass. There’s a lot of killing and murder in this book, often horrifically grisly in fact, and no one seems to care too much. One of your best friends has been impregnated by evil demon spawn who are eating her from the inside out, well, just cut them out and leave her bleeding to die. That sort of thing. It works in the story, but if you stop and thing about the reactions any non psychopathic person might have… These characters just move on. It didn’t  really bother me in the context of this story as the narrator’s view point tends to whitewash away the consequences.

There’s also a good bit of cavalier sexuality — a welcome break from the self censorship that seems to be the norm since the 90s. Hanna is certainly open minded in that regard, and likes to take off her clothes. Unfortunately 🙂 there isn’t a lot of detail, like most everything else in the book a lot is left to the imagination. This is also part of the trend. To tell the truth Judy Blume’s Forever (1975) is still the most explicit teen book I can remember.

Overall, this is a great book, but it’s much more FANTASTIC than your typical paranormal. Being a fantasist, that was more than fine with me.

Related posts:

  1. Book Review: White Cat
  2. Book Review: Lost It
By: agavin
Comments (0)
Posted in: Books
Tagged as: Bleeding Violet, Book, Book Review, Book Reviews, Dia Reeves, Fiction, Forever, Judy Blume, Lost Room, Marianne, Narrative mode, Paranormal, Paranormal romance, Playing card, Protagonist, Texas, YA, Young-adult fiction
Watch the Trailer or

Buy it Online!

Buy it Online!

96 of 100 tickets!

Find Andy at:

Follow Me on Pinterest

Subscribe by email:

More posts on:



Complete Archives

Categories

  • Contests (7)
  • Fiction (404)
    • Books (113)
    • Movies (77)
    • Television (123)
    • Writing (115)
      • Darkening Dream (62)
      • Untimed (37)
  • Food (1,480)
  • Games (100)
  • History (13)
  • Technology (21)
  • Uncategorized (16)

Recent Posts

  • Robo Eats – Anarbagh
  • Fred loves N/Naka
  • Major Major Major
  • Far East – Beijing Tasty House
  • Home Sweet Spicy Home
  • Quick Eats – Bafang
  • Quick Eats – Peking Restaurant
  • Quick Eats – MK BBQ
  • Wolfing it Down
  • Big Night at Capital

Favorite Posts

  • I, Author
  • My Novels
  • The Darkening Dream
  • Sample Chapters
  • Untimed
  • Making Crash Bandicoot
  • My Gaming Career
  • Getting a job designing video games
  • Getting a job programming video games
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer
  • A Game of Thrones
  • 27 Courses of Truffles
  • Ultimate Pizza
  • Eating Italy
  • LA Sushi
  • Foodie Club

Recent Comments

Archives

  • March 2023 (8)
  • February 2023 (11)
  • January 2023 (14)
  • December 2022 (11)
  • November 2022 (13)
  • October 2022 (14)
  • September 2022 (14)
  • August 2022 (12)
  • July 2022 (9)
  • June 2022 (6)
  • May 2022 (8)
  • April 2022 (5)
  • March 2022 (4)
  • February 2022 (2)
  • January 2022 (8)
  • December 2021 (6)
  • November 2021 (6)
  • October 2021 (8)
  • September 2021 (4)
  • August 2021 (5)
  • July 2021 (2)
  • June 2021 (3)
  • January 2021 (1)
  • December 2020 (1)
  • September 2020 (1)
  • August 2020 (1)
  • April 2020 (11)
  • March 2020 (15)
  • February 2020 (13)
  • January 2020 (14)
  • December 2019 (13)
  • November 2019 (12)
  • October 2019 (14)
  • September 2019 (14)
  • August 2019 (13)
  • July 2019 (13)
  • June 2019 (14)
  • May 2019 (13)
  • April 2019 (10)
  • March 2019 (10)
  • February 2019 (11)
  • January 2019 (13)
  • December 2018 (14)
  • November 2018 (11)
  • October 2018 (15)
  • September 2018 (15)
  • August 2018 (15)
  • July 2018 (11)
  • June 2018 (14)
  • May 2018 (13)
  • April 2018 (13)
  • March 2018 (17)
  • February 2018 (12)
  • January 2018 (15)
  • December 2017 (15)
  • November 2017 (13)
  • October 2017 (16)
  • September 2017 (16)
  • August 2017 (16)
  • July 2017 (11)
  • June 2017 (13)
  • May 2017 (6)
  • March 2017 (3)
  • February 2017 (4)
  • January 2017 (7)
  • December 2016 (14)
  • November 2016 (11)
  • October 2016 (11)
  • September 2016 (12)
  • August 2016 (15)
  • July 2016 (13)
  • June 2016 (13)
  • May 2016 (13)
  • April 2016 (12)
  • March 2016 (13)
  • February 2016 (12)
  • January 2016 (13)
  • December 2015 (14)
  • November 2015 (14)
  • October 2015 (13)
  • September 2015 (13)
  • August 2015 (18)
  • July 2015 (16)
  • June 2015 (13)
  • May 2015 (13)
  • April 2015 (14)
  • March 2015 (15)
  • February 2015 (13)
  • January 2015 (13)
  • December 2014 (14)
  • November 2014 (13)
  • October 2014 (13)
  • September 2014 (12)
  • August 2014 (15)
  • July 2014 (13)
  • June 2014 (13)
  • May 2014 (14)
  • April 2014 (14)
  • March 2014 (10)
  • February 2014 (11)
  • January 2014 (13)
  • December 2013 (14)
  • November 2013 (13)
  • October 2013 (14)
  • September 2013 (12)
  • August 2013 (14)
  • July 2013 (10)
  • June 2013 (14)
  • May 2013 (14)
  • April 2013 (14)
  • March 2013 (15)
  • February 2013 (14)
  • January 2013 (13)
  • December 2012 (14)
  • November 2012 (16)
  • October 2012 (13)
  • September 2012 (14)
  • August 2012 (16)
  • July 2012 (12)
  • June 2012 (16)
  • May 2012 (21)
  • April 2012 (18)
  • March 2012 (20)
  • February 2012 (23)
  • January 2012 (31)
  • December 2011 (35)
  • November 2011 (33)
  • October 2011 (32)
  • September 2011 (29)
  • August 2011 (35)
  • July 2011 (33)
  • June 2011 (25)
  • May 2011 (31)
  • April 2011 (30)
  • March 2011 (34)
  • February 2011 (31)
  • January 2011 (33)
  • December 2010 (33)
  • November 2010 (39)
  • October 2010 (26)
All Things Andy Gavin
Copyright © 2023 All Rights Reserved
Programmed by Andy Gavin