Houston Was About the Rockets Game, But Viet-Cajun Crawfish Stole the Trip

Viet-Cajun crawfish, a Houston specialty

Get: A pound of shrimp in Viet Cajun sauce, corn, a smoked sausage, and cheesy oysters

Our first real proof that Houston's Vietnamese food is on another level from LA: a lemon-pepper Cajun sauce that's definitely Cajun and definitely Viet at the same time, garlicky and limey with real lemongrass notes we said we hadn't tasted in LA's Viet-Cajun spots. The corn alone, at $1, was some of the sweetest we've had, and the whole dinner for two, shrimp, corn, sausage, and cheesy oysters, came to $47.63 before tax and tip.

Vietnamese-French beignets

Get: A powdered-sugar beignet

A direct legacy of French colonization showing up on a plate: beignets became popular in Vietnam because of the French, and this order came out hot, crispy outside and soft inside, closer to funnel cake than we expected. Honestly we wished it came in a smaller size, but crispy-outside-soft-inside is how all good fried things should be.

Vietnamese coffee, drive-thru

Get: A milk coffee ($5.25)

A convenient drive-thru Vietnamese coffee stop on a rainy day; the milk coffee wasn't quite as strong as we'd have liked, but still good, and they've got pasta on the menu too if you look them up on Yelp.

Vietnamese-Texan bakery, downtown

Get: The beef pho kolache, their famous item, with sriracha and hoisin

Worth the drive back downtown specifically for this: a soft, fluffy kolache (a Texas-Czech pastry) stuffed with tender beef and finished with sriracha and hoisin. It doesn't actually taste like beef pho, but it totally slaps anyway, and the pastry work here is genuinely excellent.

Vietnamese noodle soup and garlic noodles

Get: Banh suong ba ky (a shrimp-paste noodle soup) and Vietnamese garlic noodles

A clear-broth, shrimp-forward soup with huge shrimp-paste balls and round rice noodles, simple and nourishing enough that we said we needed to find something like it back in the San Gabriel Valley. We also finally got our garlic noodles here: buttery, garlicky, a little citrusy, and a good excuse to explain that the dish was actually invented in San Francisco in the 1970s by chef Helene An, inspired by an Italian chili-olive-oil noodle she'd had there.

Asian-fusion Texas barbecue

Get: Beef brisket fried rice, black pepper sausage, and a beef belly banh mi with pho rub

The Hakeem Olajuwon-inspired mural on the wall should tell you this is a Houston institution. The beef brisket fried rice, rendered beef fat and all, was so good we said we could barely properly enjoy the actual brisket after it; the black pepper sausage ($5) was hard with a snap and genuinely peppery; and the banh mi, built on a beef belly rubbed with pho spices like star anise and cinnamon, might be our favorite banh mi we've ever had.

Arena food, Rockets game

Get: The H-town dog, loaded with brisket and crispy onions

Arena #19 on our quest. The H-town dog's crispy onion topping was genuinely break-your-teeth crispy, but a hot dog and a bottled water ran us $25, which is Houston's own version of arena markup. There's also a carving station inside the arena, which felt like a very Texas touch.