Ling & Javier
Jack Tyler
today's Chronicle (Friday 2/22).
Albert Nurick
news:a56cps$im4$1...@slb0.atl.mindspring.net...
> For a good belly laugh... catch Alison Cook's review on this place in
> today's Chronicle (Friday 2/22).
LOL! L&J was on our list to check out, but perhaps we'll just stop by
for dessert and the sideshow.
--
Albert Nurick
alb...@nurick.com
Joanna Crawford
sticks a pin in the balloons of pretentiousness.
Jo
Jack Tyler wrote:
> For a good belly laugh... catch Alison Cook's review on this place in
> today's Chronicle (Friday 2/22).
--
Joanna F. Crawford
Northwest Community UU Church
Affirming "A Free and Responsible
Search for Truth and Meaning"
http://nwcuuc.org
kerr
news:a56cps$im4$1...@slb0.atl.mindspring.net...
> today's Chronicle (Friday 2/22).
>
Here's R.Walsh's review of Ling/Javier from the Feb-7 Houston Press.
Kerr.
http://www.houstonpress.com/issues/2002-02-07/cafe.html/1/index.html
Jeremy Goodwin
even get the weekday editions, how about a quick
synopsis?
JJ
RAMBLER32
Click Here: <A
HREF="http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/story.hts/dining/1264014">HoustonChronic
le.com</A>
or copy and paste in browser
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/story.hts/dining/1264014
Kelly Younger
WOW! Between Walsh and Cook, they may as well shut the doors on that joint. I wonder if "beautiful
people" who frequent the place can read.
--
Kelly Younger
Albert Nurick
news:BXCd8.11398$6j2.7...@typhoon.austin.rr.com...
Wow. I wonder how long before the "concept" gets a bit of
adjustment?
--
Albert Nurick
alb...@nurick.com
Not Me
I looked at Inside Houston magazine at Super Stand today. It had a
fawning review of Ling & Javier. I tend to trust the Press and Chron
reviews on this one.
Jack Tyler
"Jeremy Goodwin" <jer...@dcnet2000.com> wrote in message
news:3C770A67...@dcnet2000.com...
"I know it seems silly," smiled the sleek young hostess at Ling & Javier,
the restaurant at the sleeker-than-thou Hotel Derek.
She had hesitantly approached the high-style picnic table where two friends
and I sat convulsed with laughter over what I have come to think of -- with
perverse fondness -- as The Bread Incident. It started with a bowl of
mussels: rather nice ones, moored in a chile-spiked soy bath that triumphed
over its sugar content. The mussels were so superior to our other first
course, a pitiful tribe of popcorn-grade shrimp in a way-salty garlic
butter, that we began using the shrimp's lonely slice of toasted Cuban bread
to sop up the mussel juices.
"Can we have some more bread?" we beseeched a waiter, who looked as if he
had teleported in from Miami Beach.
"We don't serve bread," he told us in a tone both apologetic and pitying.
"Sure you do," protested my friend, pointing at the remaining crumb of Cuban
toast.
"Only with the shrimp," said the waiter firmly.
But of course! Bread ... how plebeian. How unstylish. How fattening. Ling &
Javier wasn't cutting costs. Ling & Javier was making a statement.
We cracked up, noisily enough to be heard above the hypnotic throbs
emanating from the nearby sound table, where a grimly serious DJ passed his
hands over a vast array of electronica.
"It was worth coming just for that moment," I managed to gasp eventually.
And that is the spirit in which one should visit this maddening,
inconsistent and vastly entertaining restaurant. If you approach Ling &
Javier in hopes of fine, cutting-edge dining (which is how they have
positioned the place), you are likely to go away disappointed or outright
indignant, not to mention a good deal poorer. But if you approach the
restaurant as you would a Molière bedroom farce, or a hefty new Tom Wolfe
novel, you are likely to depart with enough anecdotes to dine out on for a
month.
The trick is to dodge the menu's culinary bullets by sticking to a few safe
choices (more on those presently), or to just come for a drink or one of the
terrific desserts. If you can grab a sofa across from the bar's long and
sinuous curve, it's just like sitting in the restaurant, anyway: The two
wide-open, minimalist spaces mesh in the room's midsection, the better to
give everybody a good look at everybody else. There is a rear dining
section, but I have yet to see a soul sitting there. Why come to eat pricey,
dicey food if you can't see the floor show?
And what a floor show it is. Toward 10 p.m., the gilded not-quite-youths of
Houston's fashion/beauty/retail/PR axis start filtering in, schmoozing and
cooing and complimenting each others' latest haircuts. A striking young man
with 2-foot dreadlocks and Prada tailoring cuts a swath through the room,
glad-handing the DJ, drawing the cutest of the waitresses like flies,
trailing a swarm of bespectacled acolytes in his wake. A well-divorced
socialite air-kisses a duo of hair stylists who are got-up to resemble baby
software moguls. With her, fresh from Tootsie's (you can hear the names drop
halfway across the room), is a tall, wolfhound-lean blonde costumed like the
schoolgirl from hell: plaid kilt up to there, black suede over-the-knee
boots, crisp white shirt with its collar rising up from the blazer just so.
Huddled on a sofa, a quartet of pretty young people swap Valentine's gifts
stashed in Saks Fifth Avenue bags. A waitress affecting a look midway
between Britney and Buffy takes their order; around her waist is strapped a
bulky black notebook-holder that might come in handy for special ops in
Kandahar.
In the duskily lit room, hand-held computer screens flare up with a greeny
glow and wink out again. Settled uneasily on a raft of banquettes in the
corner, a group of conventioneers checks out the scene, no doubt wondering
when the models will arrive. At the bar, a leather-clad woman attempts to
sip a glass of champagne -- but it's not easy when the stodgily thick rim of
the tall, cylindrical tube Ling & Javier insists on using keeps bumping her
expensively made-up nose.
The food? Oh, that. Like everything else here, it's more a matter of form
than function. The menu, which is laid out to look like an invitation to a
charity ball, is divided between Chinese and Cuban offerings. As in Ling &
Javier. As in New York City's famous Cuban-Chinese spots. Or -- more to the
point -- as in boutique hotelier Ian Schrager's Asia de Cuba restaurant
empire, which has spread from Manhattan to L.A. to San Francisco and shows
no signs of stopping.
Not that the pioneering Schrager owns the Hotel Derek. No, the Derek is a
rip-off of ... er, homage to, such hip, design-mad Schrager properties as
the Paramount and the Royalton in New York. Why not riff on his restaurant
concept, too?
For starters, because the riff falls flat. The kitchen here, headed by Alena
Pyles (the sister of star Dallas chef Stephan Pyles), has a tendency to
overcook expensive entree ingredients, to oversalt or oversweeten, and
occasionally to abandon seasoning altogether. Some of the high-concept
dishes are like bad jokes. Take the $32 coconut lobster with orange rum
sauce -- please! With tough lobster meat set on cloyingly sweet rice
simmered with coconut milk and laced with mango, this could be a dessert
from outer space. After a few bites, I turned to my friends and said, "This
is the worst thing I've ever eaten." Those are words that do not pass a food
critic's lips lightly.
After that, there was nowhere to go but up. To a chewily oversteamed red
snapper in a fashionable banana leaf wrap, accessorized with nutty, slightly
viscous purple rice and a nicely untamed relish of vinegary gingered
pineapple. It looked swell in its bamboo steamer, but it never rose above
the sum of its parts. The wok-tossed vegetable stir fry looked pretty and
tasted like zilch.
A salad of seared scallops and bok choy astounded with its chintziness:
Served on a porcelain rectangle the size of a pencil box, it consisted of a
knob of braised bok choy, a few leaves of sweetly dressed napa cabbage, and
one solitary seared scallop sliced crosswise into four pieces. Not even a
fetching garnish of gingery fermented black beans could make amends.
One senses, here and there, germs of good ideas struggling to get out. A
Boston lettuce salad of mango, avocado and crisp jicama strips gets a
briskly sharp papaya vinaigrette that might work if it were not splashed on
with such abandon. A Cuban strip steak arrives cooked well done instead of
medium rare, and absent the advertised marinade flavors of cumin and orange,
but by golly if its mashed potatoes mixed with boniato -- a Caribbean tuber
with a denser, smoother texture than potatoes -- is not head-spinningly
seductive, the kind of thing you can't stop eating.
There is an amusing ear of corn, pooled with a hot-red-chile butter, its
trimmed husk still attached, but somehow it's hard to picture Ling &
Javier's ideal patrons risking their dry-clean-only wardrobes with such
stuff.
Among the strangenesses, I did discover a couple of definite pleasures. A
salad of sashimi-rare, sesame-crusted tuna with saffron potatoes and
asparagus twigs wore a racy dressing of creole mustard kicked up with briny
green olives. A plump, sweet-corn tamale topped with a gentle ropa vieja of
braised duck was set off by crunchy jícama and radish slivers.
And the desserts, a genre that normally fails to move me, are killers: from
an opulently sticky rice pudding infused with heady vanilla bean and molded
like some exotic flower, to an outrageous globe of soft, spiky meringue
hiding vanilla ice cream in a puddle of dark chocolate sauce. Even a new
cliché like molten chocolate cake is worthy here, escorted by espresso ice
cream; and the old-fashioned fruit dumpling emerges in an updated form, with
a poached pear beneath its pastry envelope and green tea ice cream
alongside.
The good things here, and the coolness of the expansive, pared-down room,
are enough to make me mourn Ling & Javier's missed opportunities. The
management of both restaurant and hotel had a chance to create something
specific to Houston. Instead, they created something that is sooooo
Manhattan 1999, it's rather touching. But in Houston 2002, the hipsters are
here -- at least for the moment -- and so is the show. It's delicious, all
the way out the door to the lobby, past the virtual fireplace to where
pleated lamp shades the size of the Apollo space capsule dangle in front of
the elevators, even unto the gift shop with its luminescent
rubber-and-Kryptonite Hotel Derek chess sets. Price tag? $3,500. Enough
said.
· Ling & Javier: 2525 West Loop South (at Westheimer).
Hours: Lunch, 11:30 a.m.-2:30 p.m. daily. Dinner, 5:30-11 p.m.
Sundays-Wednesdays; 5:30 p.m.-midnight Thursdays-Saturdays. Breakfast,
6:30-10:30 a.m. Mondays-Fridays; 7:30-10:30 p.m. Saturdays, Sundays.
Prices: First courses, $8-$12; salads $8-$13; entrees $16-$26; desserts $8.