Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2025 i Texas Highways Magazine

IN 1974, REAL estate developer George P. Mitchell dreamed of creating a new kind of planned community north of Houston focused on environmental stewardship. Fifty years later, nearly one-third of The Woodlands, population 120,000, is green space. As the community continues to welcome more restaurants, residents, and tourists along its scenic waterways, the steady hum of activity is tempered by the tranquility of thick forests and 151 parks. “Over this 50-year history, this dream and vision Mitchell had for a better hometown has come to fruition because of the work of thousands of people,” says Visit The Woodlands president Nick Wolda, who has helped shape and promote the area for over 25 years. The town might be considered a trailblazer in terms of environmental placemaking, but with the spread of…

SMART APP As supply and demand for crawfish ebbs and flows throughout the year, so too do wholesale and restaurant costs. To help navigate that fickle field, Baton Rouge natives Ryan and Laney King created a tool that helps diners find the best deals in their respective areas. Launched in 2017, The Crawfish App includes live updates on prices—something that is especially helpful at the beginning of the season when short-ages and sky-high demand can lead to sticker shock. shop.thecrawfishapp.com 88 BOILING CRAWFISH & SEAFOOD Thai meets Cajun at this compact Westchase spot where crawfish can be found bobbing in glistening fried rice and plastic-lined buckets. But the notorious spring crowds cramming into the nauticalthemed dining room key you in to the real draw: a messy yet satisfying adventure in…

THE AROMA OF garlic, onions, and lemon wafts outside a grand building with pagoda eaves in Southeast Houston. It’s a Friday evening in April at the Vietnamese Martyrs Church, and more than a dozen people toil over large, bubbling boil pots at the church’s annual crawfish festival. A messy, wet nap-reliant tradition since 2002, the event has grown from a respectable 5,000-person crowd to this year’s massive gathering, where nearly 15,000 attendees will consume more than 22,000 pounds of crawfish over a span of three days. Digging into plastic bags dusky with seasoning, the crowd happily cracks and claws at Viet-Cajun crawfish, a style that combines Cajun spices with Southeast Asian flavors. “After we cook, we dump it out on a big pan,” says festival organizer Tinh Trinh, describing the…

Ed Poullard is widely regarded as one of the most significant fiddlers and accordionists playing traditional Creole music. He also builds 10-note diatonic accordions by hand at his shop about a mile down the highway from Spindletop, the nation’s first oil gusher, in a marsh south of Beaumont. He plays in a traditional Cajun-Creole acoustic jam session the first and third Thursday of each month at the American Legion Post 922 in Nederland. Poullard: “This area all the way from here to Houston is a carbon copy of Southwestern Louisiana, from the marshes and low-lying areas to the culture and food, because so many people migrated here from Louisiana during the oil-boom days. My whole family moved here from Eunice, Louisiana, when I was 9 months old. I learned to…

A PIECE OF IDIOSYNCRATIC folk art draws tourists to Houston’s Rice Military neighborhood. Situated among modern townhomes and apartments, a 1940 three-bedroom bungalow known as the Beer Can House is a recycler’s paradise. An estimated 50,000 weather-worn beer cans adorn its facade and dangle in garlands throughout the property. The distinctive embellishments appeared in the late ’60s when John Milkovisch, an upholsterer for Southern Pacific Railroad, laid concrete grounds and reshaped aluminum cans for the exterior. “He had no idea that people would drive from all around the country or even from all over the city to see his house,” says Jonathan Beitler, former chief operating officer of the Orange Show Center for Visionary Art, which manages the property. A tour of the silver-hued interior contains a noticeable lack of…

ASK HOUSTON-BASED CHEF Chris Shepherd what he loves most about the city’s dining scene, and he answers without hesitation: “Diversity. I love that everybody can grow here.” Shepherd has done plenty of his own growing in the Bayou City. After trying college in his home state of Oklahoma—“I might be the only person you’ve ever met who got kicked out of Tulsa Junior College because I’d rather play pingpong than go to biology,” he says—he moved to Houston in 1995 and enrolled in the culinary program at the Art Institute. Post-graduation, he landed a job at iconic eatery Brennan’s and quickly ascended the ranks of Houston’s dining industry. In 2012, he launched his own restaurant, Underbelly, and received the James Beard Award for best chef in the Southwest only two…

THE MURKY BOTTOM of a Sour Lake rice field tugs on Jake Tortorice’s waterproof boots as he travels from one wire trap to the next. Maneuvering a small push boat—what resembles a buoyant shopping cart—he inspects wriggling crawfish for size and health. Only the finest specimens will make their way into plastic pails and depart this area of Beaumont in 35-pound sacks, bound for restaurants and backyard boils within a 100-mile radius. Tortorice runs this farm, but harvesting crawfish is a relatively new addition to the third-generation family business. Initially focused on traditional agriculture, the farm’s trajectory changed around eight years ago when, motivated by his wife’s passion for the delicacy, he ventured into the crawfish side of things. In south-central Louisiana, the crustaceans live and are farmed in natural…

At dawn, Shannon Tompkins backs his fishing boat into the lower Trinity River, where the water nears its meandering end and spreads into a maze of marshes, swamps, bayous, canals, old river channels, and hidden lakes. “We’re on the edge of the coastal marsh, probably a few miles from Trinity Bay, but we’re going up the river to the largest cypress swamp remaining in Texas,” says Tompkins, a prominent nature writer. “We’ll do some fishing and see what we can see.” Alligators lazily make way for Tompkins’ boat as he courses beneath Interstate 10, a mere 40 miles east of Houston. The coastal marshes quickly give way to bald cypresses, their knobby knees defining the river’s edge. “Within a hundred miles of us are 7 million people,” he says. “Thank…

ON ANY GIVEN Thursday morning, Houston pitmaster and chef Greg Gatlin is standing over a pot of boiling water. To his side are plates of piping hot chargrilled oysters blanketed with garlic butter imbued with Asian herbs like lemongrass and basil. As a waiter grabs the plates to serve to guests, Gatlin returns to the pot, adding in diced onions, garlic, celery, bell pepper, and gizzards. The chef waits patiently as the innards are pressure cooked for optimal tenderization, absorbing the essence of the aromatics. The result is a familiar flavor profile that’ll pair well with a subsequent buttermilk brine, breading, and side of house-made ranch dressing. “Those are nostalgic kinds of things—the kinds of things we ate growing up,” Gatlin says. The food of his youth is the foundation of…

It’s All a Facade I enjoyed your Small Towns feature on Canyon [“For Old Time’s Sake,” Jan/Feb], so much so that I want to fill in a little detail about the Randall County Courthouse. I lived in Amarillo for 23 years, and I watched the fight over how to restore the structure built in 1909. The county applied for a historic preservation grant, which provided enough money to restore the courthouse exterior to its original glory. The interior? Nothing was done to it. It remains empty to this day. However, the Canyon square has flourished as businesses have moved in, giving the square a lovely ambience. The courthouse’s functions, mean-while, have been shipped to other locations in Canyon. And, yes, the clock tower keeps perfect time. JOHN KANELIS, PRINCETON A…

IN THE OPULENT CONFINES of his office in Southwest Houston, Johnny Dang reclines in a plush leather chair. Known as the King of Bling, the longtime jeweler-tothe-stars is surrounded by ornate décor and a gold-plated moneycounting machine. Suddenly, an employee barges in with a patron who’s made the final payment on a gem-encrusted grill. Dang leaps into action for a quick hype video filmed on the customer’s iPhone. “Who else has this?” he boasts. If you’ve seen a celebrity flash a smile brimming with diamonds, there’s a good chance the mouthpiece was created by Dang. The jeweler has fashioned oral accessories for everyone from Shaquille O’Neal to Snoop Dogg. But his illustrious career started five decades ago in the Vietnamese village of Buôn Ma Thuôt. Born in 1973, Dang grew…

I TOOK MY 7-YEAR-OLD SON on a fishing expedition along the Texas coast with the help of an experienced guide on New Year’s Day 2024. We had lived in the state for a couple of years, in landlocked College Station, and I didn’t want him to forget what life was like on the rural coast of North Carolina, where my family comes from. We were told Matagorda Bay offered prime saltwater fishing opportunities. That was an understatement. Our captain, Charlie Paradoski, steered his bay boat into the Intracoastal Waterway and under the Matagorda Bridge. When he realized we were comfortable on the boat, he sped up gradually to around 45 mph. The temperature was in the 50s as we flew down the waterway, fog hanging here and there. After about…

Recommended Equipment Propane burner (minimum 100,000 BTUs)Propane tankCooking pot (120-quart holds one sack of crawfish, averaging 35 pounds)PaddleHeat-resistant gloves70-quart crawfish washer bucket, such as Cowboy’s brand out of Missouri CityHeat-resistant bags for optional add-insScoopCrawfish traysPaper towelsBibsWet wipes Optional add-ins PotatoesAndouille sausageCornMushroomsBrussels sproutsShrimpEggs STEP 1 Select the appropriate amount of crawfish for your boil. Most hosts recommend an average of 3 pounds per guest. This may fluctuate based on several factors, including other sides and proteins available. Bring a cooler and ice to take the live crawfish home from your pickup location. STEP 2 Rinse your crawfish to avoid cooking them in swamp water and dirt (unless you purchase them already purged). Keep rinsing until the water runs clear. STEP 3 Fill the pot with water. Bring it to 212 degrees…

The morning air slows you down in the marshlands near Beaumont. It’s heavy here, like wading through soup. Fog coats the earth and renders the sun a vague notion, the horizon merely hinting at trees in the hazy distance. Mosquitoes buzz. Alligators lurk. The word “dew,” with its implication of droplets of water, fails miserably to describe the flood of condensation weighing down every blade of grass. Underfoot, even seemingly solid ground is suspiciously squishy. That’s my impression from one truncated stroll through a marsh there late last summer. Better known for petrochemical refineries than for nature hikes, the far southeastern corner of the state is often overlooked during conversations about natural beauty and iconic landscapes in Texas. But wonders abound if you know where to look, from the cathedral-esque…

On a bright, hot afternoon at the Cattail Marsh, 900 acres of public wetlands on the swampy outskirts of Beaumont, Cathy Spence bumps into fellow photographer Kenyan Guidry. “What’s happened to the eagles since the tree died?” Spence asks. For 15 years, a family of bald eagles made its winter home in a nest atop a lone pine tree on the edge of the marsh. The pine, now brown and bare, didn’t survive the summer drought. “The nest is still there,” assures Guidry, who works double duty as the nature tourism coordinator at the marsh and as a photographer for the Beaumont Convention & Visitors Bureau. “We plan on the eagles coming right back here,” he says. “If they want to start a new nest, we’ll just have to find…

THE FIRST PHYSICAL cue of David Skinner’s playfulness are his silvered eyebrows that curl up in a central zenith. As he sidles up to our table, the Choctaw chef arches them jauntily while pouring dry ice over a circle of stones with a seashell balanced on top, all culinary accents cradling his version of Three Sisters. The Cherokee dish of corn, beans, and squash—crops Indigenous tribes grew together—is typically served as a soup or succotash. But Skinner finds that “boring.” At Ishtia, his modern Native American restaurant that opened last June in Kemah, his interpretation of the dish involves a fresh Maine diver scallop wreathed by shredded acorn, spaghetti, and zucchini squashes; droplets of black tepary bean gel; and rich corn butter. It’s one example of Skinner’s mission to present…

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