https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/05/dining/houston-hillstone-restaurant-group.html





Tejal Rao is a critic at large for Food. She lives in Los Angeles.

  • Aug. 5, 2024

Outside Houston’s, in Pasadena, Calif., a woman in a cream-colored poplin skirt that skimmed the concrete explained the concept of a tradwife to her mother while they waited for a table. Men in perforated polo shirts scrolled on their phones. Just past the koi pond, behind gleaming kitchen windows, cooks shaped bread dough engineered for the restaurant’s relentless output of French dips.

Everyone who dines at Houston’s has their go-to order, but the French dip has a particularly devoted fan base. Here’s why: Out of the oven, the rolls are tender, light and crackling, with an unfashionably closegrained crumb. Buttered, toasted and smeared with a little mayonnaise, they’re piled with sliced roast beef almost pastel in its dawn-like rosiness.




The Houston’s in Pasadena, Calif., is crowded, even at lunchtime, when diners waiting for tables spill out onto the shady patio.Michelle McSwain for The New York Times

The slices aren’t squashed, but cling to each other so that when you dip the sandwich in a ramekin of light, slightly wine-dazed jus, the sandwich holds. It saturates neatly, going from crisp to soggy at exactly the pace you set.

Much like the Hillstone group itself — which counts several Houston’s locations among the 37 restaurants it runs across the country — the sandwich is pleasant, polished, a bit expensive and utterly generic on the surface. But you’d never mistake it for another restaurant’s version.

Timeless isn’t quite the right word for the group, though Hillstone does tend to resist trends. It isn’t nostalgic, exactly, but Hillstone appeals to one’s inner Patagonia vest. While most restaurants, particularly chains, lean hard into their own branding and mythology, Hillstone erases itself almost completely. Its steady pleasures are smooth and corporate, working hard to please everyone — and often succeeding.

When I was in high school in Atlanta, my parents chose Houston’s for a few special occasions. The combined dietary and emotional needs of my extended immigrant family at a restaurant cannot be overstated. My grandparents were particularly fussy diners, and their endless requests and brutal criticism could make me burn with embarrassment as a teenager. If things went sideways and my parents’ mood dipped, it could be hard for anyone to have a good time.



One of the Hillstone group’s quirks is its fondness for open kitchens.Michelle McSwain for The New York Times

But the food and service at Houston’s were consistently pleasant, accommodating and emphatically American. My family, still new to the country, thought that beaming servers introducing themselves by name was absurdly charming.

Unlike some of the other expensive chains in town, where so much of the actual cooking happened mysteriously behind closed doors, if it happened at all, the kitchen here was open. You could see steaks acquiring cartoonishly perfect grill marks, wine reducing for pan sauces, serious-faced expediters keeping time. Houston’s wasn’t exciting or exceptional; it was nice.

George and Carol Biel opened the first Houston’s in Nashville in 1977. Mr. Biel, who had worked for Steak and Ale as a manager and, later, a regional supervisor, dreamed of running a restaurant that would be as broadly appealing as possible. It’s a suitably plain origin story.

In the decades since, chefs and restaurateurs became celebrities, but Hillstone restaurants remained faceless and, as a result, kind of egoless. No one in a Hillstone kitchen was going to hold it against you if you wanted mashed potatoes instead of fries. No one was going to explain why what you wanted was wrong.




The beef is deeply seasoned, roasted so it’s still rosy and juicy. Michelle McSwain for The New York Times




The chef Enrique Vazquez slices meat for the French dip at Houston’s in Pasadena.Michelle McSwain for The New York Times




The sandwich rolls for the French dips are baked in Hillstone kitchens every day, then buttered and toasted when the sandwiches are assembled.Michelle McSwain for The New York Times

The French dip at Houston’s evolved much like a Yorkshire terrier from a gray wolf — a compact, delicate, almost unrecognizable descendant of the hefty French dip at Philippe the Original in Los Angeles, where cooks have been swiping buns through dark, decanted pan drippings for more than a century.

The sandwich appeared on Houston’s opening menu, but had its first major makeover in the late 1990s, when the kitchens adopted electric slicers to thinly shave the meat. The group started baking its own rolls, instead of buying them, in the early 2000s.

A roast beef sandwich is so simple that small, seemingly trivial alterations can completely transform it. How rare exactly is the meat? How thinly is it sliced? And — this is important! — what’s happening to those roasty browned bits that tend to fall and make a mess when the sandwich is assembled? At Houston’s, a cook is often sliding some of that wreckage back in, for the mildest of contrast. Oh, you didn’t notice? Well, you’re not really supposed to.

The sandwich is here to please you, not draw attention to itself!




The chef David Molina finishes the sandwich by cutting it neatly in half — without squashing it.Michelle McSwain for The New York Times

Back in Pasadena, as my eyes adjusted to the light in the wood-paneled dining room, I saw the spotlit booths were full of couples on dates, mother-daughter duos resting between shopping excursions and power lunches fueled by martinis and big glasses of big reds. I felt the manic energy of a half dozen agent meetings.

And by the time I got to my own table, I lost count of the French dips.


Download PDF