Southern Smoke Festival Returns Saturday, Plates Out for Hospitality Workers

Chef Rodney Scott (photo by Hugh Galdones)

By Jeff Gremillion

Discovery Green again turns into a massive chef’s tasting this Saturday, with nearly 100 cooks and bartenders working the lawn for Southern Smoke.

The James Beard Award-winning foundation’s festival, presented by Sysco, returns Oct. 3 for an afternoon of bites, drinks and live music that funds emergency relief and no-cost mental health care for food and beverage workers nationwide. Tickets are on sale at southernsmoke.org.

General admission is $225 and gets in at 4 p.m. with food, drinks, the YETI Culinary Stage and cookbook signings. Lexus VIP is $550, with a 3 p.m. entry and an air-conditioned lounge at The Grove. Talent Supporter packages start at $5,000 and underwrite one chef’s food, gear and travel, with earlier access and a seat at the Oct. 1 welcome party.

The roster mixes first-timers and festival regulars. New to the lawn: Lindsay Autry of Honeybelle in Palm Beach, Tyson Cole of Uchi, Tiffany Derry, Brandon Jew of Mister Jiu’s, Serigne Mbaye of Dakar NOLA, and Daisy Ryan of Bell’s in Los Alamos, California. Alumni back for another round include Aaron Franklin, Chris Bianco, Nina Compton, Ashley Christensen, Mason Hereford, Ana Castro, and Houston’s own Chris Shepherd circle — Aaron Bludorn, Leonard Botello IV of Truth BBQ, Bryan Caswell, Manabu “Hori” Horiuchi, Rebecca Masson, Ryan Pera, Erin Smith and Patrick Feges, and Nick Wong among them.

Drinks come from Houston rooms such as Julep, Johnny’s Gold Brick, EZ’s Liquor Lounge and Reserve 101, plus out-of-town bars including Cure and Bacchanal in New Orleans and Dear Irving in New York.

Food & Wine’s 2026 Best New Chefs — still to be named — cook together for the first time in a Skadden-presented area. The YETI stage brings demos from Bianco, Isabel Coss, Kevin Fink and Tavel Bristol-Joseph, Genie Kwon and Tim Flores, and Evan LeRoy, with chef and YouTuber Brad Leone as emcee. Lexus VIP revives Respect the Rosé with Ryan Prewitt, Nicole Mills, Stephen Stryjewski, and Andy Ticer and Michael Hudman, plus bites from Derry, Sarah Grueneberg and Horiuchi. Kindred Stories handles cookbook sales and signings. Four Seasons Hotel Houston is the official hotel partner, with festival rates from $345 while rooms last.

Chef Chris Shepherd and executive director Lindsey Brown founded Southern Smoke in 2015. The group has granted more than $16.5 million and, since 2020, opened nearly 12,000 counseling sessions through its Behind You program. In 2026 it received a James Beard Foundation Impact Award.

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The scene downtown at Southern Smoke (photo by Daniel Ortiz)

Franklin BBQ (photo by Hugh Galdones)

From Uptown Fine Dining to an Omakase Return, Houston’s Next Wave Takes Shape

Nigiri at Neo

By Jeff Gremillion

Houston’s fall dining calendar is filling up fast, with a splashy Uptown newcomer, a Michelin-recognized omakase comeback and a Downtown rooftop all in the mix — plus two suburban arrivals close behind.

Mack Allen’s, one of the year’s more anticipated openings, is due this month at 5POP, the 28-story office tower at 4400 Post Oak Parkway. The 16,000-square-foot restaurant takes over the entire first floor with New American cooking: prime beef, American wagyu, seafood, sushi and caviar, plus a wine cellar of about 1,000 bottles and a serious spirits program. The layout splits the difference between scale and intimacy, with three private dining rooms, a statement bar and a botanical garden-inspired patio. Founder Mack McDonald is positioning it as a destination for business dinners, celebrations and dressed-up nights out.

Neo, the Michelin-recognized omakase from Comma Hospitality, is slated to reopen in late fall at 1711 Indiana St. The restaurant began as a 2020 pop-up above the clothing store Glass Cypress and closed in late 2025 for renovations. When it returns, it will come back with a refreshed room and an evolved version of its intimate omakase format.

The Perch is also aimed at late fall, landing as the rooftop restaurant and bar at JW Marriott Houston Downtown, 812 Main St. Executive Chef Rafael Gonzalez will lead a seasonal menu inspired by local flavors and Houston’s mix of culinary influences, with a beverage program of globally inspired wines, local craft beers, cocktails and nonalcoholic options. Guests can take in the skyline from the dining room, the bar or the rooftop pool. The restaurant is part of the hotel’s larger expansion, including the transformation of the historic Battelstein’s Building plus new guest rooms, meeting space and amenities.

Kirby Ice House is preparing to open its new Clear Lake location this month at 530 Bay Area Blvd., near Johnson Space Center and Space Center Houston. The 21-and-up indoor-outdoor neighborhood bar is bringing the usual Kirby formula — roomy seating, sports on the screens, rotating beers, craft cocktails, games, dog-friendly patios, food trucks, complimentary group reservations and plenty of parking — to the Bay Area. Local NASA-inspired details include a custom neon of the brand’s cowgirl mascot riding a rocket. The idea is an easy hang for happy hour, game day and neighborhood celebrations.

Meanwhile, nationally known Tony’s Italian Delicatessen — the spot that hit No. 1 on Yelp’s Top 100 Places to Eat in the U.S. — is bringing its stuffed “Carnegie” subs to City Place in Spring, at 1700 City Place Drive, in early fall. After busy Montgomery and Tomball locations, Tony’s is serving the same end-to-end sandwiches on crusty Italian rolls, finished with its signature sub oil and named for Italian American icons. Expect the Stallone, Sophia and Pacino, plus soups, salads, gluten-free options and a dessert lineup of tiramisu, limoncello cake, cannoli and homemade snickerdoodles.

A rendering of the Champagne Room at Mack Allen’s

Kirby Ice House (photo by Alex Montoya)

James Beard Winner Douglas Rodriguez Takes Over the Kitchen at Exilio

Chef Douglas Rodriguez

By Jeff Gremillion

Exilio Latin Flair has handed the kitchen to one of the chefs who helped invent Nuevo Latino cuisine.

James Beard Award winner Douglas Rodriguez is the new executive chef at the Harlow District restaurant, and his first move was a full reboot of the lunch and dinner menus, which debuted Tuesday, Sept. 8. 

Rodriguez is widely credited with shaping Nuevo Latino cooking in the United States, taking the flavors and traditions of Latin America and presenting them through a contemporary lens. “Chef Douglas Rodriguez has an extraordinary ability to honor the traditions of Latin American cooking while presenting them in a fresh and exciting way,” said Pedro Teyuca, co-owner and operator of Bari Hospitality Group. “His creativity, experience and deep understanding of these cultures make him the ideal chef to guide Exilio into its next chapter.”

Rodriguez’s résumé includes Alma de Cuba in Philadelphia and De Rodriguez Cuba at the Hilton Bentley in Miami Beach, which became Miami’s first Latin restaurant to earn the AAA Four Diamond designation. More recently, he developed Nikos in Durham, N.C., which earned a recommendation in the 2025 Michelin Guide. He won the James Beard Foundation’s Rising Star Chef of the Year Award in 1996, later received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Flavors of Passion Awards and competed on the inaugural season of Bravo’s Top Chef Masters. 

At Exilio, he is drawing from the Caribbean, Central and South America, Mexico and Spain, with dishes that lean into indigenous ingredients and regional technique. The new menu includes tuna watermelon ceviche, salmon amarillo, mixto seafood leche de tigre, braised short rib flautas, Colombian-style chicken empanadas and a Cuban sandwich on a stick. Entrées run from chicken mole and snapper Veracruz to Argentine churrasco-cut filet mignon and malanga ricotta gnocchi.

Exilio, part of Bari Hospitality Group with Bari Ristorante and Georgia James, is at 2817 W. Dallas St., Building C. Reservations are at exiliolatinflair.com.

A dessert is garnished fancifully with crisp rounds of taro, or “malanga,” root.

The Four Seasons’ Smart Speakeasy and Spectacle-Savvy Latin Steakhouse Are Must-Do’s Downtown

Tomahawk steak with flaming Mezcal and herbs

By Jeff Gremillion

DOWNTOWN'S GRAND OLD Four Seasons Hotel has been making huge strides in modernizing and sexing itself up, with largescale renovation projects over the course of a few years. But none of those efforts may be quite as impressive as its food and bev updates in recent months.

In just the last few weeks, the hotel has made its contribution, and a fine one at that, to the season’s wildfire craze — speakeasies. The intimate new eight-seat bar and small adjacent lounge is called Bandista Cocktail Laboratory, and you can only get there if a hotel employee shows you the way. They meet you in the lobby, take you up the staff elevator and through various backrooms, until they reach a bookshelf that’s actually a hidden door.

Although the entrance is cloak-and-dagger, the lamplit, Latinate vibe inside is warm and chatty. On a recent night, a hunky Brit bartender and his cute, tattooed hipster-gal colleague, both in bowties and smart vests, mixed up liquid treats from a menu divided into “1920s” — Vespers and Sidecars in delicate antique stemware, if you please — and “2020s.” In the latter category, the Fig Daisy has rum, English Breakfast tea, fig jam and a bit of lime. But the most popular seems to be the Dead Man Walking, which highlights absinthe and comes steaming (thanks to nitrogen) not in a glass but in its own dispenser; it’s an occasion of a drink and serves two.

You might be tempted to make a meal of the potato chips and French onion dip topped with caviar that Bandista offers for snacking, but absolutely have dinner at the hotel’s still-new restaurant Toro Toro nearby, touted as a pan-Latin steakhouse. On almost any given night it’s a bustling, urbane affair, with a worldly mix of business travelers putting their expense accounts through their paces and sometimes-rowdy locals enjoying the stellar variety of surf and turf on offer; “toro,” after all, meansbullin Spanish andtunain Japanese.

The seafood shines, especially in raw preparations, as inHamachiceviche with tartleche de tigre, little cubes of sweet potato and crunchy corn nuts. Other dishes range from comforting roast chicken to all-out spectacle, as in grilled Tomahawk steak piled high with fresh herbs and flamed with Mezcal tableside — and the must-get dessert which is (no lie) a hollow chocolate ball filled with ice cream and cakey bits and berry and vanilla sauces and smashed open with a mallet in the middle of the table.