Top 10 Restaurants 2007
Valentino's Seafood. Another new local seafood stalwart, this one in the Bay Area and associated with the owner Mark Valentino's shellfish company. Chef Devin Corbett brings personality to bear on his renditions of stuffed flounder, half-shell oysters smoked on the grill, cilantro-spiked slaw and delirious hush puppies. It's a modest place with--when the seafood-supply stars are right--some not-so-modest food. Oh, yeah: when the local crab is in season, the crab cakes here fairly rock. Green vegetables and grilled options lighten things up.
Alison Cook; Houston Chronicle
December 31, 2007
Seafood classics reinterpreted
At Valentino's Seafood, a worthy young Galveston Bay-area seafood restaurant, I could feast happily on the artisanal-quality hush puppies as my entree, with a side of cilantro-spiked slaw to go along.
The pups are bigger than golf balls, rough and crunchy of crust, ribboned throughout with scallion and possessed of a faint chile heat. They are stoutly savory rather than sweet. And that tart, herbal slaw, minimally dressed and threaded with red cabbage among the green, is notably light on its feet.
Such a meal would be fun, but it wouldn't be smart, because the seafood here is so fresh and distinctive. Want the usual fried-everything with a washtub full of prefab french fries? Or generic "snapper" with the inevitable heap of extraneous shellfish and sludgy cream sauce on top? Go elsewhere.
What chef Devin Corbett produces in this cool, ice-blue space is classic, carefully sourced Gulf Coast cookery updated with smart touches. Moist fillets of fresh-caught Texas flounder arrive with a filling of dewy, bacon-flecked crabmeat tucked in, and just the lightest gloss of buttery sauce. Like a number of dishes here, the stuffed flounder is a genuine improvement on a beloved genre.
With your flounder, wonder of wonders, you can choose a fresh vegetable — grilled asparagus spears, perhaps, or crisp-tender green beans — instead of the time-honored, guilt-inducing Gulf Coast sides of fries and slaw. Better yet, Valentino's green vegetables are neither cooked nor seasoned to distraction, so they speak for themselves.
So do the fish and shellfish on the seafood platter, which is listed on the menu as "fried" but also can be had grilled, which is a great option. The night I tried it, pearly grouper dabbed with a graceful scallion-and-garlic butter consorted with shrimp grilled solo, as well as rolled in bacon and crisped. Then came pan-grilled oysters in a mode that habitués of Clary's Seafood Restaurant in Galveston will recognize. Add some of those hush puppies and slaw, and you have a plate for the ages.
The reason such seafood items score is that owner Mark Valentino, a third-generation Bay-area shellfisherman and distributor, has made freshness his priority.
"I always wanted to have a restaurant that serves fresh bay and Gulf shrimp and oysters, not the foreign pond-raised stuff everyone else has," Valentino says on the restaurant's Web site. Chef Corbett and his sous-chef, Abbey Lewellyn, were eager enlistees to the cause.
Corbett once cooked on a deep-water diving boat; offshore audiences are famously demanding, since mealtime is a principal recreation. He later met Lewellyn when they trained in the Art Institute of Houston's culinary program.
They are part of the new wave of local, grass-roots grads who have fanned out over the city, making many of our regional cooking currents their own and rewriting some of the rules in the process. They've got their feet on the ground and their eyes on what's in front of them — not on molecular wizards or the heat and flash of Top Chef.
Our regional cuisine will end up the better for it. Just as an example, Valentino's smoked oysters rival the stunning wood-grilled oysters at Gilhooley's Restaurant & Oyster Bar in San Leon, which may help establish the dish as a deserving staple of the local repertoire.
The Valentino's version, cooked in their shells on a charcoal grill and doused with a garlicky chive butter, are even simpler than Gilhooley's, because they lack the gilding of Parmesan cheese. Both dishes are great, but at Valentino's there are actually a couple of respectable white wines to go along.
What there is not, in this suburban dining room just off the Gulf Freeway and NASA Parkway, is the ramshackle seaside charm a place like Gilhooley's offers. Valentino's done-on-a-shoestring look is mostly a function of its cool blue paint job, which feels good in high summer but, in conjunction with lots of hard surfaces, might well turn chilling in cooler seasons. It's a clean, well-lighted, contemporary place with a no-nonsense look and an angled bar at which solo diners can eat comfortably. The focal point is the food.
Corbett's Gulf crab cakes, which have scarcely any binder save a sprightly, seasoned mayonnaise, can hold their own with those at far fancier restaurants. They're packed into ring molds and left to steep in their own marinade for at least eight hours before being turned out on the grill.
Curiously, the local shrimp that should be such a centerpiece here have failed to wow me as much as the fish, oysters and crab. There's a very simple, chunky, lightly creamed shrimp dip that's a family recipe of Mark Valentino's, and while it is long on delicate shrimp flavor, I longed for a slight twinge of something acidic to set it off. (When I got the leftovers home, I added a little minced, pickled carrot from some jalapeños escabeche, and it transformed the dip into something electric.)
The fried shrimp here get an eccentric coating of shardlike cracker crumbs, fried dark brown and bristly. It's interesting, but the shrimp's sweetness tends to get lost underneath, and the butterflying process reduces juiciness and makes them cook through faster. On one occasion, the fried shrimp had an unpleasantly spongy texture; on another, the shellfish were moister, but they still fought a losing battle against their spiky fried coating.
I'd go for the cold boiled shrimp, instead, or perhaps the bacon-wrapped Shrimp Kisses with a jumpy cilantro dip that puts your average spinach dip to shame. I wish Valentino's tartar and cocktail sauces had half the oomph of that cilantro dip. And I wish the sauces were brought to the table in their paper cups as a matter of course, without my having to request them.
Whatever you do, be sure to order a heroic slab of bread pudding for dessert. It is softer and more graceful than it looks, with toasty pecans and two kinds of raisins and an alluring whiskey current running through it.
You can take the leftovers home and live on them for days; just don't tell your doctor. But go right ahead and brag about your virtuous grilled seafood platter with fresh asparagus and wild rice.
July 13, 2007
Alison Cook; Houston Chronicle
Critic pick
Chef Devin Corbett produces classic, carefully sourced Gulf Coast cookery updated with smart touches. In this contemporary space, Texas flounder arrives moist, with dewy, bacon-flecked crabmeat and a gloss of buttery sauce. Smoked oysters on the half shell rival the great ones at Gilhooley's. Curiously, the local shrimp here does not impress. Say yes, though, to bread pudding with whiskey, pecans and raisins.
Alison Cook; Houston Chronicle
Three-alarm oyster alert!!!
Okay, if I were excitable political blogger Matt Drudge, I would have the sirens screaming above, the police lights flashing and the headline popping at about 700 points.
But I'm not Matt Drudge. So you just get three paltry exclamation points and a pathetically low-tech kick in the pants.
I just got back from a quiet dinner at Valentino's Seafood, which lies barely to the east of the NASA1 intersection with the Gulf Freeway. It's not easy to find. If you're coming from Houston, as I was, you must turn north on NASA 1, then hang tight until you make a right on Kobayashi Road, which runs behind the Cinemark-anchored shopping center where Valentino's resides.
Either that, or you can cut through the parking lots of Houston Garden Center, Big Lots, and lord knows what else, until you swing left paralleling the Gulf Freeway and then left again into the Valentino's lot.
It's worth the trouble. This five-month old restaurant shows signs of becoming a Gulf Coast classic.
Take the smoked oyster appetizer, which is as simple and pure as can be, and which shows the char-grilled bivalves off to best advantage in a scallion-and-parsley-flecked garlic butter.
That's all there is to it. The oysters emerge with their frills raised high, as plump as all get-out; and there is just enough smoke flavor to intrigue without overwhelming. At the end, you can tip the shells up to catch the last delicious juices. These oysters are a model of sophistication and restraint.
Thank Valentino's executive chef Devin Corbett, a grad of the Art Institute of Houston's culinary program and a veteran of the famously demanding offshore cooking wars. (He served on deepwater diving boats.)
Thank owner Mark Valentino, too, the third-generation shellfisherman who had the great good sense to hire Corbett and his Art Institute classmate, Abbey Lewellyn.
The upshot is dishes like those smoked oysters, and a stuffed flounder of astounding purity--just pearly fish, not the least overcooked, with a dewy filling of bacon-flecked crabmeat tucked in. Sauce? Only the lightest, pearliest gloss.
Check it out. I have a feeling this place is a keeper.
Alison Cook; Houston Chronicle
March 17, 2007
Mature Dining
Rattan, a project of Sinh Sinh founder and former owner Ron Chen, marks the latest in a new breed of ambitious, chef-driven suburban restaurants that includes Killen's Steakhouse in Pearland, J's Bistro in the northwest, Taverna Winery & Restaurant in Conroe, Pulcinella Ristorante in Katy, Valentino's Seafood in Webster and Amici in Sugar Land. Together, at long last, they signal that Houston's dining scene is maturing.
Alison Cook; Houston Chronicle
