Houston Restaurant Weeks 2024 — Dinner at Artisans in Mid-West Houston – Houston Food

UPDATE: Houston Restaurant Weeks has been extended to September 30, 2024, so you have plenty of time to conduct your own culinary explorations. To assist restaurants that were affected by this year’s severe storms, the charitable contribution for the month of September has been reduced to $1 per meal. 

• HRW Meals Offered: Lunch and Dinner
• Offers Self-Parking? No – Valet is $8 plus gratuity
• Presented the HRW Menu Without Being Asked? No
• Would Return for a Regular Meal? Maybe, but only to the bar or chef’s counter

Earlier this year, Artisans, the elegant French restaurant founded in downtown Houston by longtime Houston chef Jacques Fox, reopened in a new space at 5745 Westheimer, the former site of a James Coney Island. Fox is more an owner than a hands-on chef in his golden years, leaving the executive chef role to Erik Cruz.

I visited during Houston Restaurant Weeks 2024 for dinner, and the visit revealed that the well-executed food is as artistic and flavorful as ever. However, the service experience was uncomfortable, making this the least-successful of the six Houston Restaurant Weeks visits I made — a shame, as Artisans also served one of the best dishes of all. 

As I mentioned in an editorial earlier this week, I really dislike diners being forced to request the Houston Restaurant Weeks menu at participating restaurants. It’s annoying, and it feels like you’re asking for special treatment when you’re just out to have fun while also raising money for food banks. Worse, though, is being made to feel like a cheapskate for ordering from the special menu, and that’s how I felt at Artisans. 

When I requested the Houston Restaurant Weeks menu, our server’s expression indicated that he wasn’t happy about it, and that seemed confirmed when he immediately recommended that we should order additional dishes from the regular menu. “Well what my customers do (I guess I’m not your customer?) is they also order a few additional items,” he said. I understand that servers upsell to increase their tips — and they need to make good tips to offset ridiculously low hourly wages — but selling is an art. Good selling focuses on the customers’ needs. Bad selling focuses on your own desires. I was unsurprised when our server also recommended a $22 cocktail, one of the most expensive on the short-but-astute list. (The lowest-priced cocktail is $17.) 

I pressed on with my Houston Restaurant Weeks order. Our server suggested adding seared foie gras for $18 — not at all a bad price, but at this point, he’d lost my trust and I wasn’t accepting his suggestions. However, I did order a cocktail and was considering a spiked coffee later with dessert. 

With that awkwardness aside, the food and drinks proved mostly exemplary. My $17 cocktail tasted like a million bucks. Called La Collaboration, it tickled me, as it referred to the combination of Termano Blanca Tequila from Mexico and saffron-infused French vermouth. (Those former enemies make great friends when it comes to food and drink.) It also included lime, sugar and a float of red wine, which my companion called, “one of the best secret-weapon ingredients when it comes to cocktails”. 

The meal started with a surprise — a delightful, perfectly fried croquet accompanied by a cocktail fork for easy nabbing. My companion and I are both big mushroom fans, so ordering the Le Champignon Portobello au Chevre Montrachet Brûlée — portabello mushroom with baby spinach, oven-dried tomato, flamed goat cheese on a crouton with sauce mousseline — as an appetizer was a given. The same went for Erik’s Pork Rillettes, accented with three-onion marmalade, rosemary focaccia and cornichons. 

We were still enjoying our appetizers when our server arrived bearing the entrées — because of course. We shoved those aside to make way for the dinner plates, then rearranged the table so we could get back to the appetizers. However, the entrées were also worth savoring — one more than the other. 

The le jaret d’ agneau braise au vin rouge — a 16-ounce red wine-braised lamb shank, atop creamy polenta with roasted Brussels sprouts alongside — was visually stunning. The flavor was somewhat tame — perhaps just needing a touch of salt to enliven the wine flavor — but it was nonetheless a satisfying selection. However, the smaller duck confit dish — Le Canard Confit Sauce Chili — proved the big winner. The duck was everything you could possibly want of it. It was slightly crisp outside, meltingly tender inside and the orange sauce was the perfect accent. The dish also included Sarladaise Potatoes, a simple but exquisite preparation in duck fat and garlic, and oven-roasted ratatouille. 

The desserts of le gâteau au fromage blanc a la framboise (raspberry cheesecake with cointreau creme anglaise) and la galette pistache sauce au caramel (pistachio frangipane, a type of custard, with brown butter ice cream and caramel sauce) appeared smaller than expected, but were actually just the right size for an excellent ending. My companion said the cheesecake had “the texture of a stick of butter”, but it was not meant unkindly or even as a criticism. We love butter. My favorite flavor was the pistachio frangipane, which reminded me greatly of marzipan. 

I was hoping to order one of the spiked coffees to go alongside the desserts, but our server unexpectedly hit some common ground with my guest. While they engaged in an animated conversation, I didn’t get an opportunity to place my order. Oh well. 

Now, some seating advice: the main dining room, which I’d selected for our reservation, is a well-appointed, rectangular space outfitted with two large monitors so you can see the kitchen staff as they’re plating the dishes. It was an interesting touch, but not enough to surmount what felt like a space isolated from the rest of the restaurant. Curious, I peeked around at the rest of the space. By far, the liveliest, most enticing setting at Artisans is the chef’s counter. There’s a curved bar for diners in the light-and-bright space, and one of the chefs was visiting with a diner when I took a look. I highly recommend you select the chef’s counter when making your reservation. 

Then there’s the bar area, bold and glamorous, with a huge jug of red wine aged for 40 years on a cart and a large window boldly accented with a huge metal representation of Artisans’ rooster logo. (Called “le coq”, the rooster is an important symbol in France.) Eight dollar valet or not, I’d go out of my way to enjoy a few drinks in the posh setting, perhaps during social hour from 3 to 7 p.m.. The drama and glamor of the chef’s counter and bar area made the main dining room seem isolated and a bit dour.

Lack of self-parking is a sticky issue with Houstonians, because nearly everyone needs a car to drive around the vast city. While it’s understandable that restaurants with small or distant parking lots need a valet, it’s not a popular scenario. It’s even less so when you drive up to find that the valet costs $8, as was the case at Artisans, plus the sign with the price also recommends gratuity. It’s annoying, but for me, not a deal-breaker when it comes to a restaurant experience.

I may return to Artisans at some point, but not in the near future. I have all the respect in the world for chefs Fox and Cruz, but the service experience made me feel like I’m not their ideal customer. By the end, I spent $175.13 after tax and tip, and I ordered nothing extra other than my $17 cocktail and a double-espresso for my guest, which was $8.50. So, why was I made to feel like I wasn’t spending enough money by ordering from HRW menu? Although the meal was terrific, I’ve got a bad taste in my mouth that’s going to take some time to fade. 

Other Houston Restaurant Weeks 2024 Articles

Houston Restaurant Weeks: Perspectives & Observations

Houston Restaurant Weeks Lunch at Late August

Phaedra Cook has written about Houston’s restaurant and bar scene since 2010. She was a regular contributor to My Table magazine (now closed) and was the lead restaurant critic for the Houston Press for two years, eventually being promoted to food editor. Cook founded Houston Food Finder in November 2016 and has been its editor and publisher ever since.