Vuji Café’s sandwiches fuse together flavors from various Asian cultures and Texas toast to create its Tex-Asian cuisine. The Houston Heights has welcomed another new restaurant, focused on Tex-Asian food, bringing a new twist to the already diverse cuisine Houstonians have become accustomed to. Vuji Café officially opened its doors to the public in late June and has already become a local sensation. Founders Ian So (of Chicken & Rice Guys) and Tristan Nguyen took over the space that was formerly home to a bubble tea shop owned by a friend of theirs. So says that when they learned their…

Plant It Forward is one of many community gardens in Houston providing organic farming and healthy foods. Food security continues to remain a pressing issue across America. Houston is no exception. According to the nationwide food bank network Feeding America, the food insecurity rate in Harris County in 2022 was 16.4 percent. This means that about one in six residents either struggle to afford or cannot access nutritious food. Community gardens offer a solution, empowering residents to grow their own produce and fostering a sense of community connection. These gardens also serve as educational hubs where people of all ages…

Macie Kelly/Houston Public Media FILE: Hugo’s, a restaurant that participates in Houston Restaurant Weeks. The 2024 Houston Restaurant Weeks will kick off on Thursday, Aug. 1, and end on Sept. 2, with a goal of increasing traffic in restaurants, collecting food donations and expanding Houstonians’ palates. The 21st annual fundraiser invites local foodies to try different restaurants with multiple-course menus at a set, and usually lower, price. A percentage of the revenue goes to the restaurant’s local food banks, such as the Houston, Montgomery and Galveston food banks, said Katie Stone, the Houston Restaurant Weeks President. “This is just one…

Back 2 School Fest is free and each student will get a backpack full of school supplies. HOUSTON — Make plans to come out to the George R. Brown Convention Center Saturday, Aug. 3, for the Mayor’s Back 2 School Fest. The event will provide up to 25,000 kindergarten through 5th-grade students with backpacks, school supplies, health screenings, vaccinations and other services. The Houston Food Bank will also be there to distribute food to families, and it’s all free. “The city really wants to help our families, help our students by providing all the resources that we can in order…

There are more than 12,000 restaurants in Houston. With at least 145 languages spoken across town and communities bringing compelling fare from regions like south Louisiana and the West Coast, and countries like Mexico, Syria, and the Philippines, there’s no shortage of outstanding food in Space City. Check back monthly to see the best things Eater Houston’s editor ate this month. Flounder crudo at Azumi Before I dove into an assortment of fatty slices of bluefin tuna, nigiri, and hot dishes, like the also-noteworthy fried rice, a bright flounder crudo served as the perfect palate opener at River Oak’s newest…

It’s SFist’s 20th anniversary week this week, and it seemed like a good time to look back on how we’ve covered food and the local restaurant scene going back to the site’s early days, spanning an era in which SF restaurants became some of the most buzzed-about places in the country.While I have not been with SFist for all of its 20 years — I started as a contributor in 2009 and became a full-timer in 2013 — I have been one of the primary people on the restaurant beat for much of that time. Prior to becoming an editor…

SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) — A fee for this, a surcharge for that, it’s become common on restaurant bills.Bay Area business owners say these fees are to make sure workers get a decent living wage and health care coverage.But now some customers have started to push back.And you’ve likely seen them, surcharges tacked onto the tab with different names:-Service fee-Labor surcharge-Fair Wage-Employer mandates-Health Care Security Ordinance-SF Safety and Benefit Charge”At the end of the day there are always people who try to get around something and find a way to make it work better for them. Folks just have to vote…

I had just put the finishing touches on Eater’s Best Fried Chicken in NYC when I received an email from Zoee Wong, an R&D chef at Birdsong — the San Francisco restaurant with two Michelin stars. The email suggested I check out Birdsong’s fried chicken spinoff near Times Square called Birdbox. Birdsong comes from Christopher Bleidorn and Aarti Shetty, and the Michelin review describes the cooking with live fire as having a sense of whimsy. It was here that the “highly Instagrammable” chicken sandwich with a claw took flight during the pandemic. Back in 2021, Bleidorn told Eater SF that…

The Silver Crest Donut Shop, whose red neon sign has boasted “We never close” for as long as fans of 24-hour doughnuts can remember, is no more.For much of its long run, the cash-only Silver Crest was one of the most peculiar restaurants in San Francisco, like something from a David Lynch film. The fluorescent light was tinted blue-green. Long-silent jukeboxes crowned most of the booths, and the pinball machines were usually broken. Nominally an all-night breakfast spot, the restaurant had a menu that included a fried ham sandwich for $11.95, Sanka for $2.95 and a hot snail (a sticky…

Most people see expiration dates as the end, but for Will Dittmar, they’re just the beginning. “We waste enough food to fill Oracle Stadium on a daily basis. It’s unforgivable,” he said.The Executive Director of an organization called Extra Food, Dittmar collects groceries from supermarkets in San Francisco that would otherwise head to the landfill and delivers them to local nonprofits and pantries.About a third of the U.S. food supply goes uneaten. When it rots in landfills, it produces methane gas. California now requires all supermarkets to give away food that is still fit to eat, rather than throw it away. Now…