"On a sweltering summer Monday in midtown Houston, chef Chris Williams turned up the heat for a recipe-testing session at his new restaurant, Late August. It's an airy space with banquettes swathed in cobalt blue velvet, in an Art Deco building that, until 2018, was a Sears department store. In 2021 the city and Rice University repurposed the site as a business incubator and community events space, part of a joint project to develop a technology park dubbed the Ion District."
"Sergio Hidalgo, the restaurant's executive chef, created a Mexican American-inspired fry bread, a popular dish in his home state of Arizona, using a recipe for yeast rolls devised by Williams's great-grandmother Lucille B. Smith, one of the state's first prominent African American businesswomen. (She invented a pre-Pillsbury instant hot-roll mix.) The chefs might garnish the bread with mole butter or benne seeds, a sesame brought to the United States by enslaved Africans."
Houston's art and food scenes rank among the country's finest, fueled by diverse communities and a sense of boundlessness. Late August, a new restaurant in midtown, occupies a repurposed Art Deco Sears building in the Ion District. Chef Chris Williams curates a culturally kaleidoscopic menu through collaborations that fuse African American, Mexican American, Caribbean, and Southern influences. Executive chef Sergio Hidalgo adapted a Mexican American fry bread using Williams's great-grandmother Lucille B. Smith's yeast-roll recipe and garnishes with mole butter or benne seeds. Williams recruited cousin Jennifer Parsons, a Guadeloupe-raised pastry chef, who created a banana-pudding–filled churro taco that embodies the restaurant's layered heritage.
Read at Conde Nast Traveler
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