BB's

Some of you may have read less than glowing reviews of Louisiana in this forum before. Those of you who know me may have heard me call Louisiana "America's butthole", "a dingleberry", or "a crappy place to go." Hating Louisiana as I did, I refused to enjoy Cajun food in any form, referring to all of it as "sewer trash". I know, guys. "Sewer trash" is a redundant phrase. Everything in a sewer is trash. Anyways! I've been shown the light! This Spring Break my best friend from high school and I ventured into the wasteland of Louisiana, and I kind of have a different opinion of it now! I mean don't get me wrong, the air got noticeably smellier once we crossed the border and I wasn't carded once in that lawless society (which, now that I'm over 21, makes me feel like an old lady rather than lucky that I got away with something I shouldn't have.) However everything I ate there was really tasty and more importantly, I held a baby alligator, which was life-changing.

Did you know that alligators have an acid inside their bellies that completely breaks down blood and sinew? They can just eat whole animals without having to worry about what's going to happen to them later.

Anyway. So now that I like Cajun food, I sauntered on over to local favorite BB's Cafe. I assume it's a local favorite because the logo is so cute, a snoozing moon, that there's no way people could manage to stay away. The logo would just melt their hearts. +10 Also there is a BB's right next to the Velvet Melvin, where I frequently hold my birthday parties. Public service announcement: you can no longer get a fish tank for free on your birthday, you have to pay $18 for it even if you cry. If you're looking for a better deal on your birthday, you can come over to my apartment but there's no guarantee that I'll stay awake past 12:30 to hang out with you (maybe that's why people in New Orleans didn't card me - because it was barely even night time hours and I was already checking my watch and wondering aloud when we could be back to the hotel room, asleep)

Look I'm going to tell you something real here guys, something non-arbitrary. I loved the fried pickles at this place. +1798 Fried pickles is one of the things that I like to eat the most with my mother, who is another fanatic. I've tried fried pickles across town - at Hooters, at Katz's, at Studio Movie Grill, at no other places than that. And the fried pickles at BB's are hands down the best in Houston. Not only because of the delicate flaking of the batter whenever you bite into them, but also because the ranch dipping sauce that they provide is BACON JALAPENO RANCH. It is so good, you have no idea. Recently my boyfriend told me that nothing I do would ever embarrass him, and so lately I've been testing him and I did eat a spoonful of bacon jalapeno ranch all by itself just to see if it's true. Let the record show that he was not embarrassed, -5, but the bacon jalapeno ranch dipping sauce was just as amazing by itself as it was with fried pickles dipped into it. Guys I love BB's, let's just get that through our heads.

I will say though that there was one thing I found unsatisfactory. Inside the Angry Orchard's six-pack that was holding the condiments on my table (I know, aren't they so trendy and cool with their empty hard apple cider cases on every table? This didn't even make me as mad as creative recycling normally does because of the food coma I was very quickly lulled into.) there were four different bottles of hot sauces. Two of the hot sauces were Tabasco related. One was Cajun Chef. One was Crystal's, admittedly the third greatest hot sauce. NONE were Louisiana hot sauce, my favorite hot sauce every, which is named for the state that this food came from!!! -19 Come on guys, can we at least stay on theme??? Look I'm not mad about this, I'm not about to go write a Yelp review or anything, especially since all the food was perfect and didn't need hot sauce. I would however call myself at least a bit disgruntled and I will be telling all of my friends that I meet at my next birthday at the Velvet Melvin about this.

Pho and Grill

This place is on 290, just right outsidethe loop. I'll agree that it's not in a neighborhood I typically associate with great Vietnamese food, but it's right by the movie theater I normally go to with my bf and the other day we needed to stop and get something before we saw Jurassic Park 3D. Have you guys seen that yet? It's awesome, I definitely recommend it, if only because Jurassic Park was the best movie ever made when it came out, and now with 3D retouching it's once again the best movie ever!!! +10 I'll admit that Ian Malcolm is maybe not my dream man anymore, ever since Daniel Craig, beefcake of the year, was cast as James Bond, but he's still a pretty cool scientist and I think we can all agree that the velociraptors in that movie are so scary!! I was just talking to my brother the other day about how easily I'm scared by movies and he pointed out that the last time the two of us watched a scary movie together I had to sleep on his bottom bunk because I was too scared; he thinks this is a funny story because I was twenty at the time but in reality this is a funny story because the movie was Jurrasic Park. Don't worry guys I have fish now that protect me from that sort of stuff so I wasn't too traumatized by the 3D version.

Anyway. Pho and Grill. So this is what's important: there are booths along the side and I know what you are thinking, wow, those must be the best seats in the house, the only thing is once you sit down you realize that they are the most uncomfortable booths ever created! What they did was they took a solid wood bench and then they sanded it so that it looked rounded, like there was padding, and then stapled a piece of fabric over it, so that it gives the illusion that it's a super comfortable, secretive booth, but in real life it's a sleeper cell of hatred and discomfort. -29 This is the biggest kind of betrayal ever, as booths are the nicest part about eating in a restaurant and these booths completely pervert everything that their breed stands for. It's mean! You know what this compares to? There's this lawn-mowing company or something, I didn't give them the satisfaction of remembering what their business is, and they printed their business cards on what looks like a hundred dollar bill; when you fold it in half, it's exactly the size of a quartered hundred dollar bill and the sides are printed so it looks exactly like one. Anyways so I'm at work, hanging out, doing my business, giving people food and taking their money for it, and I look down in the tip jar and there's a hundred dollar bill! I flip out! This is so great! One hundred dollars, split three ways... that's thirty three dollars!  A fortune! I can quit my job! I start to plan what I'm going to buy with it, I think about all the tropical vacations I'm going to go on, I think about the Maserati I'm going to buy, I pick out the Swatches I'm going to buy for my parents as a thank you for raising me... I fish it out, to show to my coworkers, so they can begin to plan their new lives too, and guess. what. It's NOT a hundred dollar bill! I'm NOT rich! It's just some dumb business card for some dumb lawn-mowing business or like a bail bonds attorney or something. THAT'S what those booths did to me, again.

Look I know that sounds like a good reason to never go to Pho and Grill but I'm sure it's a nice place to go if you sit at a table. I found a hair in my pho, but it was mine, so don't freak out. This happens to me a lot because I have long hair and I rarely brush it, so whenever I wear it down all the live hairs are trying to push out the dead hairs because it's traumatic for them to have to be together in such cramped conditions, I mean it's actually pretty inhumane, if the CPS or I guess it would really be the Hair Protective Services found out, they'd be pretty peeved. But luckily I've managed to stay under their radar for this long and my only punishment is occasionally finding horse tail long hairs in my soup only to realize that it is in fact my own, and also that half of my hair now tastes like bean sprouts and broth. +18 Just keeping it for later, that's what I always say. (That's pretty gross, to be clear I never say that.)

Anyways if anyone wants to go see Jurassic Park in 3D with me please email me at arbitrarycriticism@live.com but just to let you know afterwards you may wake up to discover that I have crept into your home and am attempting to fear cuddle you.

Mandola's Deli

If you guys live on UH campus you've seen this place for sure, it's just across the street from that Kroger on Cullen, where they only have half the things you need at any given time and the dog food and the cereal are on the same aisle which is really weird if you ask me, like what are the trying to insinuate here? Also the lady products are in the same aisle as manly things like motor oil and light bulbs that only men ever need (just kidding guys I have to put new motor oil in my car every six miles ain't nobody got time to wait for a man to do that for me) so that it's super awkward for both genders. So yeah Mandola's Deli is right there, it's this orange-y brick building with a picture of Italy with the Italian flag superimposed over it. I always thought it was a front for the Houston branch of the mob, I had no idea it was like a real restaurant! That regular non-mob people could go into! Turns out though, anybody can go into a mob restaurant, it's just people will look at you the whole time you eat your meal and if you overhear anything you'll end up in the trunk of your own car, floating down the river. Pretty scary stuff.

So yeah Mandola's Deli has been there for like a million years, like 38 or something. Anyway you go inside and it definitely looks like it's from an earlier era, before there were arbitrary critics running around, looking at people's table and chair sets and judging them based on what they got. Because their table and chair sets are real boring, guys. Like one step up from a folding set. Except I think that maybe the folding set is better, as maybe they look boring but at least when your roommate gets a new kitchen set off of Craigslist, you can put the folding seat in the closet until you remember to get rid of it. These tables and chairs, you cannot do that, unless it's a real big closet that I wonder if they'd consider renting out for not too much money as my lease expires soon. -14 I don't want you to think that I have a huge problem with boring tables, the only thing is, they only have four tops, so if you came in for instance with a group of eight because your friend Jess is back in town from St. Louis for the week, then you're SOL and have to push tables together in a nosy way that just draws more attention to you from the mob types that are hanging out there.

But back to the fact that Mandola's Deli has been open so long. Have you guys ever worked for a restaurant that's been open that long? It's really nice, the thing is whenever you work in a restaurant people are always trying to tell you how to do your job, you know, everyone has an opinion these days. But! Thirty eight years is older than most of the people who are always trying to be your parent and boss you around, so nobody can be a buttface to you at a restaurant that old! +29 I'm all about restaurant workers getting treated well as I'm going to be chronically underemployed for the rest of my life and will probably die at age ninety three in a restaurant, answering the phones, my wrinkled crone hands punching away at some new advanced POS system, whispering croak-y questions into the receiver. "Would you like to add a can of Coke to your order?" will be my final words as I slip into the great fast food chain in the sky. In order to make my final days as wonderful as my current ones, I'll make sure that the restaurant I'm slogging away in has been producing food for at least 10 years longer than I've been consuming it. Let's just hope Mandola's Deli is still there when I need it to supplement my Social Security checks.

Frida Mexican Kitchen

I was going to start by complaining about the grammar of the name of this restaurant, but then guys I remembered that I've never proofread anything I submitted to you, my loyal followers, and I'd rather do anything than be the pot that calls the kettle black, with the wrong punctuation and probably misspelled as well. You get off this time, Frida Mexican Kitchen, but in my mind I will always pronounce the apostrophe s.

Look I think Frida Kahlo is kind of weird looking, OK? We've discussed it before. If I were a famous artist known for my self portraits, I would not have painted myself so many times with a unibrow. I would have painted myself a lot skinnier, and my hair would be shinier, and my elbows would be less pointy, and I wouldn't have this weird tan line underneath my watch, where it's not really a difference in the actual hue of my skin but just in how many freckles I have. OK but Frida Mexican Kitchen LOVES Frida Kahlo. There's a portrait of her outside the door, and there are pictures of her inside, and the tables themselves are made out of laminated portraits of Frida. They're all the same portrait too. Look I kind of like it, OK? +31 I mean that's real commitment, you know? Real commitment. I'm not even talking, like, marriage commitment. I'm talking, that restaurant married Frida, then they moved to a small island with her, and then they kicked off all of the native inhabitants, and then they burned their ships, and then they ate all of the furry animals that they could have talked to, and then they lived there with Frida for the rest of their lives without having anyone else to be with except for Frida. THAT'S the kind of commitment this restaurant made to Frida, and it's nice.

What's silly about this restaurant is, it's your typical Mexican restaurant if you ask me, kind of dark, nice salsa, that kind of stuff, not dirty, you know, but not exactly fine dining. Call me prejudiced, but I always prejudge Mexican restaurants the minute I walk in the door, you know? If they put too much emphasis on appearances then I always feel like they're just trying to trick us into not noticing how bad the food is. Don't get me wrong FMK has good Mexican food, it's not bad, I ate the fish tacos, also the salsa is good, also the queso is good, you get what I'm saying, but that kind of stuff isn't important. What I'm trying to say is, the inside of the restaurant looks like it would be a good Mexican restaurant, but then the waiter comes to your table and he's wearing a really silly bow-tie! It was so big and fancy! Like we'd taken a wrong turn down Ella and somehow ended up at Brenner's! Did you guys ever read Catcher in the Rye? And our boy Holden's got that hooker in his room, and he's imagining her at the store buying that green dress and it makes him so sad that he can't bang her? That's kind of how I felt about my waiter - I was picturing him at home putting his bow tie on, and then I was imagining him thinking to himself, man, this sucks, I hate this bow tie, and it made me so sad that he had to do that for me, Catherine Martin, when I'd shown up in sweatpants and my Three Wolf Moon shirt. -18 You know? That poor waiter! I bet he wishes he'd been wearing his Three Wolf Moon shirt too.

The best part though is that their rice and beans don't come on the plate itself, they come on the side, in these little blue pots and and you think that it's this lovely surprise, and it is, you open the top, and on the inside is the rice and beans! You can recreate this moment as often as you want by replacing the lid and then removing it again! Oh, what's in the pot? Oh! Rice! What's in the other one? Oh! Beans! I love this kind of stuff +20 Luckily I have the wonder of a child, anything can impress me if I'm in the right mood and it's hyped correctly. Like you know those fizzy bath bombs that you drop in the water and they fizz up and then at the end the water is a different color and smells nice? I love those, I could watch them for hours. Anything that changes color, really, like those mood rings that only ever seem to go to purple? They have shirts that change color in the same way, like wherever someone touches you or if some parts of your torso are hotter than others then it glows a different color, isn't that awesome? I mean I think it would be embarrassing actually, like for instance your armpits are always going to be a different color, which is gross. But my point is I love these pots.

The only thing is I liked FMK but if you guys are in Oak Forest and want Mexican food you really should just go to Mi Sombrero and eat the Tommy's Tacos, as they are the greatest things in the world.

Goro and Gun

So to prepare for this review I went ahead and read all of the reviews on Yelp and Eater, because I feel like this was a controversial restaurant opening and above all, I want to always be your source of Catherine Martin's opinions on controversial restaurant openings. So, here's what I have to say about all those Yelp reviewers: You guys are poop faces, not because you said the food is bad, but because you are comparing a Houston restaurant to restaurants in San Fransisco and New York! Come on guys let's try to pull it together, let's try to have some Houston pride. Look it's obvious I have no idea what "good ramen" tastes like, I loved the way the miso ramen at Goro and Gun tasted, I'll agree with the Yelpers, the broth was very thick which was delicious, have you ever gotten full off of a thirteen cent package of Top Ramen? Nope! But this miso ramen made me so full I had to lay on my back afterwards with a warm washcloth over my face, sighing dramatically. Thanks, thick broth. If Houston, the third largest city in the United States, has no other use for it's ramen shops than to try to keep up with other cities rather than pioneer something new, then there is really no reason for us to be living here, if we're not going to come up with our own identity we might as well all move. -12 to the haters, pull it together guys, let's start talking some sense.

Look it's clear that the very best thing about Goro and Gun was obviously their drink menu. The drinks themselves were delicious (I drank the Lifer because I'm about to graduate college and am assuming I will become a Lifer at the pizza restaurant I work at; just to let you know Dad it had scotch in it and I loved it so I've developed some expensive tastes for the next time I come home) but I'm not talking about the actual beverages - I'm talking about the beverage names! The whole first page were all restaurant industry terms - lifer, short-timer, line cook, S.A., shoe maker. Underneath the names they had a brief description of what the terms meant, for the 25% of the American population who have never worked in the service industry (obviously I don't associate with this sort of person and was a little surprised to discover a restaurant who admits they exist). Even better than these is my favorite drink that I didn't order: the cookie monster!!! It has rum and cookie milk and several things that I didn't recognize; doesn't that sound delicious? For one thing what is cookie milk! I think it's what's left over when you pour yourself a glass of milk to dip your cookies in, but then after the cookies are gone decide you don't need anymore calcium for the day and will in fact die if you drink it. I never knew what to do with that milk before but now I do: sell it to Goro and Gun. +233

I'll agree though that there is a serious problem with Goro and Gun and we all need to sit down and talk about it: the bathroom. Look I'm a pretty anxious person, especially lately, just ask my roommates the other day I lost the lid to my popcorn maker and I made them all hunt for it for two days and I had a bit of a panic attack alone in my closet and the whole encounter culminated in me nearly burning down the apartment complex trying to make popcorn on the stove. It still smells pretty bad in here. These aren't the actions of a person who has her life together, let me tell you. So anyway here I am hanging out downtown, alone in this world with no popcorn maker lid, when suddenly the Lifer I drank plus the four cups of water kicks in and I have to excuse myself to use the ladies' room. I'm already on edge and then I close the door and bam! Panic sets in! The whole bathroom is painted red and it's pretty dim in there, I guess they were trying to set the mood in there but I'm going to be honest guys, I wanted to love everything about Goro and Gun but I couldn't love this, it made me too nervous, all that unrelenting red. Even the door was painted red, with no relief at all. I'm not really sure, red isn't usually like, a trigger color for me, or anything, but it just made me feel really unsafe, like some kind of ninja was going to come in on me with my skirt down and attack me or something. -12 Maybe even a different wattage on the light bulb would have made me feel less panicky, but I was not a fan of the bathroom.

Anyways let's end on a positive note. Goro and Gun apparently knew I was coming because they had placed all of these stuffed wild cats around the room, like a mountain lion, and an ocelot, I'm not really sure, I can never tell them apart unless they're at the zoo with a placard in front of them. Anyways I guess they knew I liked to fit in or something because after all that thick broth, guess what I was? A stuffed Cat! +18 Get it? Because my name is Cat and I ate a lot? Man that's some funny stuff, it really turned my night around after that bathroom incident, thanks Goro and Gun.