Best Place to Eat in Houston 2021 | Bellaire Vietnamese Food Tour

[Music] i'm so full [Music] we've just landed here in houston first time in houston we are here for one thing and one thing only that is vietnamese food oh yeah our first meal of the day is going to be it's time for pig blood and pig trotters i would say houston's supposed to have the best vietnamese food so i'm so excited i've been wanting to come to the city forever so we'll see you there [Music] the first place we went was uh banbo hue quan tu which was not the original place we wanted to go to because we wanted to go to number three or whatever they were open at 8 a.m and they served bamboo which is basically the only thing we were after and that was the only thing that they serve which i appreciate i did appreciate two things when we first got there they made it clear that they were very annoyed that we had showed up and bothered them that is the authenticity we're looking for uh and then the second thing is we ask can we have a menu and she's like and she nods to a poster that just says bundle play this is literally the only thing on their menu i thought it was good pretty sure that was the first time i've eaten it is a beef broth got a little bit of shrimp paste heavy on the lemongrass so it also had beef brisket vietnamese pork sausage pork blood and then it had a pork trotter what was your favorite of the meats uh i like the sausage yeah it's really flavorful just chewy enough salty peppery it's delicious i mean that's like one of my favorite meats i would say my complaint though is that it wasn't quite spicy enough by itself definitely had to add some chili paste i thought it was okay i didn't want it to be like too spicy because it was like breakfast i thought it was good i thought it was flavorful they offered two sizes which i appreciate if she was like you want a small or a large this is a small [Music] i i'm pretty sure they use the same size bowl for their small and they're large i would hope so because i was trying to picture what a large bowl would be the bowl it was large but there wasn't that much stuff in it was nice and warming though on this uh 91 degree 100 humidity day and like i said it was 9 a.m i spent about three seconds outside and i was complaining a lot wasn't i i was sweating the shirt was sticking to me it was gross it wasn't the best i'd say that i had ever had have spent a lot of time in california orange county specifically where there is little saigon and they have amazing food but it does top st louis because st louis doesn't actually serve this dish you know it's freaking decent i don't think we would find a bad bowl of noodle soup anywhere it's just the matter of finding the best yeah we did look at the map and it was and that was one plaza there was like several blocks of chinese restaurants there's like a little bit of korean and then there was a couple blocks of vietnamese so after we had the we hopped across the street to another plaza which happened to have the dessert place that we wanted to try at j kwame tanzi that was not close i'm so excited oh my god this is some type of jet i pointed and the nice little old lady got it for me this place was intense too it was like the mullet christmas this is like a dessert that my mom gets all the time at home and i think this is just like 10 times better i think my problem it's a problem i have at home too is that it's just like mouthful of ice after a mouthful of ice i've i like the coconut milk though and i like the little gummy bits is that pondon i think so with some grass jelly oh so good those are good and i like coconut milk if there was no ice it would be delicious no that won't be cold they gave it to us like one minute ago it's not cold in there i'd take it warm [Music] i wanted to clarify that i like everything in here but then as i took a bite it was just all ice [Laughter] the place was fun there's a lot of stuff i think i would have got if i wasn't scared they don't only have jay which is the vietnamese coconut dessert they had up on me they had banggoon they had like lots of other like grab-and-go dishes so we got this bamboo now i'm not sure if this is actually going to be good but if it's delicious that'll be all the more reason to go back we also got this i'm excited for that even through this plastic wrapper you can like smell the aroma from the fried onions and scallions oh my gosh it smells so good i pour the fish sauce on it [Music] i didn't know there would be that much fish sauce oh one bite mmm would be better if it was warm that is extraordinarily stanky as a fan of fish sauce this is pungent [Music] i feel like the rice part has like no flavor on its own it's fun to chew on mostly fried onion and fish sauce it would have been a good appetizer i feel like this is an appetizer dish it's not like a entree or anything i'm gonna try the uh tapioca layer cake [Music] oh it's so good [Music] i don't know what any part of this is the jelly part so like oily and sweet the non jelloy bit so soft and creamy mung bean love that mung bean they're my favorite i could eat that all day long [Music] coconut balls came with a little packet of powder bits [Music] it's salty but sweet i think this might actually be really good [Music] does it taste similar it's a variation of it like but it's like more mung bean the mung bean is not as sweet it's more like coarse and sandy then there's also that unsweetened coconut both very strong flavors what it needed was that that salt sugar dip it's delicious with it super strange eating these salty beans and coconut and just smelling this like the most pungent fish sauce i've ever smelled in my life desserts amazing i love them all you full full enough to go eat some pop let's do it we'll see you uh the next place good morning good morning so last night we made a slight detour well we were walking around the houston gallery oh my god so i thought you know this is supposed to be a big mall it's like it i guess it's kind of large it's not that much bigger than st louis malls but what but then apparently that was the first wing of about five wings and it just kept going two and a half hours before we finished the first floor and then there were two more floors plus i think parts of it had a fourth floor above we woke up at 3am so it was a bit of a a trudge at the end there the plan was initially due to a bit far after we walked around the mall but then that didn't happen because we saw a sign for happy hour at blanco taco and it was offering warm queso it was ordered in port carnitas and it was half price margaritas we set a note to it initially i stopped reading like i refused to explain any more of the menu to her and we kept walking then fate pulled us uh right into its path so we decided we'll stop in we'll have just a one biter a little bit of a drink and then we'll walk right back out he was like wouldn't it be so nice if we didn't have to go out anymore today and we just got that didn't come up until several bites in we just got the warm queso and then had a drink i think that was after i started sipping at the margarita we still did it right because we got the warm queso with added beef we got the pork cartinas we got the cheese crisp and it was all really good and the margarita was amazing so then we ordered more and then i ordered the mezcal flight and then i ordered another margarita and by then we were kind of set uh so to start things off we got a roasted poblano and tomato cheese crisp which i i think we both thought were going to be like little chips like little crispy cheese chips like you know when you melt cheese in a hot pan and then it turns into a crisp like like yeah i was expecting that but it was like a flat bread it was a pizza next thing we had was the pork carnitas taco they had some like pickled like very sweet pickled jalapenos on top which i don't think you like cause you got a big mouth full of that i think the carnitas were a little sweet oh no no that's because you got the top taco sweet bottom was salty and together it was delicious i just got the sweet so i thought it was okay and i would say the same thing about the cheese crisp it was just kind of okay but then there was the queso it was queso with beef sour cream and a guacamole oh and a pico de gallo and i'd say that that queso dip that was the crux of the whole meal everything else was kind of okay the beef and the queso that everything we had we dipped into that cheese queso with the beef and everything was elevated so high because of it i mean if cheese was good for you we would be extraordinarily healthy right now we devoured it we dip everything into it it made everything else around it taste so much better so then i got another round of tacos with a chicken pasta and a slow cooked barbecue pork i got the chicken fajita it came with a side of like street corn black beans so i thought the chicken was pretty good once you squeeze a lime into it and there was like a roasted jalapeno that like burned a literal hole in my stomach i swear a literal hole oh the spiciness um the tanginess my one thing that i wish there was uh would have been mexican rice beans better with the cheese street corn better with the cheese your fajitas better with the cheese i did find out too that i still don't like mezcal it tastes like i think i said pool cleaning chemicals that was accurate it was effective though it was a really nice stop and i really liked going there i mean our first day in travel day it's good to relax and then after all that i slept for 15 hours i was kind of sleepy it was like 4 30 5 p.m he passed out and i was like wow it's like so bright outside do you see how awake he is now after 15 hours and three cups of coffee and i think now i'm ready for some breakfast fa although we keep making promises and videos and then going somewhere else wildly different we'll see we'll see where life takes us and we'll see you there we went to koi huang for lunch i actually don't know how you're supposed to say it ah then maybe i'm right what they are known for is kakoto kakoto which is a caramelized i think we got the catfish it's always catfish it's the only thing we got the normal goggles is a caramelized catfish in a clay pot when she brought it out the smell i wish you can smell through the camera because it is intoxicating covered in pepper and spices yeah all these like little crunchy bits that we couldn't identify i never knew what they were i've had kakota before in st louis but this one was just so good the sauce over rice i couldn't just eat that for days yeah there's no counting calories on a vietnamese food super good but we couldn't get distracted by that because we also got a gigantic bowl of beef is the special combination rare beef brisket and tripe the extra fatty brisket and the meatball that was really good mmm yeah that was so beefy this was like straight beef there was like an ox tail or something in it too yeah i knew i could count on texas for a great beef well there was a bunch of sliced jalapenos we got to throw in so that was it was like just spicy enough it was just beefy enough i know a lot of people like adding sriracha to their fall but i don't like that because i feel like it kind of messes with the flavor so that's gonna be fresh yeah i like adding the jalapenos in there more so delicious oh my gosh i ate way too much but those aren't the first things we had because we started things off with spring rolls which he thought were supposed to be summer rolls i didn't think there was supposed to be summer rolls i initially suggested summer rolls because it's summer and it seems more appropriate seasonality is important i didn't look at what they are hmm i just looked at the season it was really good though their spring rolls they were wrapped well it was fresh when you go to some vietnamese places in st louis you can tell that they like wrapped a bunch and just let it sit because the wrapper gets hard it was great because they added the chili sauce into the dipping sauce which i didn't have to do it myself and it was perfect and there was just one old lady running the entire restaurant she also taught me how to pronounce uh the vietnamese coffee cafe souda yeah because what were you saying suanda is how it's spelled that's not on me i didn't i didn't spell it he got the vietnamese iced coffee too amazing it's not my favorite but that's just you know something i don't care i'd say a very very good food day yeah i think we both left and said uh best restaurant so far yeah yeah authentic tasty and somehow great customer service it's very suspicious of that plus that entire meal the catfish the fall the coffee and the spring rolls 28 before tax and i mean our dinner last night was four times that whoa mostly alcohol i guess i would say huh yeah interesting these vietnamese restaurants in bel air oh my lord i think this is where you have to retire to i love that it's caught on camera ready to eat i want to bond me we are going to go back to bel air to see what we can get i don't want to go off of google reviews one because someone reviewed that restaurant negatively because they don't have fortune cookies to be fair they said fortune cookies are their favorite the reviews are very suspect so we're going to eat based off our gut ah there's a lot to do here we're gonna get back at it [Music] after lunch we made a pit stop here at bodard bistro their popular thing was this one some kind of spring roll thing [Music] so this is a grilled pork spring roll with a piece of crunchy wrap in the middle with your standard lettuce and vegetables this is like their special dipping sauce almost looks like an egg drop soup i love that crunch having just eaten regular spring rolls the crunch is nice the dipping sauce i don't love it's extremely sweet but there's like a fishy funkiness to it with bits in it it's hot temperature hot what's all in here cucumber lettuce crunchy fried bits grilled pork you know how crunchy that is dreamlike crunchy k hong i thought had really good spring rolls but i like these spring rolls better i like that crunch i like the dipping sauce better at the other place though but it definitely needs a sauce i'm just not sure it needs this this is the main claim to fame here yep this is what they're known for yes you can see why those are good it was a fun time also since it was just this they had a ready in about five seconds definitely worth making a stop here and grabbing some [Music] [Music] we are here at dawn cafes where we came to uh we came here specifically because i was really hungry and when i really wanted a sandwich because uh because i really wanted a sandwich and i don't exactly know what kind of bun me i usually get usually there's only one option this one though is the special what's included in the special i had no idea it does look like it's some kind of vietnamese pork sausage thinly sliced some other clearer meat with cartilage it's like pate some vietnamese sausage some cold cut meats i was pretty sure he wouldn't like it it's a very big piece of jalapeno i asked them what their most popular one was and that's their number one which is the grilled barbecue pork and that one looked really good i wanted an authentic one though that looked like chinese barbecue pork that does not it's not red that looks like grilled pork you know what i'm just gonna go get one no do you wanna bite first yeah she said she's not hungry at all i'm not but i feel like i don't think i can eat another i just want i want him to like something that tastes good and i think the other one looked like it would taste much better than something that he would actually like smells good tastes like bread i'm like about as not hungry as you can get those cartilage bits are chewy we should add more sauce just leave those first few bites in the the one side i didn't get any sauce at all i kind of want that like that usual mayo garlicky i've got none of it so far yeah it's like a garlic schmear i think i haven't got any vegetables yet though i got a long way to go that's really good this is their number two most popular i'm glad that i got to the jalapeno part because with the jalapeno is better i do like it better than when the jalapeno and the cucumber slice thinner so that you get the more evenly divided because now it's kind of like a big bite of just meat big bite of jalapeno big bite of only cucumber bum beans the type of food that i never feel like i want it but then whenever i have a bite i want more it spreads really good super crispy on the outside super fluffy inside i feel like we never get near this quality in st louis kind of liking those cartilage bites maybe something to chew on that jalapeno is not too spicy too i was worried when it took a huge bite of it that is gonna like burn my mouth apart well now it's getting there would you want to try the barbecue pork one if i got it is there anywhere else you'd like to go because we're gonna get bone maize tomorrow i'm just amazed at how quickly that you went from i could not eat it again in life too let's order a second one well sometimes you just need to eat more food to push the food down and then you know it's just science i just want to try their number one most popular now that i know which one it is are you gonna be able to sleep at night no [Music] i got it did they laugh no they didn't even recognize me i don't know how hot this is it was toasted looks like a single raw jalapeno and cucumber slice in each a bit of shredded pickled carrots it looks like the the same yellow sauce too i bet you can pick up that crunch on the microphone i don't like this one as much i don't think i could eat the whole thing too much it's very fatty it does taste like chatsu though i can taste like the star nice some of the same spices it's very fatty and there's no like salt so it just comes across as like bland maybe i need some of that like jalapeno and carrots or more of the sauce it's a lot better with the pickled carrots and the jalapeno but not like the other one better i like the variety of lunch meats and i like the saltiness of it i think the bread's still my favorite thing about all of this though for once but they agree with them i think i like the cold cuts better oh she's drunk bunnies in general i feel like it like tears up my mouth though because of how crispy the bread is it's like one of my favorite things about it would you recommend dom cafe yeah i thought they were good no i won't fall let's go get i'm so full i woke up in the middle of the night and i had this terrible worry like the first thing i thought of was still full i don't think i can eat clarification by middle of the night he really meant 8 p.m that was the middle of the night for me well it was the start of my night i guess we went to foe 54. her mother's from vietnam she's chinese it's like saying from vietnam it's like saying arguably that makes her vietnamese it's like saying i'm from china were you born in china and then we also got uh it was like it has like a it came with like a marrow dip a bunch of beef bone marrow floating in a pool of fat a lot of that those pieces were just like straight gelatinous fat yeah floating in a thick layer of like oily fat it tastes almost exclusively star anise yeah yeah that's what that was it was too much for me i think that is the flavor that i really didn't care for it was hard to eat too much of which i guess is good because it's just bone marrow and fat uh that's gotta be horrific for your body dude yeah and you're supposed to dip the baguette into it that was my like third bag out of the day of the like hour it wasn't my favorite but that being said i probably should have gotten the since it's 54. i got the bumble it instead the first one we had from yesterday the bomb boy i thought it was fine this one though this one was extremely good it was really good it was spicier the broth was like beefier you could tell the broth was richer just by the deep color the noodles were better there was some sort of like pork sausage meatball one meatball it was just like like a fourth of a meatball it was the smoothest softest porkiest thing i think i've ever tasted in my life i was like this blew my mind you have to eat one and apparently i ate the only one i'm not mad i think if you had tasted it you'd be at least a little bit annoyed place yesterday it makes me think we were naive and giving that one a good review because this one was so much better you really can't go wrong with anywhere here on belair they're all good it made me think of hawaii where we'd spend a long time like trying to find anywhere to eat and then here like we stopped to eat and she'd be like only there there there there there there there it's like and i'm so full so we're just like doing the best we can to to build up an appetite every moment we're here it's hard it's not that hard but it's a lot of fun and again this was super cheap he also got like a coconut drink all right it wasn't the cafe souda it was the coconut coffee so it had like a little bit of kind of had some coconut flavor in it really tell it was still like the vietnamese coffee you know and love super bitter super strong super sweet wait you had coffee at 6 00 pm i think i just literally cannot fit any more food into this body i think i gained 10 pounds during this two days what else do i still want to eat well stopping in that other plaza on bel air today made me want some chinese food after all you weren't born in china still a lot of work here to be done uh that's why we got a whole nother day planned so we will see you in the morning good night so for lunch we tried to go to pho bin by night but it was not open because it is not night so we went to fa bin by afternoon i don't know run close that four what opens that for arguably they could just use the same restaurant what kind of fun do we get bol bien voda bovine fa with the rare beef and meatballs and the meatballs were good noodles were okay it wasn't like mind-blowing it was very like average cabbage we thought the specialty there was the and apparently not i noticed every table around us was getting something else i just saw a mountain of like fried onions on top so when i asked the waitress i was like and she said it was the dry noodles so it was like fun noodles that's no soup very mild in flavor but it was so good it came with a nice like clear broth like a clear chicken broth that i thought was really tasty it was a lot more interesting about lunch option even though i had my bowl of i had to try it i like that's what everyone else was getting but most importantly what they had was a cafe souda which i thought was better than any other so far she said it tasted exactly like a frappuccino yeah it did she was not wrong he likes sugar he was a million percent sugar it was super good fall was a bit disappointing but the dry fall with chicken was very good and i've been wanting to try dry fall this did not disappoint it was very good definitely gonna try to make it myself at home it was more interesting than the pho i don't think i would make it a point to go there for this i wouldn't go there for it but i would want to make it myself at home so that i can adjust the flavor yes myself because i would like to have had a little more sauce i appreciate the subtlety of the sauce but i do like it a little saltier we still got a couple more meals to eat and we'll see you there so for dinner we made a little bit of a detour not that there wasn't a million billion more vietnamese restaurants that we would have loved to try but because i went to that one plaza yesterday and saw that one restaurant oh because we went to don cafe and you saw the szechuan restaurants yeah it was the chinatown part of town we had to make one stop so that she could sleep at night and we chose the male sichuan bistro off of bel-air [Music] and it was like our favorite place we had a box we're here on a vietnamese tour we tasted all these wonderful amazing vietnamese dishes that we can only kind of get either here or in vietnam but super good we started with the was it water poached fish water boiled fish fillet and it does not sound interesting at all but it's my favorite thing to get at sichuan restaurants so it's just entirely soaked in szechuan peppercorns i thought it was incredibly spicy and i was just sweating through endless napkins i think that guy understood when i was like i want more napkins it's less all of your napkins it's not so much spicy as it is numbing it just feels like numb it can do both because they also had plenty of red peppers in there too yes it was certainly within tolerable limits i just i wanted like i needed like a sweat rag and i needed to be able to like pull my shirt off and then i would have been fine to eat through that whole thing it was super good though but we also got a baby bok choy and some shiitake mushrooms which was his favorite debatably my favorite that was so good the sauce was absolutely delicious you could just like drink from those shiitake mushrooms they were so so packed with that flavorful sauce i like to have a bite of fish and then a bite of the vegetable the shiitake mushroom sauce was sweet the bok choy was very nice and refreshing it felt very fresh so we got an order of the sour and spicy wontons to go along with it they were like a pork dumpling it was okay i would have eaten more if we didn't have so much food to get through i have had better i would say the filling was a little lackluster it was kind of my least favorite of what we ordered yeah okay then the last thing we got was the don don noodles which is a very popular street noodle also very spicy it was i swear to god it was it was okay i didn't think it was spicy after she mixed it i smelled and i was like oh dear lord it smells so good tangy spicy nutty i thought it was spicier than the fish i didn't think it was spicy at all but yeah everything was good that we had i would have loved to try some of their like meats you know some other intestines oh my gosh yeah i feel like if anywhere on this street i would have felt comfortable ordering pig intestines it would have been here so i really wanted to but i'm still full from lunch well apparently i was preemptibly full from dessert apparently they were james beard nominated i see why in the middle of dinner i feel like we both just kind of looked at each other like this play's the best right i mean it's good that we ended on a high note right yeah it's one of the places i would definitely recommend people come to yeah for sure the one in asia town yeah i guess we can't vouch apparently the quality difference is uh noticeable so so apparently make sure to come to bel air for the uh authentic one and to round out the trip we've finally made a stop at bubble egg what has been promised since day one when we passed it i know it's kept eluding us this time we made sure to save stomach space i got the double chocolate waffle which was chocolate waffle with chocolate chips inside they poured chocolate chips into each one of those little bubbles so i got that with vanilla ice cream and nutella drizzle with whipped cream on top and i loved it i got the original waffle with pecans in each of the bubbles along with a scoop of chocolate ice cream and nutella on top and how did you like it it was okay i thought mine tasted better mine was like so warm and i love biting into each individual little i usually don't like the waffle cone in cantonese it's called kaitanzai kaidanzai is really popular in hong kong but i loved how each individual bubble had like melted chocolate chips in it and it was like chocolate waffle with melted chocolate chips contrasted that with the cold vanilla ice cream so it was a warm waffle with melty chocolate chip with cold ice cream so you get that temperature texture difference holy crap it was so good and i would say your waffle was definitely hot like it was piping hot mine was kind of just room temperature and my little egg pods would just crumble if you touched them which was kind of nice if you could just gently tap with your spoon scoop it up with some ice cream but one thing we both kind of noticed was that there's a big lump of ice cream on top so we kind of threw away like the last half of our waffle because you're just eating plain waffle i personally didn't mind because i don't ever eat the entire waffle anyway it's way too much carbs i do i only as many carbs as i would like i only want to eat enough waffle to finish my ice cream and then i'm good and i think this is just kind of one of those things where it's unimpressive in comparison because the only other time i've had this dish is when we went to new york and i thought that was absolutely perfect i figured that was really good forget the name of that place but me too you threw away none of that waffle in new york i still threw away the same amount i used the uh the royal u and that i did not it didn't break apart you could safely hold that whole waffle and you ate all the way down to the bottom again the royal you it's good i i do remember the one in new york being really good i wouldn't have felt right if we left without it and i don't regret a single bite of it no very good so that wraps up our trip to houston there's apparently a billion things here left to eat we did not step foot into the city at any point still a lot left here to explore but i don't think there was a single place that we didn't enjoy no everything was really good a lot of places we recommend all in all pretty successful food tour i'd say and then we'll see you next time [Music] [Music]

Channel: Susan and Eric

Views: 5,824

Keywords: houston texas food tour 2021, where to eat in houston 2021, best place to eat in houston 2021, houston bellaire, best place to eat in houston, houston asian food, Houston Texas Food Tour, what to eat in houston, best vietnamese food in texas, good food in houston texas, houston texas vlog, houston texas travel vlog, houston texas food, vietnamese food guide, best restaurants in houston tx, vietnamese food tour, houston texas tour, best restaurants in houston

Id: AGt5RKHZKBg

Length: 36min 12sec (2172 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 05 2021