Kosher Food and Drink

During my family’s recent vacation in Houston, we had the fantastic opportunity to sample many of the city’s kosher restaurants.

Houston has a sizable Orthodox Jewish community, and about fifty thousand Jews in the city. While this is not quite the size of the large Jewish populations in the MD-DC-VA, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and other major Jewish population centers, the relatively concentrated nature of the Houston Jewish community seems to allow it to support a larger number of kosher restaurants than its size might suggest.

One of those kosher restaurants was Saba’s Restaurant (9704 Fondren Rd, Houston, TX 77096; (713) 270-7222; sabasrestaurant.com; under HKA supervision), which is what I would classify as “neighborhood kosher pizzeria.” Every major town with a kosher-eating population seems to have one, and it’s always about the same paradigm: order at the counter, it’s not terribly expensive, your food comes out, and it pretty much is what it is. “Heimishe” would not be a bad descriptor for those of you who know what that means.

The neighborhood it’s in is not great, and the slightly off-kilter sign is not as endearing as I think it was intended to be. The inside is a moderate improvement. Everything is somewhat well-worn, but they put in a bit of effort into making the place look nice. I was not necessarily a fan of how crowded the ordering area was, but I understand the trade-off between kitchen and retail space. This isn’t really a good spot for your anniversary dinner, but for an informal dinner out with family, it’ll do.

Saba’s has a deep menu, which is something I’ve grown to appreciate as such menus become more rare due to cost cutting. There’s also sushi, which I didn’t try. Most of the dishes are in the $10-$20 range, so not terribly expensive (I miss the $1.50 slices of pizza from my childhood!).

We ordered the nacho chips as an appetizer. These were something of a surprise hit with the table. The cheese and bean sauce coating was evenly applied through the layers of the chips, and the pico de Gallo was well-constructed. Would it have been better with real nacho cheese and some guac? Yes. But compared to the poor implementations I had seen previously in the kosher world, I was happy enough with it.

My wife and I ordered paninis; the kids had baked ziti. At this point, I had a small complaint: my tuna melt panini wasn’t really a panini.

I’m not trying to claim to be some sort of gourmand, but paninis are made with Italian bread, not whatever this was. It wasn’t a bad tuna melt as they go; tasty but somewhat uninspired, albeit with more attractive plating than the norm. The tuna was not high-end or anything. My wife’s Tunisian panini also suffered from the Italian bread deficiency, albeit she opined that it tasted pretty good.

The baked ziti was apparently pretty good (didn’t get pictures, but it wasn’t anything special). However, that’s relying on my kids’ opinions, which tend to go from “terrible” to “terrific” pretty quickly.

Service was acceptable enough; we didn’t wait long for our food. With this restaurant paradigm and price point, simply not screwing it up is enough to earn passing marks.

I know it’s a bit of a faux pas to evaluate a pizza place and not actually try their pizza, so I apologize to my readers (and Saba’s) for that. I suppose my conclusion for now is that they seem like a reasonably competent option for casual dairy in the area, and probably have something for everyone, even picky eaters. That said, even a reasonably competent pizzeria is something a fair number of kosher communities don’t manage to pull off, so some credit is due here.