Kosher Food and Drink

This review is part of a series of restaurant reviews conducted while my family was on vacation in Houston. It was an amazing opportunity to try many kosher restaurants in this growing Jewish community.

It seems like the first restaurant you’ll see in any Orthodox Jewish community of significant size is a pizzeria. And that makes sense! Everyone loves a good pizza, you don’t have the overhead that a meat place might have in terms of a mashgiach temidi (full-time), and there’s a lot of catering opportunities for local Jewish schools and organizations.

One of the restaurants we visited in Houston was Pizza TLV (9804 Hillcroft St, Houston, TX 77096; (832) 203-5784; totelaviv.com; under HKA supervision). It seems to alternatively be named “Taste of Tel Aviv”, but the sign on the front was Pizza TLV. Perhaps there was some sort of branding change? You may have heard of this restaurant in a less-positive context, as it was targeted for vandalism during the Israel-Gaza Conflict in 2023.

However, it was in great shape when we arrived, and had an appealing storefront. The inside was pretty nice, too, much more than I expected from a local neighborhood pizza shop.

The front end server was very friendly, and we got our orders in with no drama, albeit it wasn’t exceptionally speedy. We kept it simple: pizza (extra cheese), fries, and onion rings.

The fries were nothing special. The onion rings, on the other hand, were utterly fantastic. I have gotten too many onion rings lacking a crispy outside, and these were super crunchy and flavorful.

The pizza was alright, but I’d put it in the mid-range of kosher pizzas I’ve had. Definitely not bad by any means, but the sauce was a little sweeter than I prefer, the crust wasn’t very crispy, and, oddly enough, the cheese reminded me of some Pizza Hut pizza I had in my much younger, non-kosher-keeping days. It’s possible you will just love this pizza, and perhaps this is “Israeli-style”, but it just didn’t do it for me. Prices were about average for this kind of pizzeria; the pie was ~$30, which is maybe a couple bucks more than usual, but the nice store made up for it.

They also included some sort of pizza spice packet, which was a nice touch.

On the whole, dining there was a pleasant experience, and even if I didn’t love the pizza itself, it was good enough that I’d go back without a lot of arm-twisting.