Smoking, butterflies and Chubby’s

Dear Readers,

It’s been only a fairly busy couple of days.  We are not doing much today (or last in Texas), but we are having dinner tonight at another Michelin recommended place, so there may be blog worthy food porn from that yet.

Over the last couple days, the highlight was probably yesterday’s lunch.  We picked up bbq from a place in downtown Spring (the place with the shotgun houses).  But Corkscrew is in a trailer.  You have to set up your pickup time because they sell out so quickly.  

It is the rare barbeque place in the world with a Michelin rating of distinction.   I checked. :)  If you can imagine, there was a line around the trailer to get in — at 1130!!! Michelin says to get there at 11 when they open or go eat elsewhere (it’s not quite that bad, but you get the idea).  We ordered ahead, so we had our pounds of meat. :). Here’s my plate:

Supposedly, the claim to fame is it is cooked over red oak, and it does have some color to it and a strong smokey taste.  as Michelin said, you can taste the smoke long after you eat it.  So, it was a big hit. 

To go back to Wednesday, we spent the day at the Houston Museum of Natural Science (HMNS), which was pretty amazing. 

The highlight was their butterfly area; it had its own waterfall and was 3 stories high.  At the beginning they gave you a laminated legal-size sheet with pictures to identify the butterflies — on both sides!!!  I insert just a couple pictures here. 

I talked to the staff person working the area and she told me about the bird over my head, which was a native of Angola, has a terrible sounding call — between a crow and a dog, she said — and it (or they, there’s a pair) like to poop on the staff.  She was keeping an eye on it — “I see where you are” — because she had yet to be pooped on.  Butterfly room working hazard, I guess. 

The other exhibit we paid to see in the building was of King Tut.  He wasn’t there (they put him back in his tomb in Egypt) and we thought the exhibit was both fakey and hokey.   

OTOH, they had their own huge Egyptian room with lots of good real artifacts from there. 

Dinner was at a place near KG’s called Chubby’s.  It had a good rating on Google; it was supposedly a “seafood place with a Latin flair.”  Right.

Don’t get me wrong, the food was good.  But the experience! :).  So, KG orders a margarita.  Their specialty one.  The waiter immediately says “we don’t have that tequila.”  So, he moves on to the second, their “golden.”  Away goes the waiter.  

K’s drink comes.  But no margarita.  After about ten minutes, the waiter comes back and says “turns out we don’t have that tequila, either.”  You know, a Mexican place without tequila…like a desert without sand.  KG orders the classic margarita with mango juice.  

A bunch more minutes.  A guy (not our original waiter) brings our appetizers and asks how things are going and if KG needed a drink and he says “I ordered a margarita.”  The guy (he might have been the chef) makes him repeat his precise order and says “Okay,” and bounces away. 

Nothing.  

Another ten minutes and finally the first guy comes back with his mango margarita, which he says is good. 

He has only taken like one drink and here comes the waiter to say “we have our alcohol order here and we can make whatever one you want.  If you want it, we’ll give you the specialty one (with the most expensive tequila) on the house.”  KG says “sure…”. 

At one point I said “they really don’t want you to have a margarita, do they?” and he agreed they didn’t seem to want him to. 

But here’s their shrimp tacos, which K had. 

Like I said, food was very good. 

Around the bbq delivery, we ate on KG’s golf club’s veranda, we looked around the golf course.  It’s called Gleannloch (someone named the whole place with that irrational misspelling! 😡) and is in the north and slightly west part of Houston.  There are 27 holes and they own A LOT of property.  

Probably the outstanding characteristic having driven around the course is that it has at least one tunnel on each 9.  Never seen a course with some many tunnels.  We were told that in a hard rain they flooded up to the road above.  :) 

The course looked good, very green for Texas at the end of summer, and there was a fair amount of  play for a Thursday afternoon on an 88 degree day (they think that’s nothing here). [K took all the pictures while I drove]

And that’s about it.  We leave tomorrow as early as we can to head east; we stop tomorrow night in a place I didn’t know existed till we drove by it last week — Evergreen, Alabama.  I suspect it’s a misnomer. :)

Till later…