The menu sources unique ingredients from local farms and from far away the handsome, personable waiter brags, for example, that the creamy burrata cheese is made by family friends of chef Troy’s in Italy and overnighted on the regular for the roasted beet salad with frisee, spiced honey and citrus vinaigrette in which it stars. The food here - inspired by Guard’s travels throughout Asia and the Pacific Rim and his early days working in exotic kitchens around the world, like Roy Yamaguchi’s splashy Tao in New York - is beautifully executed and artfully presented. Some banquettes peer into the open kitchen (There’s a larger eat-in lounge space up front, and another bar upstairs in the private dining area.) It’s a huge kitchen, too, with two big grills ablaze, a complete charcuterie station and a raw bar that spills out onto a cool bar space in the back. The best seats in the house are the four-person ones situated both to sidle up to the vast open kitchen and offer a wide take on the streetscape in the other direction. Tuna sashimi with jalapeño, ponzu and coarse salt You’d call it “raw” except that it’s warmed up considerably by materials such as the deep blue velvet of the banquettes, which range from two-seaters up to deep, inviting six-seating versions. Post-Space-Age spacey, in the way perhaps of edgy 1980s sci-fi. This is, oxymoronically enough, an old-school kind of modern. Throw in bending banisters of brutalist concrete, and overhead, an art installation of 4,600 individually hung bronze rods dripping from the ceiling. Imagine stepping into a soaring, multi-level space of glass and concrete, with a 30-foot wall of windows framing the ground-floor vista of Smith Street, with a thoughtful alternative rock soundtrack à la Lana Del Rey and Sir Sly saturating the air. Guard, working with Boss Architecture out of Denver, has truly gone there. The city has seen wild takes on modern before, certainly the Cordúas’ surrealistically tilting Américas comes to mind. The new restaurant’s dramatic mod environsįrom your first steps into the space - Guard’s first venture outside his home state, named after his young daughter Grace - it’s apparent that this is a bold, rare kind of restaurant for Houston.
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