In Houston, Diversity You Can Sink Your Teeth Into
Stephen Klineberg polishes off a spicy lamb mint burger, mops his brow and recalls the Houston he moved to as a young professor in the 1970s.
"It was a deeply racist, deeply segregated Southern city," he says; an oil boomtown of black and white Americans.
There were no restaurants like Pondicheri, where Houston chef Anita Jaisinghani's hip take on Indian street food — and the air conditioning's battle with 100-degree heat — conspire to make the Rice University professor sweat.
Houston back then was about steakhouses and Tex-Mex, smog and concrete. It was where bilingual meant English and Spanish, and staggeringly wealthy white oil men had the run of the place.
Sound familiar?
That image of this city of more than 2 million remains amber-fixed in the minds of most outsiders. It was true back then; now, it's almost all wrong, though energy remains king.
Vibrancy In Diversity
Boomtown Houston circa 2013 is a fast-growing mash-up of color, culture and ethnicity. The metro area of 4 million-plus people has been transformed into one of the nation's most diverse, seeding down-the-road political implications for deep-red Texas.
And nowhere, with the exception of city schools that count more than 80 native languages among their students, is the metamorphosis more visible than in Houston's dynamic, nationally recognized food scene.
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