The tomatoes are bite-sized and tossed in a housemade pesto vinaigrette, the asparagus has been roasted to fork-knifing perfection, the air inside the 70-seater restaurant in Houston Heights was being moved by Ingrid Michaelson, HAIM, and Vampire Weekend, the dominate art feature (each Postino location has one as a calling card) is an external shortside wall plastered with fragments of skateboards.
The decks add kaleidoscopic color to a refined industrial dark wood room, and pull together the zigzagged fabric of the comfortable cushioned seats as well as the cathedral-esque glass of the delicate lighting descending from ceiling above the bar.
There are a myriad of hardback books at that bar. They literally bookend the wine goblets and champagne flutes. Notably, a Bowie biography and Kirk West’s Allman Brothers photography collection Les Brers look down upon taps waiting to pour out any one of five Texas beers including Saint Arnold’s 5 O’Clock Pils, a craft brew that’s brewed just a few miles away as a crow would fly east.
Postino in Houston Heights is a subtle, sublime feast for the senses. It’s the perfect place to wake up on a Sunday morning and to become cool, calm, and collected.
And stuffed like a child’s teddy.
The seasonal bruschetta, the food vessel on which Postino proudly floats, on the mid-August Sunday morning I visited layed down a lightly heated roasted cauliflower and corn atop a romesco sauce. The result was a pleasant, slow burn in my spice-sensitive mouth. To reduce bread intake I indulged in just a few bites of the bruschetta as prepared and presented, then scraped the veggies and as much of the creamy Houston Dynamo forever orange romesco off as possible, thus devouring the good-for-me-goodies sans a crumb of carb-fueled guilt.
Not sure the bruschetta worked as a palate cleanser, but good god did it work.
Oh crap I was just talked into the crème brûlée. It’s 9:57am.
I mean, honestly, no one should be ordering crème brûlée at breakfast, not even when you dress the meal up all fancy-like and call it brunch, but after tasting it/not eating it just as Winnie the Pooh would have if the fluff-stuffed bear were also at Postino enjoying the best brunch in Houston Heights, I’m convinced that everyone should order the crème brûlée regardless of when they find themselves sitting down for a meal.
The portion size won’t make you hate yourself anymore than you already do, and the shallow oval dish is lined with thinly sliced strawberries so the dessert is basically a fruit on the defunct food pyramid. Break that caramelized sugar crust and don’t look back.
As I sat, digesting, watching fellow brunchers pour in as the volume of food coming from the open kitchen to my left rise along with the pleasing adult alternative soundscape, and contemplating my turning of the food dial up to eleven, a song with the lyric, “I wanna feel like I’m never ever gonna stop” played.
While I contrasted the sentiment in regards to the act of eating (after all I was coming apart at the seams in Pooh Bear style), I did share in the desire to never ever stop being in warm and welcoming spaces like Postino in Houston Heights, a low key classy gem in Houston’s renowned dining scene crown.
