Theodore Rex

Justin Yu's Warehouse District restaurant — the James Beard Best Chef Southwest winner (for his earlier Oxheart) opened this smaller, more personal room as his current flagship. The menu changes constantly with what's coming in from Gulf Coast and Texas farms; the cooking is unpretentious but technically rigorous, the kind of work that earned Yu his national reputation. Less formal than the Oxheart era, more deliberately about ingredient and instinct. For one of Houston's most quietly important kitchens.