I ate crickets and didn’t hate them, Houston food critic says

Street to Kitchen had recently acquired its wine and beer license, and Graham clearly was having fun matching his interesting picks with his wife Benchawan Painter’s Thai dishes. “This works with the crickets,” he assured me, and he was right. The combo tasted like summer, refreshed.

“Champagne and insects, that’s the future,” he declared. Maybe he’s right about that, too.

Mexico had already softened me up for insect-eating with crispy grasshoppers (chapulines), delicate small ant eggs (escamoles) and red mole deepened with dried flying ants (chicatanas) — all of which I’ve encountered in Houston, too, primarily at Hugo Ortega’s restaurants. You can taste the wild funky edge imparted by those flying ants in the mole chicatana with pork ribs at Xochi, Ortega’s Oaxacan restaurant downtown; or adding its je ne sais quoi to the obligatory Prime ribeye plate.

“Eating crickets this way is mostly about the chitinous texture,” writes food critic Alison Cook.

So crickets weren’t a huge leap for me. I confess my eyes widened as I took in those high angled legs that give the insects their spring, but I’m at a point in my life (and my understanding of our collective human future) where I figure it’s all just protein. Snap! Crackle! Pop!

Who knows what our species will be eating in a hundred years, if we make it that far? Something tells me we’ll be getting over some of our deep-seated food aversions and broadening our ideas of what suitable foods are. Might as well start now.

It was no accident that this unusual dish appeared on Saturday at Street to Kitchen. That’s the day the Painters shop the Urban Harvest farmers market, where they launched their business as a Thai omelets-and-more kiosk. Now they pick seasonal and local ingredients to take back to their brick and mortar for specials like a 16-ounce Angus steak dry-aged for 14 days and cooked Tiger-Cries style.

I couldn’t resist. This elemental Thai beef dish has long been a favorite of mine, but it’s rare (a word I choose purposely) that I find one cooked the way I like it. Benchawan Painter’s was: gorgeously rare, seared to a fine salty crust in a pan, and served up with a basketful of well-considered condiments. 

There was green papaya slaw to go along, cool and fish-saucy, with blistered green beans the width of matchsticks in the mix. There was super-sticky sticky rice in a little plastic bag, to break off piece by piece and use as a chaser. 

Last but not least was a dark-brown pool of dip incorporating the Thai version of garum, the ancient Roman fermented fish funk. It’s a sauce made of fermented mackerel, batang, and it’s a trip when you use it to goose the dry-aged beef.  (Which most assuredly will NOT be on the menu in a future of champagne and insects.)

My whole meal was a trip, actually. Make that a voyage, although I ate it about three-quarters of a mile from my house.

Even Benchawan Painter’s rectangular garlic-chive “pancakes” I’ve grown to love seemed to have an extra-ephemeral frizzle to their surfaces, a deeper green allium tone from the garlic chives, and an extra measure of supple elasticity from their glutinous rice-flour base. I consider them to be among Houston’s best dishes.

Just remember that Saturdays tend to be booked up because of the farmers market specials. Plan accordingly, and don’t try to just walk in. The restaurant is the size of a postage stamp, which is part of its quirky charm.

I sat at the four-person counter, in front of the nice new wine-and-beer refrigerator case, underneath a mural of white rabbits jumping over the blue moon. Thai rap was percolating over the sound system, in a cozy room in the end cap of a gas station. At least part of the future was already here, crickets, bubbles and all.

Street to Kitchen, 6501 Harrisburg, 281-501-3435. Website: streettokitchen.com