About

When I was six years old, my father took me to a restaurant, took my fork out of my hand, and replaced it with a pair of chopsticks. What followed was an epic battle against balance, gravity, and my own fingers. Once the check had been paid and the waiter had been tipped, my father snapped his fortune cookie in half and asked me, “Now what did you learn about people from China today?” I looked up at him with what I imagine were very wide eyes and said, without missing a beat, “They’re hungry.”

When my father and I shared a meal, we shared it at a restaurant. Not Chili’s or McDonald’s, but local places. Family-owned places. Places he frequented when he started working as an electrician in the Med Center in the late 1970′s, places he happened upon while he drove around all day. He taught me how to tip. (20%, please, unless your waiter or waitress does something absolutely heinous like, oh, sets you on fire, and even then, at least 15%.) He taught me how to love Houston. He taught me how to eat.

When I lived with my father between college semesters, we would go out to dinner when he got home from work. He’d finish what he ordered—”a member of the Clean Plate Club, in good standing”—but I’d have leftovers, which I brought home. The next day, I’d have the leftovers for lunch and we’d start the whole process over again. We rarely went grocery shopping, which meant there was plenty of room for our cat to lounge around in the fridge, something she tried to do every time we opened it to get a drink.

He was always supportive of my creative writing pursuits, so when I called him from school and told him that I wanted to spend 2010, my first year as a college graduate, visiting 495 restaurants, he instantly said, “Let’s do it.” It would have been easy for the two of us to do that without even trying. We planned on getting dinner and dessert every day, plus breakfast and lunch on the weekends.

On the first of November, unbeknownst to me, my father called 911 because he couldn’t catch a breath. He called me the next day from the hospital. I flew home to Houston. By the end of the week, he had been diagnosed with cancer. By the end of the month, I was planning his memorial service.

So what started as a silly food blog has turned into something a lot more important for me. It’s giving me a reason to get out of bed. It’s giving me a way to put roots down in my hometown again after being away for college. Most importantly, it’s giving me a way to honor my father.