Now that I’m no longer traveling two weeks out of every month, I’ve been enjoying the home time and the Houston time.

Our family lives just to the southwest of Houston’s “Loop” where most of the high-profile and fine dining takes place. While we have ready access to the central dining scene, we are also just a stone’s throw from an archipelago of small municipalities in the western section of our megalopolis.

With more time on the ground and yawny with the however wonderfully vibrant culinary world inside the Loop, I’ve been treating myself to lunch out with one overarching criterion: the restaurant where I dine has to be to the west of me (not to the east inside the Loop).

One of my earliest finds has been the extraordinary Middle Eastern restaurant Kabab Shack and Grill.

From the outside, this joint looks like just another anonymous strip mall restaurant. But once you walk inside and notice that the cooks are impeccably outfitted in black chef coats and toques, it becomes clear that the venue’s focus is gastronomic excellence. The older gentleman at the counter, whom I imagine is the owner, reminded me of the old school kebab places I’ve frequented in France, Italy, and Israel.

I ate every last bit of my gyro-stuffed pita. The meat was wonderfully savory without being excessively salty. The lettuce, onion, and tomato were fresh, crisp, and flavorful. And the fries, perfectly dressed with spice and tahini, were among the best I’ve ever eaten.

The thing that blew me away about this place was the professionalism of the cooks and the manager/owner. The kitchen was so clean and orderly I thought I was eating at Boulud in New York. It took a minute for my order to come out (I was one of the first customers that day) and one of the cooks made a point to thank me for my patience. The older gentleman who took my order was cordial and warm.

I loved this place and can’t wait to explore more of the menu. My new series on west Houston dining: “Worth the Drive West.” Stay tuned for more.

My political posts are getting a lot of views these days, with literally hundreds of comments. When I posted about our protest of the Neo-Confederate monument in Orange, Texas, where more than 20 Confederate battle flags are flown, a number of commenters disparaged me and my fellow protesters as damn and dumb Democrats.

Conspicuously displayed Neo-Confederate may be a Dem-v-Rep issue in other places. But in Orange, that’s impossible: the district is overwhelmingly Republican. In 2024, more than 80 percent of voters supported Trump. I hate to break it to my detractors, it’s one of the rubiest red places in the country.

And yet, the City of Orange vehemently and aggressively opposed the memorial’s construction in the years leading up to its unveiling.

The town’s Republican-controlled municipal government swiftly passed a law limiting the height of new flag poles (the Sons of Confederate Veterans planned for the flags to be visible from the interstate). They also made it abundantly clear to the Sons that they would not be able to hold a public event at the site because it lacks disabled parking.

I’ve personally spoken to a number of city leaders, all of them Republican, who have expressed their opposition to the site. Whether they oppose it for moral or practical reasons may be up for debate. But they all agree that this racist eyesore counters the winning narrative that Orange is returning to its glory days as a major industrial hub (Chevron just opened a sprawling new refinery there).

The best news: the City of Orange has greenlighted a $50 million mall to be erected at the same corner of MLK Dr. (yes, MLK Dr.!) where the monument stands. I can’t imagine Republican business leaders won’t want this albatross to scare people off. The memorial is in decline, with many of the flags badly damaged. Nearly a decade after it was inaugurated, the old white men who built it are now in their 80s. (The old geezer who manages the site goes to our family’s church and I see him every year at Easter in the pews.)

There is a season… turn, turn, turn.

After news broke last week about the passing of Carlo Petrini, founder of the Slow Food movement, people reached out asking me about my experiences at the Slow Food University, also founded by him.

In the years I taught there, I never interacted with him directly beyond a passing hello. But every day on campus I saw firsthand the way he indefatigably inspired those who worked and studied with him.

I’ll never forget what one of the students said to me.

“I want to make the world a better place to eat,” he told our class. It was as if the young man had distilled the entire Slow Food manifesto, published by Petrini in 1987.

Ultimately, I believe that Petrini’s greatest gift to us was language. He gave us the words we were searching for to describe a fast-changing world where we no longer knew our culinary place.

The phrase “slow food” alone! Some will be remembered for 1980s-era idioms that entered the cultural firmament (wax on, wax off; where’s the beef?). Petrini gifted us a single word that forever changed the way we eat and think about eating. Slow.

One of his campaigns over the last decade called on Piedmont grape growers to stop grubbing up less lucrative grapes like Dolcetto and Barbera as they made way for the all-powerful Nebbiolo.

In 2016, he published an opinion in the Italian daily La Repubblica where he noted that Nebbiolo monoculture was degrading the area’s biodiversity. As a result, the character of the wines was changing.

“When I hear of producers who rip out their Dolcetto and Barbera so they can grow Nebbiolo,” he wrote, “it breaks my heart. This negates the true value of viticulture in Langa. There is a diversity of soil types here. Over the centuries, they, like the growers, have adapted to the grapes in different ways as those varieties evolved. Together, they have given their very best.”

A few years later, I started to see winemakers across Italy replanting the “village grapes” as some called the local varieties. It was the umpteenth example of how he used the written word to make us reimagine the power of agriculture.

In today’s world of unending, head-spinning change, we could use some more Slow in our lives.