April 1973
Montrose Lives!
There's something for everyone in Houston's Montrose, the strangest neighborhood east of the Pecos.
IN THE LIVING ROOM OF THE old house on the corner, the one with the odd turrets and built-in birdhouses, Clark Gable took acting lessons from old Dr. Webster, who used to teach English at Rice Institute.
Around the corner is the First Pagan Church, with papier mache statues, and signs proclaiming the virtues of Paganism, love and nudity. It's become a tourist attraction, and people drive in from all over the state to look at it. Above the door it says: "Our religion doesn't teach sin, shame or hypocrisy. So don't blame us for your dirty mind. With love all things are possible."
Over in the vacant lot next door to the old Jubilee Hall is a strange, incongruous boat-like structure. Gail Wilson, who lived down the street, remembered: "There was this old man who lived there, and he was building a lifeboat. He would come out at night to work on it and I would talk to him. He said Houston was sinking and would be covered by tidal waves. He said maybe he'd take me along. I think they've had him committed now…"
Pretty weird? Commonplace in Houston's Montrose, the strangest neighborhood in Texas…
You need to know about Prufrock's if you're going to understand this article. Prufrock's is a bar, sort of. It's not your ordinary bar, of course, with its battered old chairs that you lounge around in, a fireplace you have to stoke up yourself, and T. S. Eliot's "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" lettered along the top of three walls. You can win a free beer if you find the three errors that are supposed to be in it, but we don't know anyone who's ever done it.
"We don't get much street traffic in here," says Dorothy Schwartz, who owns Prufrock's. "We've let the bushes grow up over the sign out front, and the only people who really know we're here are our regular customers. We held out for a year and a half to get the kind of crowd we wanted."
It's not the kind of crowd most bar owners go out of their way to attract: lots of scruffy looking college and graduate student types (one University of Houston professor holds his finals in Prufrock's), artists, photographers, youngish journalists, that sort of crew. Some of them sit around playing chess and bridge a lot, which is not the kind of activity you're used to finding in bars, and there's a semi-permanent chess hustler named Steve who hangs out there trying to make his rent off unwary newcomers. That's probably what Prufrock's really is, a hangout, but since the Alcoholic Beverage Commission doesn't license hangouts, we'll have to settle for calling it a bar.
Prufrock's, not your standard bar, is comfortably hidden away in a part of Houston called the Montrose, which is decidedly not your standard city neighborhood. Located just off the southwest corner of downtown Houston, the area is composed mostly of old buildings ranging all the way from Victorian Epic to Ramshackle Plywood, and its history has wound a tortuous course from Silk Stocking to Low Rent and back again. It's been known at various times as a haven for Prohibition honky-tonks, antique stores, wealthy socialites, motorcycle gangs, gays, harmless eccentrics and a broad array of exiles, writers, artists and musicians. From the days when O. Henry worked for The Houston Post and peddled short stories on the side, Montrose has nourished Houston's creativity.
It's hard to say just exactly where the Montrose starts and stops because residents are always arguing, with equal vehemence, whether they should or should not be considered part of "that place." It's that kind of neighborhood: people either want in or out of it. Generally speaking, though, one can define the borders as West Gray to the north, Shepherd Drive on the west, the Southwest Freeway to the south, and Smith Street on the east (about 7.5 square miles with some 30,000 inhabitants.) The spatial boundaries are relatively easy to determine—Exxon makes maps that help with those—it's the spiritual borders that are hard to fix.
Though it is certainly much more, the Montrose has become identified with a conspicuous string of European-style restaurants and sidewalk cafes which are earning it, not altogether deservedly, the title of Houston's Left Bank. Scattered along five blocks of what's now called the Westheimer Strip, and housed in renovated pre-World War One homes, the restaurants offer up foreign cuisines, wines, music, accents and ambience. Together with an electric assortment of boutiques, antique stores, specialty shops and the like, the restaurants help the Strip provide a little cosmopolitan flash to an otherwise languid Boomtown.
As must seem both appropriate and inevitable, the sidewalk cafe craze was sparked not by Houstonians, or even Texans, but by foreigners. Ari Varoutsos wandered down from Montreal to run a restaurant at San Antonio's Hemisfair in 1968, dropped by Houston, saw the Montrose and decided to stay.
"When I come to Houston I was passing by—I was a visitor—and I see that you have great big restaurants here, big dining rooms, very formal, you had to be dressed to go in and you had to spend 7, 8, 10 dollars a person to have a good dinner. So I saw that there was need for a good restaurant, with good food, and not very expensive.
"So what I did, I happened to pass by Westheimer and I see this little building here, which I liked. And I built it myself, the whole restaurant is handmade, the tables are made out of sewing machines. I was by myself, I was my own cook."
Opened in 1969, Ari's Grenouille sported antique clocks, paintings, a handbuilt Spanish hurdy-gurdy, a pseudo-French accordionist and all the French onion soup you could eat for $1.25. An immediate hit with students and Montrose hangers-on, Ari's did not at first really catch on in Houston at large but, rather, just simmered for a bit like a good spaghetti sauce, while another European got ready to slip the Westheimer Strip into high gear.
Soon after the end of the Second World War, Willie Rometsch had been apprenticed out as a cook in his native Bavaria at the age of 13. He became a journeyman cook in Munich, then was chef de banquet for Sweden's King Gustaf until the Sheraton Corporation lured him to Houston in 1962. He later struck out on his own and found the backing to open the Bismarck in downtown Houston, one of those "big dining room, very formal" places Varoutsos saw in 1968, and recently named by Southern Living as one of the ten best restaurants in the south. But Rometsch had his eye on the Montrose.
"I saw a potential for a unique atmosphere, I could visualize a very picturesque background. It's something Europeans are very accustomed to, where you can sit down and read the newspaper with a glass of wine, no rush.
"I talked to my backers and they said 'But there's nothing but homosexuals and strip joints there.' But I thought that was what was needed, that it was all good, gives the area some character, like Greenwich Village."
Together with a new partner, Mirko Predesoin, Rometsch opened Michelangelo's sidewalk cafe in October of 1970, delivering Southern Italian cookery into a good vibes environment of awnings, ferns, flowers, guitars and fine wines. River Oaks ladies had never seen the like, Houston's social superstars breezed in to soak up a little Continental élégance, the place did a land office business and the Great Restaurant Hustle was on. Rometsch had had the good sense to move about ten blocks closer to downtown than Ari had.
There was no stopping after that. Restaurants sprouted like wildflowers, all in rebuilt Victorian homes seeing their second incarnation as Left Bank bistros with an international barrage of foods and wines. Ari opened a Greek place, the Bacchanal, which does its best to live up to its name (and offers belly-dancing lessons during the day); and Rometsch had a hand in four more, including Boccaccio 2000, a disco-restaurant furnished in Modern Kubrick that's become a Jet Set pit-stop for movie stars lost in Houston. Everybody wanted a restaurant, and they're still going up, apparently with room for all of them so long as they don't run out of countries with distinctive foods, wines, or at least tablecloths.
The early arrivals are getting just a little bit wary of all the new competition. Ari says, "It doesn't matter how many restaurants there are, they just need to be good. Houston was ready for something like this," but adds, "I'm afraid we get some unprofessional people in here."
Rometsch is a little more blunt, saying that "a lot of people are getting greedy" and admitting that some of the restaurants, including those he has an interest in, wouldn't rate too many stars if the Michelin Guide bothered with Houston. "Michelangelo's was very poor for a while until we brought some new people in. A restaurant can never stand still, it needs constant promotion and it can't be phony."
One of the unfortunate consequences of the Westheimer Strip scene is that a lot of genuinely good Montrose restaurants are lost in the glare. Cardet's Cafe, for instance, hidden behind a drug store over on Fairview, functions as headquarters for Houston's tightly-knit Cuban exile community and offers a menu of bona fide Cuban dishes. Las Brisas, a working-class Mexican restaurant and hangout, a couple of creole cafes, places like Phil's plying downhome plate lunches at downhome prices, were part of the Montrose scene before the suburbs discovered the Strip.
