The City Through Food

This is Noah using Travis's account. I can't remember my password for my gmail account and he very generously let me use his account to do my assignment.

Houston has always been a place that emphasizes community. In a city so spread out people naturally gravitate towards each other despite. It's funny how that works. My communities in Houston have, strangely (and i like to think uniquely), have always been formed by the restaurants I eat at. My mom loved cooking, and food, and people, so restaurants were a natural place of happiness for her. She made friends so easily by the time we left a restaurant she'd know the cooks. Two diners stick out in my mind the most, Jenni's Noodle House and the West Alabama Ice House. As a young child I frequented the West Alabama Ice House with my parents on friday nights.
Why would a sub 7 year old be going to an Ice House on friday nights? Free. Hotdogs. It was at the West Alabama Ice House that I enjoyed my first true community. I played basketball with other kids like me taking advantage of the free food, I played my first game of poker on an electronic poker machine, I listend to my first live music, and I learned how to deal with people of all different backgrounds. Treat them the same. It's the best lesson to learn early on, because when you're a kid hanging around an Ice House for free food you really don't know any better than that. I knew the man that grilled the hot dogs, and the lady behind the counter (bar) and the people that owned the place. It's places like these that are why i love Houston. In Houston people allow you to be yourself. A 6 year old can go to an Ice House every friday and receive his free hot dogs and a few words of wisdom. He is allowed to grow and take on the ideals of the city. The ideals of community, and kindness, and the celebration of human diversity. Those are the ideals I learned every friday at the Ice House. The city of Houston was always presented to me through restaurants and the Ice House was always an open forum of learning. From lessons in toughness received by getting knocked over on the concrete basketball court, to lessons of humanity from watching the owner giving his hot dogs to the homeless. The Ice House was a celebration of the city itself. 

But as I grew older we frequented the Ice House on west alabama less and less. It was soon replaced by Jenni's Noodle House. JNH resides on shepherd street and appropriately shepherd is what the Noodle House and it's owners always were to me. The restaurant is a cozy little vietnamese place that you wouldn't know was there unless you were looking for it. The food is cheap and the portions are big their dumplings hold the answers to the universe. It's over those dumplings, or noodles, or rice that I pondered my coming of age questions, and around me, the patrons of the restaurant and the owners themselves always held the answers. It was at Jenni's Noodle House that the original idea for the Stefan Schwartz Pancreatic Research fund was hatched, and at Jenni's Noodle House where my mother's rehearsal dinner was had, and it was at Jenni's Noodle House where my first birthday as a highschool student was had and at Jenni's Noodle House where I learned what it meant to work.

The owners are just as special as the place itself. Overly friendly, obsessively detail oriented and hard working in the extreme only watching them would leave an impact on anybody. Getting to know them cemented my foundation. Everything I learned from the Ice House could have been filed away and forgotten if not for Jenni's. The restaurant breaths Houston and embodies it. It showed me that the values I learned as a child are not to be forgotten or written off as impossibilities but rather ways to succeed in the world. Without the city, without its restaurants, without the people you meet there world views could not be shaped as they are today. The idea of multi-cultural, multi-economical, multi-cerebral would be just that, ideas. They wouldn't exist as part of our realities on a day to day basis. That is why restaurants are the true melting pots of any city, places where people of all backgrounds and races can come together jovially. Places where the ideals of all peoples can be spread and listened to and accepted. "All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. Great works are often born on a street corner or in a restaurant's revolving door." 
-Albert Camus