Event season is upon us. Brace yourselves!
If you plan events for your office or you’re hosting a holiday party outside of your home, you know that the holidays will be here in the blink of an eye. By mid-October, many private dining rooms and event venues are already fully booked. When we heard that there was a new restaurant and lounge (with a second space of 2,000 square feet onsite for private events) nearly ready to open its doors in Midtown, we asked to see it immediately.
Tarakaan — located on Main with a valet entrance on Hadley street — has found its home in a 6,000-square-foot space that sat empty for the last many years. Now it boasts a rickshaw in the front foyer, intricate tile floor design, pressed tin ceiling, beautiful murals and an enormous Buddha as part of its French colonial design.
Tarakaan, which officially opens tomorrow, Sept. 16, features a large main dining room and lounge with a long bar. The smaller back room also has its own bar (and restroom) and seated dining: 85 can fit comfortably for a cockail reception, and the private space can accommodate 60 seated guests. The layout of both rooms makes it possible for guests to sit and dine in a restaurant-like setting until 11 pm, with lounge seating and banquets easily converting to a club ambiance later at night.
Behind Tarakaan is Piran Esfahani, who has been working the Houston hospitality scene for many years, and real estate group Oxberry, which owns the space. GM is Geoff Harmison (you may know him from his years with the Vallone and Cordúa restaurant groups), and overseeing the Asian fusion kitchen is chef Micah Rideout. Rideout — the son of American missionaries was born in Bangkok, Thailand, and raised in and around Chiang Mai — has developed a menu with influences from Vietnam, Thailand, Japan and India.
Invited in for lunch last week, we shared a few family-style plates. The 10-ingredient salad (photo above) arrived at the table carefully layered and was tossed tableside. Both colors and textures are vibrant thanks to frizzled rice noodles, slivers of cabbage, papaya, jicama, mango, pickled ginger, cashews, snow peas, nasturiums and apples. The dressing is salted plum, a well conceived salty-sweet complement.
If you can believe it, the dish in the photo above is Rideout’s take on “steak frites.” The beef is ribeye cubes seasoned in Asian pear marinade, and the frites come in the form of a crispy noodle salad. We also loved the curried cauliflower (photo below) dotted with spiced cashews, pickled raisins and brown butter powder.
At dessert time, Rideout (who has worked at Uchi and The Inn at Dos Brisas) arrived bearing a narrow, canoe-shaped dish with delicate, barely gelled panna cotta topped with toasted coconut, black sesame seeds and edible flower petals (photo below). Lucky for us our spoons were precisely the width of the serving dish, making efficient work of scraping up every last jiggly gob of panna cotta.
Tarakaan, 2301 Main suite 200 (next to Clé nightclub), 832-487-9096 tarakaan.com