If a 5 year old master chef made a restaurant...

So I have been eagerly waiting to blog this foodventure since I had a backlog to get through and quite frankly this place is quite frankly fantastic.  I had first read about Jus’ Mac on a blog when they were first opening up and for some reason it took a random trip months later to end up here.  I am still kicking myself for not dragging myself up here sooner than I did.

To call Jus’ Mac simple would be an unfair statement, sure there are not many frills, and the building is small, but as the recurring theme in this blog seems to prove, sometimes doing one thing right without too many bells and whistles is the right thing to do.  The restaurant is housed in a small building on Yale just south of the 610 Loop’s north side, and if you aren’t looking for it you will drive right past it, I did this and I was looking for it. 

After strolling into the darkly decorated space I was bombarded by the menu, and it was no easy task to work my way down the varieties of mac and settle on one that would tickle my fancy.

So following a steady debate we decided to settle on three small varieties of mac so that we could amp up the possibility and have a little left over for a later meal (made an excellent side dish for a meal the next day).  All their macs can come with regular or whole grain pasta for those of you who are looking to make this decadent meal a little healthier, it’s the thought that counts right?

Our first selection was the Cheeseburger; this skillet of love was full of ground beef, onions, garlic, and of course topped with cheese (Colby Jack to be precise).  I will just go ahead and say this was my favorite of the three we chose from, it was stellar and I would eat a bucket of it if I had one.

Then there was option numero dos, Buffalo Chicken, this skillet was filled with pan seared chicken, seasoned with Frank’s Red Hot Sauce (one of my favorite hot sauces around), and topped with blue cheese.  Your basic run of the mill Buffalo Chicken recipe it would sound like, but wait, there was one last twist in this pasta, thick slab bacon.  Yes, that is correct, THICK SLAB BACON, for those of you who might be hard of hearing; it was wickedly thick bacon that seemed to kick everything else in the teeth.  This past was pretty dang good but still came in at second to the Cheeseburger.

Look I even ate a vegetable.

Then there was the third and final pasta, the Quattro, we figured that a tweaked “traditional” mac and cheese would be a good way to go.  The Quattro is a mac with a “special 4 cheese blend”, which we could not exactly place our fingers on, and a topping of mozzarella and parmesan.   Needless to say, this was our least favorite of the macs because there wasn’t anything that really set it apart from anything more than average.

So if you feel the urge to venture over to Jus’ Mac sometime I have two nuggets of wisdom to impart upon you today.  First, be adventurous, they have some fun combinations and my only regret here was that I could not try more, but give it time I will.  Secondly, get bread crumbs on the mac; it adds a whole new dimension to it with texture really takes it to the higher level.

Basically this place is awesome, go there. 

The rooster made me do it...

This adventure led me to a BRC Gastropub here in Houston located on Shepherd Drive.  A gastropub is a restaurant that serves higher end beer and food and BRC definitely lives up to that definition.  You may be asking what exactly BRC means take a look at their giant statue outside of the restaurant and soak it up.

Now that we have got that out of our system I will issue a disclaimer that I did not exactly go full force into the menu here, just a light sampling of the beer and an appetizer, but after getting my toes wet here it is just a matter of time before I am back to dive in.  Check out the menu for yourself and it is not too hard to see why I will be back.

For the beer tonight I drank up one of my all time favorite beers, Moose Drool. This rich beer is brewed by Big Sky Brewery out of Missoula, Montana.   It is full of flavor, a malty beer, loaded with chocolate and caramel giving it a smooth drink that goes down way too easily at times.

My second beer of the night was another sampling from No Label in Katy, Texas.  This time it was El Hefe Hefeweizen, a sweet beer perfect for the warm summer nights here in Houston.  While I am not a big fan of hefeweizen myself, this one was good and easy to drink.  No Label has quickly become one of my favorite breweries that I keep an eye out for whenever I am at a bar with a wide selection of taps to choose from.

Then came the appetizer, with a wide list to choose from we tossed it back and forth for some time before the waitress informed us of one of the house specials, mac and cheese.   You will find this item under the sides portion of the menu, but as you can see there is no description of the flavor. This is because they rotate it day to day, featuring a new flavor on different days of the week.  This night’s special was buffalo chicken and bleu cheese, a combo too good to say no to.  The chicken was their “Dixie fried chicken” and it was quite frankly amazing and the bleu cheese was perfectly balanced, not too over powering, but all in all a delicious dish.

Basically, it is only a matter of time before I return here for dinner (Monday nights are $7 burger and fry nights) or brunch (their chicken fried steak sounds killer) so stay tuned for a future write up.