We focus on varietal and appellation correct wines that overdeliver for the price. Our goal is to deliver a straight forward wine list that is easy to read and offers selections that fit any budget, while offering something for everyone.

Additionally, we are at the right time now to enjoy the sweetest corn for soups, sauces and salads. We have found a staff members’ family, who is growing some tremendously sweet and perfectly ripe ears and we will be incorporating them wherever appropriate.

I like to include some of the flavors from my heritage occasionally in my dishes. A mole-like sauce makes it into my soups, marinades, and sauces. The roasted corn and shellfish chowder is one of my classic soups and you will have the chance to enjoy it this week.

We had the pleasure to enjoy Henry Bryan’s fresh tomatoes recently. They are some of the best that are grown locally in my opinion. We can’t wait for his next crop to be available.

Buffalo Hangar is back baby! Finally, we were able to get some beautiful cuts. It’s a favorite among the Block 7 crowd. We are sizzlin’ up what’s referred to as the butcher’s cut. Just think tender and flavorful. You know what, don’t think about it – just come in and enjoy it.

I didn’t happen to notice the sign that indicates 51 percent of the proceeds come from bar tabs, but I soon realized that Block 7 Wine Company is primarily a watering hole.

First, there’s the name. Also, the glassed-in wine store tucked away in a corner of the dining room and a sprawling tasting bar where you can sample the wares. And most of the people who visited the Shepherd-near-Washington spot when I did were clutching stemware rather than silverware.

But Block 7’s casual-to-classy fare is far from simple bar grub, and way better than it needs to be. With food this good and wine prices this considerate (there’s no mark-up, so they’re what you would pay retail), there’s as much in this year-old wine bar for foodies to savor as there is for oenophiles.

The salty, low-priced starters labeled “snacks” seem designed to sharpen patrons’ thirst. That was definitely the effect of the hot pretzel from Houston’s own Slow Dough Bakery. The herbed honey mustard on the side packed a startlingly strong punch (think pungent English mustard) and begged for a cooling chaser from the eclectic lineup of brewskis.

There are no-more substantial starters on the menu, so I created my own by splitting salads, side dishes and light entrees with my dinner companions, and each was a winner.

The roasted beet salad featured chunks of both red and yellow variety, plus a little salad studded with crumbled Spanish blue cheese and well moistened with toasted-walnut vinaigrette (for my taste, too many restaurants apply salad dressing with an atomizer). Easier to share was the “whole-pig” flatbread, a super-thin crust topped with nuggets of house-made Italian-sausage, San Daniele prosciutto and smoked bacon, plus some arugula leaves and wisps of basil. The pizza-like creation emerges from the oven bubbly, cracker-crisp and quite addictive. But I was most impressed by the wild-mushroom risotto. Well stocked with earthy ‘shrooms and as creamy and al dente as one could wish, my exemplary serving would have done credit to any Italian eatery in town.

Primed by the whole pig flatbread, I had to order pork tenderloin smoked over cherry wood. The multiple slices of Berkshire pork were a tad dry, but the silky dressing on the “German-style” red potato salad provided plenty of balancing moisture and the refreshingly nonstandard “cold” slaw had a nice slurp quotient, too.

For Miguelito’s papperedelle, the lone pasts entree on Block 7′s menu, Chef Miguel Hernandez shifted his focus from Germany to Italy. Here, house-made noodles are tossed in a light herb-butter sauce with crisp bits of bacon-y pancetta, little logs of asparagus bits were all stalks (I wondered what the kitchen did with all the heads) and the shrimp were small-ish rather than the advertised jumbo but surpassingly sweet and succulent all the same.

Not to be confused with Table 7, a very different eatery a block away on Durham, Block 7 is fancy enough to serve items like dry-aged prime steak, sauté things in duck fat and make its own charcuterie. So why was the croque monsieur dropped from the menu? Whatever the reason, the classic French ham, cheese and béchamel sauce sandwich is gone, replaced by a grilled cheese on sourdough sparked with aged white cheddar and thin slices of Granny Smith apple. It was yummy, but I still want to eat Block 7’s croquet monsieur made with raclette, the melty cheese which, served with boiled potatoes, sweet pickles and pickled onions, is a post-slalom staple at Swiss ski resorts.

I had no complaints about the other sandwiches I sampled, though. The venison “Sloppy Giuseppe” was a sloppy Joe Italianized by a few rings of sweet-hot Italian peppers. Served on a sturdy onion challah bun, it was made with wild boar confit as well as (of course) venison and rendered less sloppy than usual by a much-reduced tomato sauce that coated and infused the ground meat rather than sluiced it. The Block 7 Burger is a plump, cooked-to-order patty of dry-aged beef tucked into a Slow Dough Bakery bun along with some gruyere cheese in lieu of cheddar or “American,” arugula rather than prosaic iceberg, smoked bacon “relish” instead of bacon slices and a smear of “dijonoli,” a house-made blend of aioli and Dijon mustard. Plain aioli also comes with optional fries (you can choose potato or sweet potato, both of them very good), and it is definitely plain. With little of the garlic flavor that defines this classic French sauce, it is nearly as mild as jar mayo.

Block 7 “krack” is a deluxe variation on Rice Krispies Treats that adds brown butter, a seam of chocolate ganache and a dose of passion fruit caramel to the childhood fave. An even richer meal-ender, though, is the croissant bread pudding with caramelized apples and dulce de leche. It was easily one of the best bread puddings I’ve had in ages.

original article

In a more rough-and-tumble stretch of the Heights, Block 7 Wine Company, a wine bar and retail shop hybrid that opened in July in a former appliance warehouse, features a seasonal menu built around Texas ingredients. American classics are deftly infused with Euro spins: there’s a hefty “sloppy Giuseppe” — a satisfyingly oozy sandwich made with ground venison and wild boar confit on oniony challah — and one of the best burgers in town, a dry-aged-beef patty topped with arugula, Gruyère and a Dijon-spiked aioli.

Thanks to a friendly staff and smart design, Block 7’s huge, potentially impersonal room feels warm and relaxed. Works by local artists line the walls, and there’s a checkout counter made from a row of eclectic cabinets salvaged from the old appliance company. Because the space is part wine shop, customers pay retail for any bottle of wine they order from the wine list (or buy at the store).

On a recent visit, my dining companions and I downed burgers and that Italian-style sloppy Joe with a terrific Salice Salentino ($15) and a boutique Barbera ($40) from the shop. It was a rare, zero-markup, zero-corkage wine experience — and yet another sign that Houston’s restaurant scene has entered a bold new era

original article

It was a chilly evening, and inside Block 7 Wine Company, the smartly renovated appliance warehouse turned wine-shop-and-restaurant, my nose was turning cartwheels.

Or that’s how I pictured my olfactory apparatus, anyway, as I sniffed out the leather-cigar-box tones in a glass of red burgundy, then caught wind of a dizzyingly smoky pork tenderloin fanned across my plate. A sharp scent of warm cabbage slaw wheedled its way into my brain, too, its vinegar dressing conjuring up visions of sauerkraut.

Then, as the night follows the day, came the disciplined, self-contained flavors of chef Miguel Hernandez’s pork plate: the perfectly roasted meat and rustic cabbage dish mellowed by a creamy “German-style” red-potato salad. Everything I admire about Block 7 was there on my table: a wine much better than I could ordinarily afford to purchase at a restaurant, thanks to the near-miracle of retail-level bottle pricing from the adjoining wine shop, with no added corkage fee; plus the kind of simple, self-assured cooking that gives the wine room to shine. The cabbage tartness kept its place, and the rocket-trail smear of mustard sauce murmured instead of shouting.

That the pork plate had a sense of place, riffing on Central Texas Germanic themes, made me enjoy it all the more.

I seldom order red burgundy in a restaurant. Experience has taught me that there’s too much heartbreak involved. The burgundies I can afford tend to be thin and unpersuasive; the ones I might actually love to drink are utterly beyond my means. That’s why the chance to indulge in a $34.99 Pernand-Vergelesses 1er Cru — the 2006 “Les Fichots” from Maison Champy— was so appealing. In most restaurants it would be priced at $70 or higher, and I’d probably end up chafing that it took awhile for the flavors to catch up with the captivating nose.

Here the knowledge I was getting a steal gave me patience, and I was able to appreciate the burgundy’s quiet elegance, its prettiness, as it developed in the glass. Initially I ordered the wine to go with an earthy shiitake mushroom flatbread, paved with wonderfully stinky taleggio cheese and thyme on a thin, cracker-style crust. But the burgundy carried over surprisingly well to the smoky pork plate. Still, I wondered what Block 7 sommelier Whitney Seng might have chosen to suit the dish.

I loved his pick of a a 2005 Damien Laureau Savennieres “Les Genets” to go with an entree-size grilled Gulf shrimp dish centered on a mound of shaved fennel, pink lady apples and citrus. At $39.99 per bottle, the Laureau was actually the less expensive of two Savennieres on the list, and I’ll bet — with its juicy fruit and minerally crispness — it would have suited the pork plate, as well. It’s a fine example of what the Chenin Blanc variety can be.

I found the “Whole Pig” flatbread to be a fun explosion of porky flavors, from the spicy house-made andouille sausage to the San Daniele prosciutto and smoky bacon crumbles. Excellent snacking potential for a couple of wine-sippers. Sure, I might gloss those whole local arugula leaves nested on top with a smidge of olive for shine, and apply the teensiest bit of sea salt to the leaves, but that’s a quibble. Quibbles, in fact, are just about all I have here: I liked virtually everything I tasted, with few exceptions.

I adore the dry-aged burger on its lovely Slow Dough bakery brioche bun, intelligently dressed with nutty Gruyere, smoked bacon relish, tangy arugula and a mustard-laced aioli. This may be the cleanest-tasting burger in town.

I was just as smitten by a special elemental buffalo hanger steak, seared and cooked to a rosy rare, enriched with a little marrow-flavored butter and sliced to fan down the plate. Simple sides of sauteed baby bok choy and cheerfully lumpy mashed potatoes made the buffalo a swell match for a $45 bottle of Chateauneuf du Pape. (The regular menu features a dry-aged Kobe hanger steak, served with a marrow-tinged bordelaise sauce, that is very nearly as good.)

A croque monsieur sandwich, layered with ham and bechamel and a big, earthy raclette cheese, is the sort of wine-friendly item you want to see in a place like this. So’s the whole sandwich section of the menu (venison Sloppy Giuseppe, anyone?), which offers a lower-cost dining experience than the bigger-deal, $14-$29 entrees. There’s something for everyone, even a virtuous vegetarian, in the form a knockout salad of organic arugula and roasted corn, popping with juicy cherry tomatoes and a low-key, wine-wise roasted shallot vinaigrette.

Even the vegetable sides show care and assurance, from brown-buttery roasted cauliflower tossed with almonds, capers and preserved lemon to the deep, bacony darkness of braised seasonal greens. Skins-on, hand-cut french fries arrive strewn with frizzly flash-fried herbs. I’m afraid I could make a meal of them, if I had the right wine to go along.

What would I change here? Well, I’d go easier on the roux that turned an otherwise good corn chowder thickish. (I did approve of the blob of tart heirloom tomato salad plopped into the bowl.) I would have preferred a better sear on some fine tasting baby lamb chops, which were a bit too soft under their honey-mustard glaze; more textural contrast, please. But oh, the al dente perfection of that mushroom risotto with black summer truffle. It would have done credit to a far more highfalutin operation.

In fact, I found myself wishing that more than a few local highfalutin chefs would take a cue from chef Hernandez’s unassuming style. He edits himself. He’s not afraid to pare back rather than over-accessorize, a common Houston failing. His food is calm in a city where hyperactivity is pursued, often with a vengeance. Before he landed at Block 7, he had a long tenure at Rainbow Lodge, extending even unto the Randy Rucker molecular era there. It’s nice to see him step onto his own stage with aplomb.

Block 7 Wine Company is not to be confused with the much different Table 7, from the District 7 folks, that has sprung up a block away on Durham, both of them a football’s pass from the bar-hopping mayhem of Washington Avenue. Early on, I worried that the carousers would take over Block 7, but that hasn’t been the case: the place is too subtle and too serious for them. Grownups and your more reflective sort of young person form the current customer base.

Maybe that’s a problem economically, because the wine shelves in Block’s 7′s temperature controlled retail shops have grown markedly emptier of late, although there are still plenty of interesting choices. I sense that the remarkable bottle pricing in the restaurant may be hindering the cash flow if the place doesn’t fill up every night and turn some tables. So if you are serious about wine, and about food that suits it, go now and support a business that deserves to be a success.

Seriously. Just do it. I don’t want to wake up one morning and discover that this brave concept was ahead of its time.

by Alison Cook, Houston Chronicle

Original article

If you’re allergic to burgers priced in the double digits, read no further. The burger at the sleek new Block 7 Wine Company clocks in at $12, so once you add $3 fries and a glass of good red wine you’re looking at a tab of around $25, plus tax and tip.

Is it worth the tariff? There’s a certain kind of purist who will think so, and various intangibles–from the handsome modern room to the buzzy crowd–sweeten the deal. Here’s how the Block 7 Burger stacks up.

PRICE: Block 7 Burger $12, add French fries (called “frites” on this menu) for $3.

ORDERING: Table service inside the spacious bar/restaurant dining room or on the outdoor deck.

*ARCHITECTURE: Salad stuff (such as it is) on the bottom. On a grilled brioche-type bun from Slow Dough bakers goes a modest swipe of dijon-spiked aioli, a few layers of arugula leaves, and a chubby beef patty gilded with gruyere cheese. That’s it. Over and out. Well, the menu mentioned a smoked bacon “relish,” which sounded good, but I never saw any or tasted any, and I never gave it a second thought after I took my first bite.