Hall-of-Fame onion rings

Actually, I was at the original Goode Company Seafood on Westpark last week to check on the French fries. But a lordly stack of onion rings threw me off-mission.

They were well nigh perfect. Not too thick. Not too thin. Cut from wide-enough onions to make a big-wheeled stack. And that airy, well-bronzed crunch of crust! Like the onions themselves, the batter fried up not too thick and not too thin, with jaggedy edges that upped the textural fun.

I immediately added these babies to a mental list that always lurks in the back of my head: The Houston Onion Ring Hall of Fame (TM). (Someday I shall publish that list to what I assume will be universal acclaim. Or jeers. Whatevs.)

The word "scarf" was made for these particular o-rings on this particular night. And scarf I did—pausing only to ask our wisecracking waiter, David, for some horseradish with which to doctor the accompanying ketchup into an ad-hoc cocktail sauce.

Everything else was pretty Goode, too. The fat mesquite-grilled oysters, juicy under their mantle of garlic-buttery cheese. My old favorite mesquite-grilled shrimp in salsa verde, just slightly askew for having been a bit too enthusiastically grilled. The reputable frozen Margarita, a Goode signature, with its well-controlled undercurrent of sweetness beneath the tartness of lime, and suitable bolts of brain-freeze. IYKYK.

Only the French fries I had come to investigate let me down. My out-of-town friends loved them. But again I missed what I once prized about Goode's fries: "the varied textures, from crisp to crackly to softish in places" as I once described it, all pointing to a fresh-cut nature.

I first noticed a certain sameness to Goode's fries—newly housed in a paper-lined cone instead of deposited in a tangly heap— at a dinner last September. It was a strange, dispiriting meal at a restaurant that I've admired for its consistency over four decades. The fried seafood platter that had always seemed so meticulously done (a rare feat given its tricky timing) was kind of a disaster. The frying was aggressive across the board, a first for me here.

My old reliable French fries were not the saving grace I had hoped for, either. They came off like coated fries, with stiffly uniform exteriors.

I wrote it off to the fact that Levi Goode had just opened Credence, his fancy new ode to Texas out in Memorial, and had cannibalized staff at the original seafood restaurant to get things off the ground. Even my friends' favorite bartender was missing that evening.

Eight months later, the restaurant's kitchen seemed to have regained its equilibrium, but the fries still didn't have their old spark of life for me. They were crisp. They were well-seasoned. They looked fetching in their paper-furled cone. But they ate like well-executed commercial coated fries.

The magic had fled. Like the One Power in The Wheel of Time, It seemed to have transferred itself to the marvelous onion rings.

Long may they reign in my Hall of Fame.