One Man’s Journey Through Delayed Flights, Concrete Madness, and Culinary Salvation.
I arrived in Houston at about 2 a.m., which is, of course, precisely not what the airline promised. According to the booking, I was supposed to arrive at something resembling a human hour—dinner time, maybe, or at worst, the awkward mid-evening dead zone when the airport shuts everything except the vending machines. But no. Two in the morning. That magical hour when even the rats are asleep.
And here’s the bit that really bends the brain: the airline gate attendant was more upset than the people whose plans were obliterated. There she stood, arms folded, brows furrowed, radiating pure fury—at us. Not at the weather. Not at the pilots. At us. As if we’d personally gone back in time and delayed the aircraft ourselves. Look, if you hate people, that’s absolutely fine. Join a monastery. Count pebbles. Invent new types of glue. But don’t work in a place where “people” is literally the entire product.
Anyway, there was my girlfriend. She’d waited up like a saint in yoga pants, eyes like torches and her whole body saying, “This is the last time I do this, ever.” She gave me a hug, a quick kiss, and then announced, in that way only the truly exhausted can, “You’re driving.” I hadn’t even blinked and I was already being assigned a vehicle. Welcome to Texas.
Next morning, I awoke to smells. Good smells. The kind of smells that tell you you’re still alive and possibly about to be fed. I wandered into the kitchen, and there it was: eggs sizzling, sausage browning, and coffee brewing like it had been summoned by prayer. Bliss.
But then I spotted something curious. The cookware. These pots and pans—gleaming, space-age things—were apparently called Saladmaster. Which, I assumed, was a joke. But no. According to her, they were made of “surgical stainless steel,” and when she told me the price, I genuinely thought she’d misread the number and added a few zeroes by mistake. She hadn’t. For the price of these things, I could have bought a perfectly good used car. Or a ride on a questionable spaceship. Personally, I’d go to Ross or TJ Maxx, buy some pans for the cost of a sandwich, and replace them annually, like tires.
Now, in Houston. A city I’ve mentioned before, and will keep mentioning until someone does something about it. It is not so much a city as it is a concrete experiment gone rogue. Bridges, flyovers, overpasses, viaducts—whatever you want to call them—are everywhere. They’re stacked like Lego blocks made by someone on a sugar high. There are flyovers going above other flyovers, overpasses that loop over the top of nothing in particular, and bridges that start in reality and end in theory. I swear one of them goes straight into a hedge.
And they keep building more. “In preparation for future development,” they say. Translation: “We have no idea what we’re doing, but concrete is on sale.” Somewhere, a civil engineer is sitting in a swivel chair laughing maniacally while watching Google Maps in 3D. The bridge builders here must be richer than tech billionaires. Houston is the Bubba Gump of bridges—flyovers, viaducts, sky ramps, elevated ramps, spaghetti junctions, surprise loops, you name it—they’ve got it.
But—and this is a massive but—the saving grace of Houston, the one glorious thing that prevents the entire place from being declared an unnatural urban experiment… is the food.
Oh, the food. You want American food? They’ve got burgers so good you’ll think gravity just got stronger around your plate. Steaks the size of furniture. Mexican food? Not just tacos and burritos, but about seventeen different sub-genres of Mexican cuisine that could probably out-Mexican Mexico itself. There’s so much jalapeño in the air it’s a wonder the skyline isn’t on fire.
Asian food? Of course. Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Vietnamese, and Filipino—yes, Filipino, and properly done too. They’ve got a whole building dedicated to it—it’s like walking through a food court in Manila. European cuisine? Naturally. Italian, French, German, and whatever it is the Swiss pretend is food. And Mediterranean! Hummus, shawarma, falafel—all served in places that look like someone airlifted a bazaar out of Beirut.
It’s honestly like someone took the culinary map of the entire planet and dumped it across one gigantic city grid—with a flyover running through it. If your stomach can imagine it, Houston has a restaurant for it. Probably next to a gas station. Possibly open 24 hours.
So, halfway through the week, we decided to drive to Louisiana to see my cousin. That’s about three hours away, which in Texas terms is basically next door. You’d drive that far just to get milk. We were cruising along, the radio on, me feeling oddly positive about life, when a pickup truck—a large one, obviously—swerved right into our lane like it had just remembered a dentist appointment.
I did what any respectable Virginian would do: I gave him a honk. Not an angry honk. Just a long, disappointed beep. My girlfriend gasped and said the driver was probably just avoiding traffic from the other side. Yes, and in the process, nearly folded us into the median strip. Has he never heard of brakes? Or mirrors? Or basic physics?
Then she turned to me and said something that made all the blood in my body migrate to my ankles. “This is Texas. That guy might have an opinion realignment tool.” “A what?” I asked. “A gun,” she said. “And a strong interpretation of the Second Amendment.”
That was the end of my bravery. I looked down at the steering wheel, suddenly wishing it came with diplomatic plates. In England, the worst you get is a rude hand gesture and the word wanker. Here, apparently, you get ventilated.
Eventually, we rolled into Louisiana and met my cousin-in-law. First time I’d met the man. Lovely guy. Warm, friendly, the kind of person who offers you food before you’ve sat down and makes you feel like the king of a small island. When my cousin came home from work, we set off to get dinner.
The place was called Hollier—spelled like someone sneezed during the French Revolution and pronounced like someone’s halfway between “hallelujah” and “y’all.” It’s Louisiana, so the accent is part French, part Southern drawl, and part musical instrument.
We sat down and were greeted by a server who immediately informed us that she wasn’t actually a server at all, but a teacher—just helping out at the restaurant. She looked like she could win a scholarship and a beauty pageant in the same week. Sharp, funny, and with that Cajun accent that makes even directions to the toilet sound poetic.
And then, for some inexplicable reason, I started explaining my accent. Just… launched into it. No one asked. No one needed it. But there I was, rambling on like a man who’d swallowed a National Geographic documentary. My girlfriend glared at me with that “stop talking or I’ll bury you in gumbo” expression. Message received.
The food? Glorious. I ordered gumbo, jambalaya and possibly an entire second pancreas to handle it. By the time we left, I was dragging myself to the car like a walrus on a lazy Sunday.
Back in Houston, we fell into a routine. Walks in the evening, dog in tow, around their man-made lake. Yes, lake. Or more accurately: a glorified pond with delusions of grandeur and ducks. All these new suburbs have them. They’re meant to bring peace, tranquillity, and somewhere to dump the leftover rainwater.
And then, all too soon, I was back at the airport. Staring once more at an airline employee who looked like she was one missed lunch break away from declaring martial law. Hair pulled back like a prison warden, eyes scanning for dissent.
And I thought, here we go again. Houston, I have a problem.
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A Kings 
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