Brookshire is on the bleeding western edge of Greater Houston. Every corner lot is either newly developed, bulldozed, or for sale. I was in town for a rainwater harvesting conference, which seems an odd place to hold it given the 5,000 souls in the city and not the not-muchedness of the places. But the Danish company, Grundfos, just opened its US headquarters there and has a nifty meeting place with, you guessed it, a state-of-the-art rainwater harvesting system for chiller make-up water and toilet flushing (the urinals are waterless).
I arrived the night before the event and perused the town and greater area for an interesting restaurant. Up pops Phat Eatery in nearby (20 minutes) Katy. Phat Eatery is run by Alex Au-Yeung who slings up Malaysian street food and was a 2022 James Beard award nominee. “Malaysian” and “Beard” are all I needed to read before deciding to go. After convincing a rainwater system installer from Virginia to join me along , off we went.
We started with a round of well-balanced Old Fashions to whet our whistles before starting with the must-have Roti with Curry Chicken (Indian style flat bread w/ a boneless chicken curry dip; $7). Since there were three of us, we added another roti for $2.75. The roti is soft and crunchy and puffy all at the same time and nicely complemented the savory curry. For mains, we shared three dishes: the Award-Winning Beef Rendang (Tender braised beef banana shank, galangal, potato; $26), Chili Prawns (jumbo prawns, torched ginger, and mixed bell peppers with sweet & savory tomato chili sauce rolled in a soft scrambled egg; $28), and Hokkien Mee (thick egg-noodle, chicken, shrimp, calamari, yu-choy, and dark soy; $18). These dishes were joined by white rice in a pot used to beat a serial philandering husband into submission.
The food was all delicious. The Beef Rendang was savory (although it took us a while to figure out the taters were taters), the Chili Prawns had a Russian roulette bite to them, and the Hokkien Mee looked like something Darth Vader or the president of Exxon would order but surprised with pops of fish and chicken. One of our party had a delicate constitution, so we had to stay on with the pepperless part of the menu (and there aren’t many dishes without peppers). There’s plenty of food served, which was a shame since we were all traveling and couldn’t take leftovers home. The three of us could have easily just shared two mains.
I definitely want to go back with a more adventurous group and dive into the spicier parts of the menu.
Phat Eatery; 23119 Colonial Pkwy suite b-2, Katy, TX 77449; www.phateatery.com
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