OUR REVIEW OF MAX'S WINE DIVE

Don’t you ever get tired of restaurants where you have to pray to your food? Where the chefs consider their creations and presumably themselves the center of the universe? And where the wine guys are even worse, if that’s possible? A lot of people are tired of such restaurants, and you can find those people each night squeezed into booths, strewn about shared banquettes and just standing three-deep at the bar at Max’s Wine Dive on Washington Avenue, almost certainly tasting from each other’s plates. Such bad manners are par for the course at Max’s, a place where it’s always the damn good time that matters.

It says something about our dining culture – and not necessarily something good – that the concept of a restaurant meal and a good time have come to be viewed separately. It’s a sad evolution that America by no means started, showing up in France as chefs seeking Michelin stars sought to distinguish their cooking from the bistro down the street. It showed up too in the labors of Italian chefs, particularly in that country’s economically superior north, to distinguish their food from that of the long-impoverished south – and, with a special vengeance, from the Italian-American red-sauce cuisine refugees from that south carried to the Little Italys of the world. Still, within the French and Italian cultures – especially those formed alongside the Mediterranean – there remained enough sheer gusto that mealtime seldom seemed dreary.

Leave that step to the upstart Americans, who from the beginnings of our history felt a need to out-Europe the Europeans. Taking on the pomposity of Europe at its worst, that fetish for the rarest foods and the oldest and/or most expensive wines, we created a dining mythology based on pecking order. Or even worse: on money. It is restaurants like Max’s Wine Dive, starting with the name alone, that force us back to the Old Country (even when it’s only in our minds) to reconsider where and how we’ve ended up. Max’s isn’t a French bistro or an Italian trattoria, or for that matter a Greek taverna or a Spanish tapas bar. On the other hand, this being America, maybe it’s able to be all those things at once.

Born from the success of The Tasting Room in different locations around Houston, Max’s is a wine bar with Very Serious Food. Or, since we’re not liking the word “serious” here, it might be more accurate to say… Very Big Food. Pushed along by this scope and scale, Chef Jonathan Jones delivers us from any notions of delicate or discreet, subtle or stylish. If it tastes good, Jones serves it. And generally, if a little of something tastes good at Max’s, a lot of it almost certainly tastes better. Any other approach might make diners less happy when perfect and even imperfect strangers ask to taste off their plates!

The menu at Max’s Wine Dive is a slagheap of bad puns and sexual innuendo, which only helps disarm us from notions of any propriety whatsoever. Even traditional “fancy” items like foie gras or bone marrow turn up as, in the first case, P, B & J (foie gras between Max’s tirelessly oversized Texas toast with native pecan butter and cherry-orange-ancho jam) and the second as the stark-sounding Chef JJ’s Big White Bones. Even more memorable than those starters are the Nacho Mama’s Oysters, delightfully fried and served with aioli on crispy fried wontons, the Quail Cakes (chicken-fried semi-boneless quail on lush sweet corn pancakes) and Max and Jack’s Frites – unbelievably addictive French fries dusted with something both hot and sweet and sided with a dip that’s definitely not ketchup.

At Max’s, appetizers may well fill you up; they absolutely will if you order enough of them – and satisfy your entrée cravings as well. But if you want a real entrée, Jones has picked out some really big dinner plates and seems hell-bent on filling them. Crazy things crash together and cohabitate happily: like the Lobster Thermadelphia that sounds more like an ancient Greek battle (it’s Texas-Philly cheesesteak, except made with lobster), the Lambwich (a kind of over-the-top Sloppy Joe with goat cheese), and, our favorite joke-becomes-dinner of all time, the Texas Haute Dog. This one makes the weiner from grass-fed gourmet beef, wraps it in an artisan bun, covers it in what may be the best “Texas red” chili anywhere (venison or otherwise) and sprinkles it with cotija cheese, crispy fried onions and pickled jalapenos. As young IM-ers love to put it… OMG!

When it comes to wine at Max’s Wine Dive, Tasting Room wine director Michael Housewright is often around to make vivid, dead-on and often surprising suggestions – most available by the glass for those of us who love to bounce from wine to wine and food to food like a slightly demented pinball machine. And when it comes to dessert, get both the brownie and the lighter-than-usual bread pudding spiked with white chocolate. Happily, in keeping with Max’s approach, there’s absolutely nothing light about the caramel sauce spooned around your dessert plate.