Houston, Texas

It's a very large place. 40km from the airport to my hotel. Downtown Houston can be seen from my office window when it's not too hazy, in the middle distance. 

The food is also large. Very large. Covered in cheese.

The restaurant I ate in last night has, as its smallest steak, a 12oz fillet. Sorry, fill-ay meegnon. It's coming momentarily with a special red wine Au Jus sauce. Funny, I thought the noun was Jus not Au Jus.  Oh Jzhooo, of course, is the correct pronunciation. If you were vaguely hungry you could have a 72oz t-bone, all to yourself. If you were seriously hungry you could have surf and turf. 48oz sirloin and 32oz freshwater lobster tail. With fries and slaw.

So, the waiter kept trying to persuade me to order the house special, fill-ay meegnon redwine Oh Jzhooo sauce, side of arugula and eggplant  with a chipotle wine vinegar dressing covered in melted swiss. Well I didn't, despite his best attempts to persuade me how good it was.  I can't eat dairy produce and swiss is cheese, an archetypal dairy product. No, feeling decisive, I ordered a plain fillet, blue, with fried onions and plain spinach, no cheese, so I thought. Vegetable chosen from the traditional vegetable section of the menu.  Traditional and simple food apparently, from the old world. I turned down the cheese bread and creamed butter. I turned down the olives stuffed with tuna and mozzarella. I smugly sat and waited for my delicious USDA aged plain fillet shown to a searingly hot grill, meltingly bloody inside accompanied by my plain traditional vegetables.

Some hope. Boy did they get me. 

Blue=bleu=cheese(blue cheese), melted all over the fill-ay; onions were a field of large onions, chopped into 2" high rings and deep fried in a delicious parmigan (pronounced "parmij-jan") batter and the plain spinach was sauteed in butter with a couple of pounds of delicious crumbly feta (cows milk not goats milk or sheeps milk) mixed in for effect.

I got the Oh Jzhooo sauce in a jug. I didn't order it but they thought I might want it anyway. I stopped a veritable procession of waiters from pouring it on my steak for me. I had managed to scrape off  nearly all the cheese and didn't want to cover the only edible part of the meal with boiled redwine and cream thickened with butter. Until I took my eye off the table for a microsecond to talk to someone on my left and the head waiter pounced from the right to pour my sauce for me........