Étoile Cuisine et Bar opened in Houston’s Uptown Park in October 2012, bringing French cuisine to the city and earning recognition as one of Houston’s top French restaurants within months.
Owned by Master Chef of France Philippe Verpiand and Monica Bui, Étoile offers two menus featuring all food, including bread and ice cream, made in-house. La Tradition offers classic French dishes like coq au vin and foie gras au torchon, while La Saison highlights seasonal ingredients. One of the menu standouts, bouillabaisse, is an excellent dish for cozy fall evenings and is made with locally sourced fresh seafood.
The Soup
Bouillabaisse is one of France’s signature dishes, but it has humble beginnings: it was created by fishermen in Marseille as a way to use up unsold fish. At Étoile, the broth is made with seafood stock, tomato, garlic, and saffron, all of which enhance the flavors of the seafood.
The Seafood
Chef Verpiand always uses grouper and snapper. The chef uses the heads and bones of the fish, which are loaded with flavor, to make the seafood stock, and then the delicate filets are served in the dish. Gulf shrimp is always included as well, and then he adds other seasonally fresh seafood items.
The Mix-Ins
To make the soup, Verpiand uses vegetable mirepoix, fresh thyme, dried bay leaves, and a few other secret spices (which he learned from his mom, an excellent home cook). The soup is simmered for two hours and then strained, and the liquid is used for the final dish. There is one other must for the dish:saffron potatoes. While the seafood and broth are the stars of the dish, there is no authentic bouillabaisse without saffron potatoes.
The Bread
Rather than a roll or rustic sliced bread, at Étoile, Verpiand garnishes his bouillabaisse with a long crouton made from his made-from-scratch baguettes, topped with the rouille. Some guests like to scrape the aioli into the broth and mix it in, and others prefer to dip the aioli-topped crouton into the soup as they eat.