In a city where restaurants come and go, one family’s century-old eatery in Houston stands as a community staple where even guests are treated like kin.
When I walked into Christie’s Seafood & Steaks at the beginning of its lunch service, its near-empty nautical-theme dining room felt like a quiet harbor before what would become a rushing wave of diners. Beneath the piano instrumental music were snippets of conversations that I couldn’t help but notice: a woman and her parents reminiscing on years of past family visits and a woman making a special request to a waiter to sit at her favorite booth. It wasn’t long before my visit felt just as special thanks to an employee who approached me with the kind of eager, genuine welcome usually reserved for a restaurant regular or an old friend. That employee who I later learned was a daughter of the Christie legacy.
Even before working as general manager of the family business, Maria Christie recalls spending much of her childhood at the restaurant. But the restaurant’s history extends far beyond that thanks to Theodore Christie, a Greek immigrant who had a fish sandwich shop in Galveston. In 1934, he brought his restaurant to Houston and eventually opened several locations in the city. Thirty years later, he sold Christie’s to one of his employees on one condition: to carry on his legacy and change his last name to Christie. That employee was Maria’s father, James Priovolos who made that promise. Now she, her mother and siblings are leading the Christie’s legacy at 6029 Westheimer Rd.
“I truly believe there’s no way that man [Theodore Christie] started making fish sandwiches on the waterfront, would have ever thought in a million years that it would still be standing up 109 years later,” Maria told Chron. “And that’s because it was a way for an immigrant family, like my dad and his cousin, to provide for their families. Then we grew up loving it, so we’re carrying on this tradition and it’s a part of us. We just enjoy being a part of Houston.”
While the staff and even interior has changed throughout the years, Christie’s has maintained a “century-old commitment to serving the finest quality steaks and seafood in family-friendly fashion.” In fact, the restaurant’s home-style menu items, blending a bit of Galveston and Greek cuisine, are made from many of the same recipes used since the very beginning.
“We only serve wild caught Texas shrimp, which is really important, because we believe that any other shrimp is not up to the quality standards that we want,” Christie explained. “We make everything ourselves. We make our own mayonnaise, we make our own dressings, we peel and de-vein our own shrimp, we filet our own fish, we cut our own steaks…just hands on, making sure everything is going right.”
That extra effort and fresh fusion-flavor is very evident in many of their dishes, including the Greek Village Salad comprised of sliced tomatoes, olives, pepperoncini, red onions, feta, cucumbers, capers, olive oil and oregano. Particularly paired with the shrimp in garlic lemon cream (a Greek-inspired dish with Texas shrimp), it’s one of the many meals on the menu that tastes like a coastal Mediterranean summer by way of the Gulf. And one of the many meals that showcases how some of Houston’s best bites are born from across borders.
Correction: The original Christie’s opened in Galveston at an undisclosed location. In 1934, the restaurant later moved to 6703 S. Main near the Texas Medical Center. In 1968, the restaurant moved to its current location along Westheimer Road. A previous version of this article stated the current location was its original location.…