As America’s fourth-largest city, Houston, like much of Texas, is often viewed as a place with occasionally charming stories to be told. It falls to national journalists to pull up and tell stories that essentially boil down to “Did you know this place you thought was a hellhole has culture?” A great distillation of this dynamic happened last month surrounding a popular Houston restaurant.
In August, Business Insider published a roughly 20-minute video on Aga’s Restaurant, the Southwest Houston Indo-Pak powerhouse. Host Havovi Cooper toured the restaurant’s insane operation, revealing that Aga’s is one of the busiest restaurants in the United States on Uber Eats. She sat with owner and Aga’s CEO Shaukat Maredia, who described running Aga’s as a “food factory” in the video.
BI’s video did pretty well; I saw it a few times on both my X and Instagram feeds and several friends shared it around. It was cool to see a Houston spot get some national love. Then, this week, Aga’s got some more love. The New York Times published a massive profile of Aga’s headlined “Is This Houston Strip-Mall Joint the World’s Busiest Restaurant?” Written by food reporter Priya Krishna, who is from Dallas, the story similarly touts that Aga’s is the top restaurant on Uber Eats and goes inside the restaurant to see what has made it so successful…