“Are you with the FBI?” Nora asked.

“I'm a chef,” Shepherd said.

“Oh Lord,” Nora said, shaking her head. “When you're a chef, you get to just play around and call it food.”

Shepherd wrote down his number, inviting Nora to come to UB Preserv. He left with a heavy bag of supplies and a promise to bring some of his cooks back to ask more questions.

To many, this scene might as well be the Zapruder film of cultural appropriation. Shepherd has heard the critique, but it seems to genuinely baffle him. His mission, he says, has always been to introduce diners to cuisines they might start out too intimidated by or unaware of to explore on their own and then send them to experience the real thing. “I want to be the gateway drug,” he says. At Underbelly, and now at UB Preserv, the check comes with a pamphlet listing Shepherd's favorite restaurants, suppliers, and other businesses, including those that inspired his menu. “We'd love to have you back at UB Preserv,” it reads, “but we politely request you visit at least one of these folks first.”

The menu, overseen by chef de cuisine Nick Wong, an alumnus of Momofuku Ssäm Bar in New York, ranges liberally and lustily among the city's influences. Many of the dishes wear their inspiration on their sleeve: Beef carpaccio dabbed with an aioli made with cinnamon, star anise, and other spices and covered in Vietnamese herbs is something like a pho minus the broth. Turkey-neck yakamein is a direct hat tip to New Orleans's own Creole-Asian noodle soup. Is there something slightly absurd about lumping all of these traditions together? There is. Though it should be pointed out that Shepherd did the same with western cuisines at One Fifth, with the theme “Romance Languages,” presumed to encompass French, Spanish, and Italian. Does it always work? It does not. Is it usually delicious? Very. I found myself wrapping bits of Mexican al pastor in the lettuce leaf from Thai pork larb and dragging it through the dank, buttery garlic sauce from Shepherd's riff on Vietnamese crawfish, which have become synonymous with the deliciousness dividend of cross-cultural pollination. I thought of it as my own edible version of Gulf Coast Soul.

Of course, calling a city cool is tricky business. Cool how? Cool for who? Cool isn't the same as hipster, and it's certainly not the same as gentrified, though both seem to fix to it like remoras to a shark. And Houston didn't suddenly become cool just because outsiders started to take notice. It was cool way back when Archie Bell and the Drells name-checked it while teaching America the “Tighten Up,” cool when Montrose was perhaps the most bohemian and LGBT-friendly neighborhood in the whole South.

It was cool, certainly, when a brand of slowed-down hip-hop emerged from the streets in the early 1990s. Nobody is better evidence of that enduring cool than Bun B. As one half of UGK, he had helped translate that sound, pioneered by the legendary mixtape-maker DJ Screw in imitation of the dreamy, slurry rhythms of codeine syrup, into the sound of Houston rap. Since the death of his partner, Pimp C, in 2007, Bun B has emerged as one of the city's most visible boosters, mingling equally with politicians, millionaires, and younger hip-hop acts. He also still performs and, with his wife, produces an exceptionally funny YouTube series of cooking videos called “Trill Meals.”

“I think Bun could be elected mayor,” I was told by Shepherd, who once had him collaborate on a comic-book version of tasting notes for the wine list at Underbelly.