Our columnist, Sebastian Modak, is visiting each destination on our 52 Places to Go in 2019 list. He arrived in Houston after stops in Puerto Rico and Panama.

At first glance, much of Houston looks alike. Making your way out of the “Loop,” the I-610 highway that circles the city center like a shirt collar, skyscrapers give way to manicured office parks and strip malls, each seemingly a carbon copy of the last. But when you look a little closer, you notice that in one of those strip malls, all the business names carry the tonal accents of written Vietnamese. In another, two Indian restaurants sit on either side of a service specializing in money transfers to Central America. In a nearby parking lot, a family — the men wearing skullcaps and knee-length agbada shirts and the women in brightly-patterned hijabs — loads up a sedan with the ingredients for a meal that I imagine tastes like another home, thousands of miles away.

Houston is widely considered to be one of the most culturally diverse cities in the world. According to the city’s planning department, 48 percent of residents speak a language other than English — and more than 145 languages are spoken in the city. Twenty-nine percent of the population is foreign-born.

Diversity wasn’t the main reason Houston was on 2019’s 52 Places to Go list, but food and culture were. There’s the addition of the Drawing Institute to the brilliantly curated Menil Collection; a wave of new trendy Downtown food halls; the glitzy Post Oak hotel, home to a Rolls-Royce showroom and Frank Stella art — all rising out of the devastation left behind by Hurricane Harvey in August 2017. But unless you sequester yourself in the chic apartments of Downtown or the mansions of River Oaks, that diversity is everywhere you look — and everywhere you eat.