Houston ranked a world must-see spot

Sit in silence for an entire hour at the Rothko Chapel. (Melissa Phillip / Houston Chronicle) Sit in silence for an entire hour at the Rothko Chapel. (Melissa Phillip / Houston Chronicle) Image 1 of / 12 Caption Close Houston ranked a world must-see spot 1 / 12 Back to Gallery

With no mention of art cars, NASA or Blue Bell ice cream, the New York Times ranks Houston as the No. 7 spot in the world to visit in 2013.

That puts us just after Amsterdam, celebrating the 400th anniversary of its ring of canals and the reopening of two major art museums after a decade of closure.

No other U.S. city ranks among the first 12.

Topping the list is Rio de Janeiro, followed by Marseille, France; Nicaragua; Accra, Ghana; and the tiny Himalayan country of Bhutan.

What the vaunted New York paper chose to highlight in Houston are its efforts to become "the state's cultural and culinary capital."

The Times describes the Houston Museum District as a "formidable coterie of institutions," including Rothko Chapel, the Museum of African American Culture and the Asia Society Texas Center, which opened in April in "a stunning Yoshio Taniguchi-designed building."

There's also the Houston Museum of Natural Science's $85 million hall of paleontology, as well as three new restaurants - Oxheart, Underbelly and Uchi - that have made the national list of best new restaurants, the Times noted.