Houston’s Smoked Salmon Appetizer
This recipe is about the delicious tarragon flavored aioli served with store-bought smoked salmon.
I loved the Houston's Restaurant chain. The past tense of that statement is intentional. Since 1977 and until the late 2000s, they seemed to be the only restaurant chain that had stayed true to themselves. Their menu wasn't exhaustive and they didn't try to be everything to everybody. I was convinced they were able to maintain their quality because they remained privately held. Turn a restaurant concept into a publicly traded corporation like, say, TGIFriday's or Chili's, and the focus is on earnings-per-share and beating the analyst's predictions every quarter. Neither of the latter two restaurants resemble anything like the original concept of their creators.
Houston’s Restaurants, A Brand in Decline?
Since 2009, the parent company of Houston’s, Hillstone Restaurant Group has either been re-concepting and rebranding their Houston's restaurants, or outright closing them. They’ve gone from well over thirty Houston’s Restaurants in the 1990s to about 11 today. Interestingly however, one of their rebranded concepts, called Hillstone, still looks, feels and has a strikingly similar menu to their old Houston’s. Even the fonts of their exterior signage and printed menus are the same. And precisely because they are privately held, I can’t get a good rational explanation for this strategy.
Among Houston's outstanding fare was a cold-smoked salmon appetizer, served with a tarragon aioli. When they first came out with this item in the early 1990s, it was kept out of print and off menus in part because many local municipalities' health codes required salmon to be cooked to a certain temperature. "Cold smoking" means that the internal temperature of the smoking box does not exceed 110°F, so this dish was often marketed verbally by Houston's servers as a "chef's special." Houston's ultimately changed the recipe and prepared the salmon with a hot smoke, around 170°F, which passed muster with local Health Department ordinances, and put it on their menu.
Hillstone and Houston’s restaurants still sell their House-Smoked Salmon with Chef’s Dressing and Toasts, but the recipe for the dressing has changed, so I am happy to have preserved the original version for posterity and make it often. In fact, since this recipe was posted in 2012 to the original Kitchen Tapestry recipe blog hosted by BlogSpot, it was the most downloaded and commented on recipe by far. In 2024, Kitchen Tapestry migrated to its new home on Squarespace and those comments have since been deleted.
My recipe isn't for the salmon itself. These days, you can buy perfectly good smoked salmon at the neighborhood grocer and many upscale grocery stores make their own smoked salmon in-house, such as Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s. Even if your grocer does not smoke their own salmon, they usually carry nationally distributed brands, like, Honey Smoked Fish Company or The Boston Smoked Fish Company.
Whatever you get, understand there are two varieties of what people call smoked salmon. There is the flaky, chunk variety of smoked salmon, generally sold with the skin on, which is what you want. Do not buy the cured, sliced smoked salmon, known as lox, which is better saved for putting on a toasted bagel with cream cheese, onions and capers. These two kinds of smoked salmon have distinctly different flavors and textures and you want the former.
But the Houston's aioli recipe is priceless, and after a lot of trial and error, this is a reasonable facsimile of the dressing I remember, and it appears by the comments I have received over the years, many agreed with me.
Houston's Smoked Salmon Appetizer
Ingredients
- 4 oz store-bought smoked salmon (do not use lox)
- 1 cup mayonnaise
- 1 tsp anchovy paste
- 1 tsp finely minced fresh garlic
- 1/4 tsp cayenne pepper
- 2 tbsp dried parsley
- 2 tbsp dried tarragon
- 2 tbsp dried chives
- 2 tbsp fresh lemon juice
- 1/2 tsp freshly cracked black pepper
- 12-16 slices Melba Toast (like, Old London)
Instructions
- Combine ingredients #2 through #10 above together well.
- Cover and refrigerate at least 1-3 hours before serving with the smoked salmon and Melba Toast.
