A simple French dip sandwich from the Hillstone restaurant group represents a certain kind of nice dining.
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Tejal Rao is a critic at large for Food. She lives in Los Angeles.
Outside Houston’s, in Pasadena, Calif., a woman in a cream-colored poplin skirt that skimmed the concrete explained the concept of a tradwife to her mother while they waited for a table. Men in perforated polo shirts scrolled on their phones. Just past the koi pond, behind gleaming kitchen windows, cooks shaped bread dough engineered for the restaurant’s relentless output of French dips.
Everyone who dines at Houston’s has their go-to order, but the French dip has a particularly devoted fan base. Here’s why: Out of the oven, the rolls are tender, light and crackling, with an unfashionably closegrained crumb. Buttered, toasted and smeared with a little mayonnaise, they’re piled with sliced roast beef almost pastel in its dawn-like rosiness.
The slices aren’t squashed, but cling to each other so that when you dip the sandwich in a ramekin of light, slightly wine-dazed jus, the sandwich holds. It saturates neatly, going from crisp to soggy at exactly the pace you set.
Much like the Hillstone group itself — which counts several Houston’s locations among the 37 restaurants it runs across the country — the sandwich is pleasant, polished, a bit expensive and utterly generic on the surface. But you’d never mistake it for another restaurant’s version.
Timeless isn’t quite the right word for the group, though Hillstone does tend to resist trends. It isn’t nostalgic, exactly, but Hillstone appeals to one’s inner Patagonia vest. While most restaurants, particularly chains, lean hard into their own branding and mythology, Hillstone erases itself almost completely. Its steady pleasures are smooth and corporate, working hard to please everyone — and often succeeding.
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