In Houston, Diversity You Can Sink Your Teeth Into | WAMU 88.5 - American University Radio: Stephen Klineberg polishes off a spicy lamb mint burger, mops his brow and recalls the Houston he moved to as a young professor in the 1970s.
"It was a deeply racist, deeply segregated Southern city," he says; an oil boomtown of black and white Americans.
There were no restaurants like Pondicheri, where Houston chef Anita Jaisinghani's hip take on Indian street food — and the air conditioning's battle with 100-degree heat — conspires to make the Rice University professor sweat.
Houston back then was about steak houses and Tex-Mex, smog and concrete. It was where bilingual meant English and Spanish, and staggeringly wealthy white oil men had the run of the place.
Sound familiar?
That image of this city of more than 2 million remains amber-fixed in the minds of most outsiders. It was true back then; now, it's almost all wrong, though energy remains king.
