Kendall Williams won last year’s Big Tex Choice Award for Most Creative with a Wagyu Bacon Cheeseburger Deviled Egg Slider, the kind of dish that sounds like a bit until you actually taste it. Now she’s building a full restaurant around that same instinct. Bluebonnet and Thyme opens with a soft launch on August 7 at 2610 N. Houston St., in the former Dirty Bones space across from American Airlines Center, and the menu reads like someone who’s spent a decade catering finally getting a kitchen big enough to say everything at once.
Williams has been cooking professionally for ten years, running Pretty Tasty Pasta in Plaza of the Americas and building her own catering company, Pretty Tasty Foods, before this. Bluebonnet and Thyme is named for the state flower and a Southern kitchen staple, and the pairing is the point: Williams is Texan with Louisiana roots, and she’s calling the menu a Cajun and Texas mashup rather than picking one lane.
Dinner runs around $35 an entree and leans hard into soul food built with some technique behind it. Deep-fried Cornish hen comes with dirty rice, there’s a catfish and lasagna dish that plays off the classic pairing of fried catfish and spaghetti, and both fried pork ribs and veal short ribs round out the main lineup. The dish drawing the most attention before opening is crispy seasoned chicken wings plated over a red velvet waffle with a sweet cream glaze, which is either dessert wearing a wing’s clothing or the other way around. Dessert itself leans warm rather than cold, including a banana pudding served hot as a rich custard instead of the usual chilled version.
Weekend brunch gets its own identity: catfish, shrimp, and grits, a whole fried Cornish hen, red velvet waffles, and a stuffed French toast loaded with cheesecake filling and fresh berries. Every brunch order comes with a complimentary mimosa or espresso martini and access to a charcuterie grazing table, which is a generous way to open a Sunday tab. Angela Williams, a longtime collaborator from Kendall’s catering days, is running the beverage program, built around what she describes as drinks that feel like sitting on a porch rather than standing at a bar.
The room itself sounds like it matches the food’s confidence. Williams describes the look as your grandmother’s house if your grandmother happened to be Dolly Parton, and the design leans into that fully: alligator-skin seating, floral cast-aluminum bistro chairs, exposed stone walls, and a Texas longhorn skull anchoring the space, with a patio and lounge for overflow. Dinner runs 3:30 to 11 p.m. Sunday through Thursday and until 1 a.m. on weekends, with a daily happy hour from 3:30 to 6:30 (all day Mondays) and a Whiskey Wednesday deal cutting every whiskey pour in half.
The soft opening on August 7 comes with discounted entrees, which makes it a reasonable first look before the full menu and full prices settle in.
