Houston has been both blessed and beset by Rainbow Lodge. In its previous incarnation at Bayou Bend, the Lodge served pretentious and overpriced preps of wild game and other meats. Recently, it’s seen a renaissance under a new chef who revived the menu with his modern interpretations of Gulf Coast and Hill Country cuisines. It’s still often pretentious, generally overpriced, and sometimes uneven, but at its best, the food now reaches amazing heights.

Rainbow Lodge feels like your grandfather’s restaurant, the log cabin he would build upon retiring to some sylvan Eden, complete with taxidermy. You may take your wine for a stroll through the carefully tended gardens that are often harvested by the kitchen. But the deliberate rusticity reaches almost Baroque levels; it’s fun, but maybe too theatrical for the simple cuisine.

In addition to the regular menu, tasting menus are offered that make great use of seasonal ingredients. In spring, you might have a dish of sweet English peas with chilled, grated bacon and kefir. Or gamy, tender slivers of duck breast paired with even thinner slivers of melting, luscious foie gras, specked with Grains of Paradise. House-made charcuterie is often sublime. However, problems plague the kitchen as it gets too ambitious, especially as it heads towards the meat courses. An expertly cooked loin of venison was one time body-slammed by a coating of cubeb peppercorn that gave off a jarring menthol flavor that numbed our tongues all the way through dessert. It was as if the novelty of the ingredient was more of interest to the kitchen than its application. For our money, we’ll stick to the standard menu, with which the kitchen has had more time to work out the kinks.

Unfortunately, at this time, the waitstaff seems clueless and lacking in the same passion that the kitchen has—we had to remind them that there was even a tasting menu one night—and brunch has had the servers so frazzled they seemed afraid to emerge in the dining room. The wine list isn’t nearly as exciting as the dishes coming out of the kitchen. But we will be back, because the pot of gold that is this kitchen’s finest hour is always just in sight.

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