Marrow bones with parsley salad at Feast. Photo by Alison Cook

The minute I saw the assertively browned marrow bones at Feast on a recent noon, I could feel myself relax into a haze of contentedness. "That's what marrow bones ought to look like," I thought to myself as I began the age-old hominid ritual of scooping out the rich, gelatinous ooze that our kind has prized for going on 2 million years.

Unlike some of the local restaurants that have jumped on the marrow bone bandwagon, Feast does right by the genre. Too often I have been confronted with bones in which the gloriously fatty marrow is insufficiently rendered: a little stiff at the bottom, perhaps, or -- on one memorable occasion -- still thoroughly opaque and white and not a little repellent.

Feast roasts the heck out of its marrow bones, which gives the diner a just-extracted-from-the-campfire experience that's appropriately primal. With its caramelized overtones, its deeply glazed surfaces and its trembly, dissolving texture, the marrow is so voluptuous you can see why some people call it "the poor man's foie gras."

And unlike the restaurants that overthink their bone-marrow service, adding so many pickles, relishes and sauces that the marrow is overshadowed, Feast serves the bones only with toast, plus a variant of the simple, sharp parsley salad made famous by Fergus Henderson at St. John in London.

The dining room at Feast. Photo by Alison Cook

That's a suitable homage, since Feast co-chef-owner James Silk learned butchery there. It was nice to see Silk and his wife, Meagan, back at Feast again, in the company of co-chef-owner Richard Knight. Last year the Silks made a run at establishing a Feast outpost in New Orleans, but they recently closed it and came back to Houston.

New Orleans is a hard row to hoe for outsiders. The city has a deeply entrenched food culture, and people there eat what they have long eaten. Moreover the Silks felt their location in the Warehouse District, which has lots of tourist traffic, demanded that they tone down the adventurous nose-to-tail menu that earned them their reputation in Houston and won them stellar national notice early on.

However much I wish the Feast trio success, there's a part of me that is delighted they're all back together in Houston again. The restaurant's rough-edged magic and sense of discovery sprang from the day to day interaction between the two chefs, in my opinion, and that kind of chemistry is hard to maintain at a distance. I always worried that by splitting their efforts, they were letting the lightning out of the bottle.

Bubble & squeak with a tongue-and-brain pie at Feast. Photo by Alison Cook

With the whole team in residence once more, I felt everything clicking. One of the options on the day's 3-course lunch special (one of the city's best bargains at $17.95) was a suet-crusted tongue-and-brain pie that seemed more medieval than paleo, as if four-and-twenty blackbirds might fly from it, instead of nicely braised tongue and softer brains, mild morsels no scarier than scrambled eggs, really.

Still, my favorite thing on the plate was the homely bubble and squeak, the retrograde British amalgam of mashed potatoes and vegetables (most often cabbage) left over from a roast dinner. I could eat that multitextured, comforting stuff every day, at least as it is made here, with the cabbage singed and caramelized in places, and the potatoes a never-ending fluff.

Exmoor toasts of anchovy and clotted cream at Feast. Photo by Alison Cook

It's a perfect example of what Feast does best: turning humble oddments into, well, a feast. Got a nice white anchovy? Mount it on a toast finger with some clotted cream, so that it becomes an exalted Exmoor Toast, one of my favorite bites in the city. Got marrow bones? Treat them with conviction, and keep it simple.

Strawberry Railway Pudding at Feast. Photo by Alison Cook

I even loved my English nursery dessert that day, a wonderfully innocent Strawberry Railway Pudding molded of buttery crumbs and tart fruit jam in a pond of vanilla-flecked creme anglaise. It is the kind of dish you won't find anywhere else, from a group of people doing something that seems uniquely theirs.

(Feast, 219 Westheimer, 713-529-7788.)