Click above for a photo tour of Radical Eats

Imagine that some celestial prankster combined a late 1960s hippie commune mess hall with a small-town Texas cafe and plopped the result among the tire stores and taquerias of Fulton Street, northeast of downtown Houston.

Picture the rakish vegetable garden out back, scraggy with winter greens and herbs, among a welter of shipping pallets and watering cans. Let your mind’s eye pause on the chalkboard for the daily vegan Mexican specials — that’s right, as in the brand of vegetarianism that avoids all animal products, including dairy and eggs.

KPFT radio should be playing on your mental soundtrack as you eyeball a sculpture twisted out of a brown paper bag and wait for your fried-avocado tacos to appear.

That’s not a stretch, that’s the six-month-old Radical Eats cafe, a quirky world unto itself amid its unlikely setting. This isn’t a restaurant for everybody — it’s on the scruffy side, and they are often out of dishes on their short menu — but I found myself curiously charmed by the place, mostly because the flavors they traffic in are so joyous.

Take, for instance, the fried-avocado tacos I asked you to imagine.

Fried avocado tacos. Photo by Michael PaulsenThey are wonderful: packed with fat avocado wedges fried to order in a crisp cornmeal crust, so that the avocado is as hot and plush as all get out. Purple cabbage slaw spiked with carrot and cilantro skitters across the top, along with ribbons of a tart pinkish “secret sauce.” Somewhere, there is a soft note of sesame.

Wrapping these packages are house-made tortillas: thin and stretchy, delicately layered, blooming with the gentle taste of corn. The whole effect is so satisfying you may end up devouring your tacos in a flash, without availing yourself of the self-serve salsas. But those potions deserve investigation. There’s a light bright tomato-based salsa fresca, mild but winning despite its frothy food-processed texture; and an apple-green jalapeño puree that tastes even brighter with its quick flare of heat.

Every day there’s a new enchilada on special. While I passed on Tuesday’s Tex-Mex version featuring TVP (that’s Textured Vegetable Protein), I didn’t miss meat or cheese in the slightest when I tried the Enchilada Verde that is served on Wednesdays. Its tart tomatillo sauce had a genuine lift to it, and the filling of sauteed greens worked beautifully, rich and dusky and underpinned by fleeting green chile heat. They were so good I immediately started figuring out how I could make them at home.

The best dishes at Radical Eats have that effect on me. At their $13 Sunday brunch, which caught me by surprise recently with its unexpected Southeast Asian theme, I was captivated by the generous green salad made from the cafe’s backyard garden and winter gleaning from area farmers markets. Wondering what was in the well-balanced dressing, which was tart with just the barest tinge of sweet, I asked one of the kitchen crew, who remind me of jolly counterculture pirates with their knotted head kerchiefs and easy banter.

Soon the man who had made the dressing emerged from the kitchen to tell me himself: he had used the pink juice from the beets and beautifully carved daikon he had quick-pickled in combination with olive oil and squeezed fresh tangerine. It was brilliantly done.

So was a deep-dark tangle of sauteed greens done much like the ones in that Enchilada Verde, and a frisky Thai-inspired glass-noodle salad with pan-toasted peanuts and a lime-tinged dressing.

I had thought I’d be eating tacos and guacamole that noon; instead I was calculating the best way to produce this salad at home, and speculating that the Vietnamese banh xeo (rice flour pancakes) that Pirate Steve had stuffed with vegetables might take wing if only they had a little nuoc mam dip to go along.

I wasn’t much taken with the pan-roasted potatoes on the brunch buffet, or the regulation refried pinto beans, which were perfectly decent but only made me miss a porky note of lard or bacon in the mix. (Oh, all right, I confess it occurred to me that my Enchilades Verdes might be even better with a nice gilding of good cheddar. Mea culpa.)

But I could only bow in befuddled admiration before the buffet’s unexpected rice dish: a delicious sludge of chewy brown rice bound by coconut milk and laced with tart-sweet pineapple, like some maniacal Thai dessert.

There was nothing terribly well-organized about this brunch, which started out sketchily with pans set out on serape-covered tables and filled in with more dishes — and eventually, hot coffee — over the course of the first hour of service. But it was an enormously likeable experience. I swigged heroic quantities of fresh grapefruit juice from the bottomless pitchers at the front counter, and gathered up the crumbs of some bittersweet chocolate pancakes that had been over-griddled and refused to stick together.

Apple and orange tamales. Photo by Michael PaulsenThe only dish that seemed ill-fashioned was the little chile rellenos stuffed with a nutty-tasting mix of what seemed to be bulghur wheat. The chiles had been so blistered and blackened that they were like chewing plastic, with little of the lush pepper meat left intact.

The tamales du jour at that brunch were soft and moist specimens with some bounce to their filling of sun-dried tomato and onion. I loved them as much as I have disliked a couple of tamales I brought home as takeout one afternoon. I admire Radical Eats owner Staci Davis (who made her mark catering vegetarian meals for visiting rock stars) for incorporating unexpected vegetables into her masa dough, but the effect of a chayote-laced masa wrapper and black-bean-chipotle filling was lost on me, so stiff and withholding my tamale stayed even after I re-steamed it.

Freshly made is best here, by a long shot. When I took home the same tamale a week later, it was terrific: spicy and practically downy in texture. Not to mention that an unusual “orange” tamale filled with sweet potato and hot chile pretty much blew my mind.

I am a sucker, too, for the house aguas frescas here, whether it be a lilting lemon-and-limade mix or the lovely “Dreamsicle” horchata, in which the rice-milk is combined with orange juice to very happy effect. The free refills are a nice plus. And if you want something stronger, you can BYOB. Expect to pay from $10 to $15 for a meal here, and expect to drive away feeling virtuous instead of guilty.
Your tongue will most likely be smiling, too.

Radical Eats
Ω
3903 Fulton; 713-697-8719
radicaleats.com

Key
Ω a good restaurant that we recommend.
ΩΩ very good; one of the best restaurants of its kind.
ΩΩΩ excellent; one of the best restaurants in the city.
ΩΩΩΩ superlative; can hold its own on a national stage.