Click above for a photo tour of Revival Market

In my fantasy world, I could afford to shop at Revival Market every day. The handsome specialty butcher and grocer on a corner of Heights Boulevard is stocked with so many intelligently chosen, passionately made foodstuffs — many of them local or regional — that the shelves and counters and cold boxes and salumi curing case are as seductive as a high-end jewelry store might be to a woman with different priorities.

The reality, for me and most people of my acquaintance, is that Revival Market is more of a thrilling splurge. It’s the kind of treasure-house where I count the inspiration it provides me, in my cooking and eating life, as part of the final tab.

Revival Mangalitsa Dog and heirloom bean salad. Photo by Alison CookThe casual, self-serve cafe component of the market is the staging area where I plot my purchases, swapping greetings and cooking tips with the local foodigentsia who school through like hungry fish. On any given day you might spy David Leftwich, the inspired home cook whose all-local exploits are the stuff of local Twitter legend; or David Theis, who writes the “Digest This” column on the Houston Entree website; or Dr. Cathi Walsh, the woman famous for dining out no fewer than 33 times during Houston Restaurant Month.

They’re all there to partake of thoughtful short-order fare from market proprietor Morgan Weber and his partner, chef Ryan Pera, who made his local mark at 17 restaurant and Robert del Grande’s the Grove. The blackboard menu is small and responsive to the season, and it offers an appealing way to sample some of the market’s carefully made and curated products.

Nowhere else in the city does a grilled cheese sandwich taste as important — nay, as magnificent — as the specimen here, housed on buttery toasted slabs of Slow Dough bakery’s seeded Harvest Sourdough and oozing lava streams of a Texas-made Colby from Sand Creek, as fragrant and faintly barnyard-y as the haughtiest European Gruyere. With a slice of Revival Market’s house-cured country ham tucked in as an extra, like dense and salty pink satin, the $11.50 price tag loses its terrors — for me, anyway.

I figure I’m paying for the indelible taste memory and the added pleasure of one of the market’s thoughtful side dishes in the bargain. The heirloom bean salad, perhaps, a tumble of cannellini and ayacote morados from the brilliant purveyor Rancho Gordo Beans out of Napa. Texas olive oil binds the flavors, smoked paprika adds a warm reddish tinge, and fresh herbs in season (tarragon and parsley of late) contribute an edgy twinge.

The brisk red and green cabbage slaw is another home run, ­sparked with just enough tart ginger-lime dressing and an invigorating kick of cilantro and pungent rau ram, bias-cut into elegantly thin slivers. So striking and Houston-friendly is this slaw that it sent me home raring to experiment with cabbages and condiments and handfuls of Vietnamese herbs.

That’s my fondest takeaway from Revival Market: the ideas, the sense of what is possible in our particular corner of the world. Only a couple of years ago, the notion that a Gulf Coast heritage pig rancher could produce fat, sassy hot dogs from Mangalitsa hogs seemed like a pipe dream. Now, Revival Market storekeeper Morgan Weber is doing just that at his Yoakum ranch, with Pera and his lieutenant Adam Garcia to grind and season and smoke the sausages and turn them out in chewy Slow Dough pretzel buns as Hot Dogs of the Gods.

Well, that’s my name for the hot dogs served by Revival Market, anyway. They are so mighty, I like to share one with a friend by cutting it in half, the better to ooh and ah in admiration as the nuances sink in: the subliminal pop of the whole seeds in the housemade mustard; the juiciness and spice of the dog itself; the nip of house-made green tomato relish and the mysterious textures of the chicharrones on top, flash-fried from the belly fat of those Mangalitsa pigs.

Feel like just a salad? Pera and company produce such elegant seasonal plates as baby romaine studded with the juiciest hunks of Texas free-range chicken, a confetti of grated raw butternut squash and a half-hidden prize of dehydrated winter strawberry slices, all discreetly dressed. Pure and well-nigh perfect.

Soup connoisseurs might choose from oxtail with winter greens or a gorgeous bowl of smoked-turkey udon, the fat, slippery noodles cushioning a soft-boiled farm egg and a raft of winter root vegetables: radish and carrot jumped up with bitter greens and turkey-skin cracklings. The udon’s hot-and-sour broth fell just short of brilliance, tasting too salty for comfort. With a bit of adjustment, the dish would be a Houston classic.

If you fell in love with Revival Market’s BLTs at the City Hall Farmers Market, fear not: they are a staple of the brief menu here. You must request to have your Slow Dough sourdough toasted (do so; it’s worth it in the textural department), and the winter tomatoes here are no better than they are anywhere else, I am sorry to say. But the sandwich still grabs with its thick, meaty bacon rashers from those pampered South Texas hogs; and the peppery snap of arugula leaves against an herbal green mayonnaise give the sandwich a distinct personality. I can’t wait to eat it when tomatoes come back into season. (In the meantime, why not roast and/or slow-smoke some Romas, guys?)

To drink, there are draw-them-and-ice-them yourself iced and herbal teas, a house lemonade and a spectacular panoply of coffee drinks. The coffees are all from local roasters, lovingly prepared, and the flat whites, cortados and espressos are in the top rank of local coffee drinks.

Indeed, it’s a dream to start out a morning with a coffee here, accessorized with one of the terrific meat-market breakfast tacos that Pera and company assemble out of the day’s most promising meat trimmings, judiciously simmered with chiles and spices. For the money, a coffee drink and a taco are a sort of gateway drug to the joys of Revival.

"Home-made" oreo cookie by Rebecca Masson. Photo by Alison CookSo are the sweets from freelance pastry chef and consultant Rebecca Masson, whose cookies and tarts and cupcakes inhabit a case at the market’s far end. Her “home-made” oreo cookies are beguiling things, a fluff of white frosting sandwiched between two deep-dark cookie layers that finish with a bite of salt. (That complicating salt content, to my mind, is often the secret of successful baked goods.)

I’m still thinking about the crackly wholemeal-type base of Masson’s chocolate-dipped Hobnob cookies; and the Moroccan complications of her gorgeous Ras al Hanout macaron, its pale semi-gloss surface dusted with tiny pinpoints of edible glitter.

Thinking, as it happens, is part and parcel of the Revival Market experience. I return home bearing house-cured meats sliced wafer-thin and painstakingly packaged, a couple of dollars’ worth of ingeniously spiced coppa or mortadella destined for a midnight snack, a pizza topping, a home-made slider slapped together with a Slow-Dough pretzel roll from the bakery case, with a condiment from my own arsenal.

I marvel over the rich, bloomy meadow taste of the whole milk I’ve purchased from Way Back When Dairy. I contemplate our wealth of winter strawberries under the influence of buttermilk and Waterloo Texas Gin in a pint of ice cream from local producers Fat Cat Creamery. I may have never cared about strawberry ice cream, but I care about this one.

Then I start dreaming about ways to use the extraordinary (and oh so Texan) Sorghum Finishing Vinegar barrelled and bottled by the Revival team. It is full and dark and sweet and sour and the tiniest bit savory underneath. A miracle in a spoon.

I can imagine this remarkable vinegar on vanilla ice cream. In a cocktail. Electrifying a sauce or a dressing at the last minute. I go home with a big bottleful that cost me $26.95. But like so much about Revival Market, the rewards are priceless.

Revival Market
ΩΩ
550 Heights Boulevard
713-880-8463

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.