Lee Ellis
I’ve followed Lee’s career for many years, taking note of his rise to notoriety as the brainchild behind the BRC Gastropub — remember that big red rooster statue out front on Shepherd? — and Liberty Kitchen. The success of those concepts, which elevated “fun” food to haute cuisine, as did similarly novel restaurants like Max’s Wine Dive at the time, earned Lee the nickname I often used when writing about him — the Godfather of Comfort-Food Chic.
In 2015, as we were making plans to launch CityBook magazine the following year, my photographer friend Julie Soefer and I created a series of faux covers to use to promote the soon-to-be-announced new publication. Lee was so influential at the time — and, with his long, gray ZZ Top beard, so cool — he was among our subjects, along with the likes of Lynn Wyatt, rocker Kam Franklin and a bevy of top models. I’ve always loved that cover.
Lee’s approach to food reminded me a bit of Dolly Parton’s approach to style: “It costs a lot of money to look this cheap.” He may have just been serving French fries, but by damn he was going to fry them in butter, as he did at one of his later concepts, Star Fish. And if you ordered gumbo at Liberty, it didn’t just come with rice; there was also a side of old-school, like-grandma-made potato salad, a nod to his Cajun roots in Lafayette, La.
Also at Liberty Kitchen, it wasn’t enough to serve a fabulous thick slice of red velvet cake for dessert. Lee also provided the option of tossing the whole thing into a vintage-looking drugstore mixer with premium ice cream and making it into a milkshake. Oh my, those were good.
At his State Fare, Frito pie was a delicacy. At Lee’s Fried Chicken and Donuts, two of every Southerner’s favorite dishes found themselves together at last. With a drive-through!
In his last years, Lee, a cancer survivor, broke ties will his former partners and no longer had a hand in the restaurants spawned by his whimsy and flair. Many of them are closed now; State Fare and Liberty Kitchen continue on under new ownership. It was rumored that Lee, a perfectionist deeply committed to his own clever ideas, could be challenging to work with at times.
He and wife Melissa Savarino, a jewelry designer and retailer, moved to Round Top, where, per reporting by the Houston Chronicle’s Greg Morago, he operated the Ellis Motel lounge and the Round Top Smokehouse barbecue joint. Lee seemed on his way to building another delicious empire in his new home base.
One of the great accomplishments of my life was when Lee came to my house for dinner and assessed that my homemade gumbo was pretty good. As personal triumphs go, little else can compare.
Restaurateur Lee Ellis appeared on a 2016 mock cover of ‘CityBook,' used to promote the magazine’s launch that year.
Houston Ballet Principal Jessica Collado as Alma and artists of Houston Ballet in Cathy Marston’s Summer and Smoke (Photo by Amitava Sarkar)
The program includes the world premiere of Summer and Smoke, based on the Tennessee Williams play of the same name, with choreography by Cathy Marston and a commissioned score by Michael Daugherty; George Balanchine’s Concerto Barocco; and Houston Ballet Artistic Director Stanton Welch’s Clear, set to Johann Sebastian Bach’s Concerto for Violin and Oboe in C minor and the first two movements from his Violin Concerto in G minor.
Now one of Welch’s most oft-performed ballets, audiences may not recall that Clear premiered in New York on October 25, 2001, just weeks after the 9/11 attacks. “It was the very first thing I did after the attacks,” says Welch. “I chose to finish it differently.”
Clear famously features a cast of seven men in flesh-toned costumes, with six of the seven representing different aspects of one man. The title refers to the mental and spiritual clarity that arises amid terrifying circumstances.
Welch (photo courtesy of the Houston Ballet)
For Welch, a panicked phone call home to Australia on that fateful day was that moment of surrender, when instead of obsessing over petty squabbles, one experiences “the essence of love,” as represented in Clear by the cast’s only woman dancer.
More than two decades after its premiere, which included recently appointed Houston Ballet co-artistic director Julia Kent, Welch feels the Clear’s concept and message still resonate, “perhaps now more than ever.”
For Welch, the music of Bach is perfectly suited for Clear. “There’s a simplicity and a math to it that lends itself to dance in so many creative ways,” says Welch, who next season celebrates his 20th year with the Ballet. “I think that’s its power.” He also names Vivaldi, Mozart, and Tchaikovsky (Welch is at work on a new ballet to Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1) as composers who inspire him to move. “I can see steps when I hear the music,” says Welch.
“Hear the dance, see the music” is something dancers often say what they and ideally an audience will experience at a ballet, and Balanchine, one of the most influential choreographers of the 20th century, may be the epitome of that statement. “He’s so extraordinarily musical,” says Welch. “You see in Concerto Barocco this simplicity of eight girls and the principal trio in very little costuming dancing and using completely ballet vocabulary and yet it seems so fresh and original. It seems like you’re seeing the music.”
Hearing and seeing the music is important, but so is feeling it, and for Welch, just listening to classical music is an emotional experience. “When I lost my husband a couple of years ago, I found classical music really hard to return to,” says Welch. (Welch’s husband was one of six lives lost in the 2019 Kerrville plane accident.) For a time, Welch found comfort in listening to the ’80s music he grew up with, but in the past year has begun listening to French and Russian masters Debussy, Ravel, and Prokofiev. “I can’t hear classical music and not feel something,” says Welch.
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