All Rhodes Lead Home

When you sit down to a five-course tasting menu at a restaurant, you expect food prepared with a certain level of technique, artistry, and a taste of the sublime. At Indigo, a restaurant in northeast Houston, you get all that—plus a history lesson.

Over the course of the two-and-a-half-hour meal, chef and restaurant owner Jonny Rhodes explains each dish, as he interprets it, to his guests. Presenting a dish entitled “Gold Links,” pickled pumpkin with kumquat confiture gel, Rhodes draws a correlation between the way malnourished enslaved people used precious metals to protect their teeth from disease and the contemporary practice among some African Americans of wearing gold teeth. Another dish, squash with gourd pickles, is plated to resemble the crown on the Statue of Liberty, as an allegory for