Menu
Menu
Tina and Brett
Restaurant Rating
Cost Rating
Food Type
Burgers, Steaks & Other American fare
2991 Michelson Dr, Irvine, CA 92612
Their unbeatable menu offerings, combined with deliberately designed interiors that make every guest feel like they have the best seat in the house, keep us coming back to these restaurants.
Our local Hillstone restaurant is the Houston’s in Irvine, and we’ve been dining here for years. What’s great about these restaurants is that while the concept may vary from city to city, classic menu items like the Smoked Salmon, Spinach, and Artichoke dip, the Ahi Tuna salad, and the Hillstone Burger are always on the menu.
The Hillstone Restaurant Group was founded by George Biel in 1977 and, to this day, remains a privately held, family-owned business. The first Hillstone’s restaurant was based in Nashville and named ‘Houston’s’ in a nod to George’s home state of Texas.
What started in Nashville quickly spread to locations across the Northeast and down through Florida. The expansion was slow and methodical so as not to dilute the brand.
One of the most beloved Hillstone features is the booth seating. Almost all of the tables in this restaurant group are booths by design. Booths are not just the most requested seating in a restaurant, but they are also the most private and intimate. Making close to the entire restaurant (with the exception of the bar area) booth seating makes all guests feel like they have a great table.
The vibe at Hillstone Restaurant is refined but relaxed. The food is excellent, but the restaurant group isn’t stuffy or pretentious about it. While Hillstone is technically a chain, there’s nothing about its restaurants that feel like a chain.
The current lineup of restaurants in the Hillstone portfolio includes:
The service at a Hillstone restaurant is always spot-on. This doesn’t just come down to a solid hiring, management, and training model. The secret to the
consistently good service at a Hillstone restaurant lies in the fact that servers are only given three-table sections. That means the servers are not running round to and fro from one side of the restaurant to the other, and management isn’t saddling them with huge sections in an effort to cut labor costs to the detriment of customer service.
This is likely also the reason that if you have a party of 6 or more, they do not have the tables to accommodate groups of that size.
We should probably start off by saying that Houston’s is a go-to restaurant for us. We’ve tried every item on the menu, and, as other Hillstone fans will attest, their excellence is a result of their consistent presentation and the overall quality of the flavors on the plate.
If you’re visiting a Hillstone restaurant for the first time, starting off with Houston’s famous House-Smoked Salmon appetizer with chef’s dressing and toast is an absolute must. This is hands down the best-smoked salmon we’ve ever had. This dish is served as a large piece of salmon, and when you begin pulling off flakes with your fork, you start to see just how plump and tender this piece of fish really is. Such a simple yet spectacular dish.
What else do you need to order from the menu at Houston’s? How does an heirloom Grilled Artichoke sound? Houston’s, and the other Hillstone sister restaurants, prepare just 20 of these a night. These Grilled Artichoke are sourced from Castroville, California, which is considered the Artichoke Capital of the US. This super seasonal offering is the product of rootstock brought over from Italy by immigrants in the early 1900s, and the taste and tender texture are exactly what you want from a cooked artichoke.
A huge part of the Hillstone Restaurant Group ethos is “give the customer what they want.” Seems pretty obvious, but a lot of restaurants overthink this. Hillstone restaurants, on the other hand, have this down to a science. They know their customer base so well that the menu includes light but satisfying California-inspired fare, like the above items, but you will also see sushi – the salmon, ahi tuna, and yellowtail are excellent – next to the Hawaiian Rib-Eye Steak with Pineapple-Soy-Ginger Marinade.
It’s a great way to run a restaurant.
Houston’s wine list is pretty slim for a restaurant wine list. It’s a lot of Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, and Napa Valley Cabernet. If you decide to bring your own bottle, the corkage is $25 per bottle.
Houston’s restaurant in Irvine, and the Hillstone restaurants, in general, are a solid choice when it comes to upscale casual dining. It really is hard to have a bad experience when you visit one of these restaurants. The wait staff is very well trained and offers excellent service throughout the entire meal. Oh, and one last tidbit: if you have a mixed beverage with grapefruit or orange juice, it is made fresh-squeezed at the time of the order. This little touch makes such a big difference.
