Last night, in front of almost 200 guests, Houston Landing hosted its inaugural HTX Storytellers event at MATCH Theater in downtown Houston featuring five Houstonians connected to the city’s powerful food and hospitality culture.
The full video is below, but if you’ve only got a moment, we recommend checking out the following sections:
- At 26:40 – Josh Delon of Underground Creamery talks about turning an ice cream-making hobby into a career, leaving behind a job at Southwest Airlines, and testing his then-girlfriend’s patience by cramming a deep freezer into their studio apartment.
- At 44:52 – Katie Stone of The Cleverley Stone Foundation, producer of Houston Restaurant Weeks, talks about carrying on her mother’s legacy while changing careers, moving her family across the country, and grieving loss, all in the middle of the pandemic.
- At 59:34 – Cherif Mbodji of Bludorn, Navy Blue and Bar Blue talks about growing up in Senegal and having a brief but life-changing conversation with a neighbor that has undergirded his entire hospitality career as now a partner and head of operations.
- At 1:15:50 – Yvette Leno of Beauty’s Community Garden talks about the men and women in Independence Heights where she grew up. She introduces us to the businesses, and neighbors who made that place special, and what she’s doing now to carry on that legacy even as the neighborhood has changed.
- At 1:32:45 – David Cordua of Lymbar talks about growing up as a “restaurant brat,” and growing up to help run his family’s restaurant empire, only to lose it all over night, and build it back up.
Houston Landing uses live storytelling to create connection as part of our mission: to serve and reflect our communities, to connect people to each other and to solutions, and to create empathy among us as neighbors.
Why empathy? Understanding our neighbors and having empathy for them can reduce political polarization and help us to identify our preferences, demonstrate our appreciation of competing preferences, advance unfamiliar views, and reach areas of unanticipated agreement. How great is that?
So, we hope you’ll join Houston Landing next time. Our 2025 schedule will go live in mid-November. We will host shows focusing on:
- Love and Heartbreak in February
- Houston is Home in June
- Food in October
- Holidays in December
If you’d like to tell a story – we will help you with free, professional coaching – contact organizer Megan Finnerty at megan@houstonlanding.org.
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