Last month we made the trek to Houston for my cousin’s wedding. This turned out to also be a huge family reunion of sorts since all the cousins were converging for the family event. I hadn’t seen a couple of cousins in maybe 10+ years?

We flew into Houston early on a Saturday morning as the wedding reception was later in the day on Saturday. We also happened to fly out with both my sisters and one of the nephews. After arriving, my sister had rented a car and we drove the 40 ish minutes towards our hotel. On the way we wanted to grab some food for a late lunch (turned out to be prescient as they ended up not serving dinner until a bit later into the reception). I had a couple of cuisines that I wanted to try while in Houston: BBQ, TexMex, Vietnamese food.

We stopped at Lopez Mexican Restaurant, since it was on our way to the hotel and we were a bit pressed for time to get changed and get to the reception. Here I was able to try Chile con queso (shared with everyone), and then I tried their Ocampo (Two cheese enchiladas, a beef taco guacamole salad, and a chile con queso puff). Being from CA, I wasn’t looking for authentic Mexican food but wanted to try some true Tex-Mex so was happy we were able to try this.

After checking into the hotel, we rapidly changed and then headed over to the reception at Lam Bo Ballroom. This was a mixed Vietnamese-Chinese wedding (which actually was pretty similar). There was a very elaborate (and loud) dragon dance to start things off. And then instead of starting with food, they started with some speeches as well as some dances. While this was happening, they did start to bring out some food. Prior to all this, there was a cocktail and Hors d’Ouevres hour. We had adjusted our seating so we could hang out with some of the cousins that we haven’t seen in a long time so it was overall a good time. It was hard to speak too much though because the sound volume was very high with the speeches and music.