Rosie Cannonball

Rosie Cannonball opens with a free glass of lambrusco poured from a jeroboam, and that's the tone for the whole meal: generous, a little theatrical, not interested in making you wait for the good part. The menu reads simple — pizza, pasta, steak — but almost nothing on it stays simple. Gnocchi arrives with octopus. Pizza comes with salsa verde for dipping, an extra step nobody asked for that turns out to matter. A dish billed plainly as charred cabbage turns out to be carrying a full portion of duck confit underneath.

The restaurant sits next to March, Houston's most ambitious tasting-menu kitchen, and it plays the casual counterpart with the same attention to technique, just aimed at food you can order without a script. That's the real trick here — nothing on the menu asks to be taken seriously, and everything rewards it anyway.

The wine program backs this up: a James Beard semifinalist nod for it, and back-to-back Bib Gourmand recognitions confirm what the plates already argue. This is a neighborhood restaurant operating with fine-dining instincts, and it never lets you forget it while still letting you have fun.