Houston’s ‘the Chef’s House’ Is a Tasting Menu Restaurant in Someone’s Home

Here’s how a Houston chef brought a tasting menu back to his roots — in his own dining room

I first heard of Ensemble through Instagram. Its profile was filled with intricately plated dishes that looked like something out of a Michelin-starred restaurant or glossy magazine. I quietly watched it for a year before I signed up for a reservation via email, which is when I realized there were a few crucial details I had missed. For starters, I didn’t know the address or that the experience was officially called “the Chef’s House.” On the day of my reservation, I received an email with the location for the first time, and strangely, a code.

Is this a speakeasy? I wondered. But when I parked on a side street of a West Houston neighborhood and walked up to a gated entrance of a cozy-looking brick home, I realized the destination was actually someone’s house. I looked at my husband with raised eyebrows. (I put it in my vows that I’d drag him along with me for “weird adventures,” and so here we were.)

When we stepped inside the house, we were directed to a table of six strangers in a dimly lit dining room. Six staff members moved busily around a small kitchen, plating our first course. I have eaten at quite a few tasting menu restaurants — a Native American and Thai restaurant housed in a Kemah winery, a signless Mexican restaurant nestled in a strip mall in Spring Branch, an omakase in a Montrose clothing shop, and March’s ritzy Michelin-starred restaurant in Montrose. But this was somehow my first time dining in a home restaurant, a format that gained popularity during the pandemic when chefs across the country experimented with home pop-up dinners and other smaller, more intimate events without traditional overhead costs associated with a standalone restaurant. Some cities, like Los Angeles, also implemented newer legislation that allows home restaurants to open with less red tape. In Portland, Oregon, Korean American restaurant Han Oak temporarily opened in the chef’s home, only to become a permanent fixture in the community.

But while several Houston chefs have hosted pop-ups in homes and intriguing spaces or used their home kitchens to start their businesses, restaurants in Texas homes seem rare. Texas Cottage Food Laws permit individuals who have completed a food handlers course to use their home kitchen to prepare and sell non-hazardous and properly labeled foods that typically don’t require refrigeration. This includes baked goods (excluding meat, custard, and cream fillings), candy, and dry mixes. But opening a restaurant in a residential space often requires more permitting, licensing, and certifications, including food handling certifications and commercial-grade cooking equipment.

In Ensemble’s sleek and minimalistic dining room, we caught glimpses of chef Jan-Mitchell Avilés and sous chef Tyler Westry plating dishes and heard ingredients hissing in pans on the stove just steps away. The chefs and a head server, Juan Rios, delivered each course — bright compressed watermelon sashimi that eats like tuna; seared scallops in a refreshing aguachile; Ropa Nueva, a deconstructed rendition of the traditional Puerto Rican dish ropa vieja; an intricate spiral of a rich butternut squash and ricotta ravioli; and to finish the meal off, a sweet, caramelized plantain crowned with a quenelle of caviar served over ice cream. Experience coordinator Juliette Wooden guided diners through the experience with dish descriptions; beverage director Andre Franklin emerged before each course, pouring glasses to complement each dish — a crisp Grüner Veltliner from Austria, an amber wine from Argentina, and a pinea tempranillo from Ribera del Duero, Spain.

There was something particularly disarming about the home restaurant experience. Conversation flowed readily with our dinner companions — we discussed our favorite restaurants, our kids, our jobs, the Astros, and golfing. My husband even discovered a mutual connection with another diner at the table, leading to a golf outing and an Astros game with new friends later that week.

In the end, we got a big reveal: This house was Avilés’s actual home. The chef by night and graphic by day, lives there with his wife, Jessica Wall — a copywriter and Ensemble’s general manager and director of operations, who was in the kitchen quietly washing dishes and resetting plates — and his son. The couple has run a tasting menu restaurant in their home for the past four years. There, of course, was a licensing process — Avilés, Westry, and staff are all licensed for food handling, and the kitchen is also certified. Technically, because Ensemble’s Chef House is organized more as a social club than an everyday restaurant, Avilés says the requirements have been less stringent than those of a restaurant.

Avilés always wanted to be a chef. “I had a dream of opening a coffee shop in the morning, going to the market, and making dinner for 10 people at night,” he says. He spent half of his life in Puerto Rico before moving to Houston during his first year of high school. After graduating, he considered attending culinary school, but instead decided to do an internship with a chef in Houston. “I remember working with him one summer, peeling potatoes, and he asked me, ‘Do you like cooking for yourself or for other people?’” Avilés says. When Avilés responded that he got more joy from cooking for himself, his mentor told him he was in the wrong industry. Avilés switched gears and went to business school at what is now Houston Christian University, but he never lost his love for cooking. The self-taught chef traveled, forming personal relationships with chefs around the world and finding inspiration at the Michelin green-starred Acre in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico; the now-closed Hypha in Chester, United Kingdom, which also had a green star; and the Kitchen Table in Tulum, Mexico. He built on a foundation of flavors and cooking approaches he learned from his mother, his adopted Cuban grandmother, and his friends.

“I learned to trust that what’s in my heart is being communicated in my food,” he says.

Avilés and Wall began to take serious steps toward making their restaurant dream a reality in 2019. They traveled to Paris — a city they feel close to and got engaged in — a couple of times while developing plans to open a restaurant there. (“Every time we traveled to Paris, we could really picture ourselves living there and raising a family,” Avilés says.) Then, in 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Unable to travel and open a restaurant through traditional routes, the couple eventually decided to host dinners in their home in 2019. Ensemble debuted in 2021 with a somewhat nomadic format: Avilés and Wall hosted pop-up dinners at rental properties throughout the city, a process that proved challenging, especially when traveling with their custom equipment. At that time, they only charged $50 per person.

Friends who attended these dinners praised the idea, which would later take on the name Ensemble, the French word for “together.” Soon, Avilés relocated the restaurant to a house in East Downtown for two years, investing around $48,000 of personal savings for the lease and around $30,000 for renovations — a relatively small sum compared to what restaurateurs or chefs typically spend to open a restaurant, he says. Avilés designed the brand logo and registered Ensemble on the OpenTable reservation platform. Reservations filled up quickly.

One of Avilés’s best friends gave him the idea of “the Chef’s House,” stemming from Buenos Aires, Argentina, where chefs commonly host “puertas cerradas” or “closed door restaurants” in their homes. In 2023, during Ensemble’s third year of operation, Avilés turned the restaurant into a full-time endeavor by buying a family home that would also serve as their restaurant. With the Chef’s House, Avilés says he wanted diners to feel like they were watching an artist at work in his studio. “We’re giving people a look into my creative process and the heartbeat behind this concept,” he says.

The menu, which changes monthly, still draws influences from the Avilés’ travels around the world, with a significant emphasis on his Puerto Rican heritage, the Mediterranean, and sous chef Westry’s upbringing in Uruguay and Italy. On Fridays and Saturdays, diners can sit at a table of eight, but Avilés says he is working on launching a chef’s counter for two that will provide a front-row seat to the plating and action in the kitchen with a couple of bonus dishes.

The restaurant has received rave reviews, despite the price point increasing from $50 when it first started to $195 per person. “The people who come now, they know what they’re getting themselves into. It’s usually people who have traveled around the world,” he says. “We’ve had people fly in to eat dinner and leave the next day, but it’s because they’ve been exposed to [this type of experience]. It’s not just food. It enriches you.”

“We love hosting people. We see value in community,” he says. In the end, it’s not just anyone walking into their home. They are diners who have invested in an experience — the guarantee of “good food, good wine, and good company,” part of Ensemble’s motto.

“And I do believe we’re the best-kept secret in Houston,” Avilés says. “It doesn’t get more intimate than this.”

Ensemble