Food
Pan Pa' Venezuela
You can smell it from the sidewalk, and one look at the case tells you this is not an American bakery. Cachitos, guava rolls, Venezuelan sourdough, and the one everybody lines up for, the golfeado, a sticky bun with salty cheese melted over the top. Sweet and salty at the same time, and it absolutely works. David Diaz learned the trade in his family’s bakery back in Venezuela, and he is also the fittest baker you will ever meet.
Yummy Seafood and Oyster Bar
Katy has its own Asian Town, and this is where you eat in it. Viet-Cajun is Vietnamese cooking with a swamp accent, and Tyler Tran does it properly. Gulf oysters come dressed in olive oil, green onions, peanuts and Cajun powder, with a hit of fish sauce for tang. Then the crawfish arrive, shells and all, tossed in butter and garlic and the house blend. Messy, loud, and worth every napkin on the table.
Astor's Table
Chef Casey Castro was born in Angola, raised in Cape Town, and landed in this country with seventy five dollars to his name. Now he runs an African steakhouse in Katy, and the sampler is the way in: bobotie, boerewors sausage, chakalaka. If you are feeling brave the menu will put kangaroo and ostrich in front of you too. This is the dinner that makes the case for Houston as the best eating city in Texas.
Culture
MKT Railroad Depot Museum
Here is the answer to who Katy was, and it turns out she was not a person at all. The Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad held the right to run track down from Kansas through Indian territory into Texas, everybody called it the Katy line, and when the first postmaster needed a name for the town he borrowed the railroad’s. The depot went up in 1898 and carried passengers until 1957. Look for the hobo marks in the freight room, symbols left by men riding the rails to tell the next one whether this was a safe place to stop.
No Label Brewing Co.
Katy grew rice long before it grew subdivisions, and these silos are what is left of it. They are pushing a hundred years old, and instead of knocking them down somebody put a brewery in between and kept as much of the original structure as they could. It was the first in town. The line the founders use sums up the whole place: Katy made rice, now we make beer.
Outdoors
Dig World
A theme park where the rides are construction equipment, and you are the one running them. Mini excavators, skid steers and UTVs across three and a half acres of dirt behind Katy Mills. Jacob Robinson built it for his oldest son, who loves heavy machinery, and designed the whole place so families could climb in together rather than watch from a fence. Dig a hole, fish something out of the pond with the crane arm, and do not pretend the grown-ups will not want a turn.
