The Oxheart kitchen, with its 70-hour work weeks, was a high-pressure environment. “He saw me do everything wrong as a cook,” Steets says. And Oxheart’s small open kitchen setup and tasting menu format meant that you couldn’t hide anything from Yu. Steets has been working with Justin Yu for nearly six years, but when she started with him, she was an entry-level cook. She rose from line cook to chef de cuisine.
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“Learning what people are growing, how they’re growing it, how to use it, going to the farmers’ market and having those relationships,” Steets says, “That’s my favorite part of the job, hands down.” That means limes and her favorite mushrooms from Flying Saucer Farms, frisée greens and beets from Joshua Rosas’ Jordan Ranch, and sorrels from her go-to sorrel guy at Plant It Forward.
Littlefoot is very much a reflection of that mindset, with Steets calling on her cherished T-Rex purveyors for her solo debut. “There are so many different ways that you can be careful about your costs in a small restaurant, but product, especially when it includes supporting the small businesses, the small farms, and the local purveyors, that is when you don’t cut corners,” she says. When she later joined Yu’s team as a line cook at Oxheart, it’s something he instilled in her over the years. “You could tell that the product was super intentional,” Steets says of the meal, still remembering an okra and sunchoke dish. The vegetables were also what struck her when she first dined at Oxheart, Justin Yu’s first restaurant before it closed and made way for Theodore Rex. “That was really a place where I learned how Houston seasons work,” Steets says. This started early on in her career with one of her first kitchen gigs as a cook under Chris Shepherd at Underbelly, who emphasized building relationships with farmers.
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