On a visit to Corpus Christi, Texas, while looking to experience local cuisine, I was told I absolutely had to meet Richard Lomax, the President of Water Street Restaurants. He is a second-generation restaurant owner who has a family of five restaurants, each with their own, completely different concept but with the same philosophy. All but one are located in one block of the downtown area. Firmly embedded in Corpus Christi, Richard and his team have created some unique ways to provide a taste of the gulf-side city for locals and visitors.

Click on the player below to listen to my conversation with Richard. It provides really interesting and personal insight into what it is to run restaurants, to continue the legacy of a family business, and feel responsible to the community as a whole and to everyone who sits down to one of his tables.

Richard Lomax, president of Water Street restaurants in Corpus Christi, TX. Photo courtesy of Water Street.

Here are some of the highlights you’ll hear in the podcast to learn about eating local in Corpus Christi with Water Street restaurants:

Q: Tell us about each of your restaurants.

Water Street Oyster Bar is kind of your classic Gulf Coast seafood house in an industrial port city setting. It was built in an old transmission shop that was built in 1944 and we reconstructed it in 1983. You’ll find local fair including locally-caught fish. We grow our own oysters and you’ll find the classic, mesquite grilled, simple Gulf Coast seafood there. (Editor’s note: The Sushi Room, serving poke bowls and classic sushi rolls, is an extension of the Oyster Bar.)

The Oyster Bar features mesquite-grilled, Gulf Coast seafood. Photo courtesy of Water Street restaurants.

And then we have Elizabeth’s at the Art Museum of South Texas. That’s kind of a unique concept to our group. It’s a place to escape and enjoy the water views of Corpus Christi and enjoy an eclectic Mediterranean menu tucked away in the local art museum.

Elizabeth’s at the Art Museum of South Texas provides a chance to eat local in Corpus Christi. Photo by Courtney Drake-McDonough. The USS Lexington is in the background.

El Camino is…mesquite-grilled fajitas and freshly squeezed margaritas and a nostalgic South Texas dining room with massive sunny patio to go drink.

Surf Club is the one that was built in 1990, the live music venue, and we kind of think of that concept of sharing the Texas beach culture with the world and serving burgers, beer and live music.

And we have Central Kitchen, and that is kind of a nostalgic, Americana styled bakery with old world culinary roots. It’s got like a lot of French influence kind of hidden in there but wrapped in very approachable baked goods.

Central Kitchen offers homey charm. Photo courtesy of Water Street.

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Q: Elizabeth’s is at the Art Museum as you said. Are all the others on that one block?

We have a block of real estate here, we call it Waterstreet Market. And it’s this other shop that we don’t operate that we have kind of curated friendships and relationships with locals that are offering other restaurants and or retail, one of which is Lucy’s Snack Bar. They’re doing a great job and we have a Wildflowers local home goods store here, so all of our four or five concepts are located all on this block at one perfect market.

Q: If you didn’t know the restaurants were all under your purview, you’d never know. They just have a completely different concept. Was it always the plan to have each one be a different concept? (Note: Richard’s father, who started the business, had multiple restaurants around Texas including in Corpus Christi, some with the same concept.)

When I got back in the family business, we did a lot of work on what we wanted to be: our mission statement, the vision for the companies, what fit my desires and my logistics.

And, you know, I wanted to raise my family here and moved my wife here that I met in college. And I kind of grew up seeing that, while it is much simpler to replicate the same concepts… It’s also extremely taxing. I saw my dad basically flying around the state when I was younger and having to juggle all those balls in multiple different cities and manage the different workforces and trying to keep your culture alive. Being that spread out, I saw how taxing that was for on the restaurants themselves and then on my dad as a business operator.

He just cared so much about the quality and the products he was putting out and how much time that took. So, I just knew that that would probably work for me and my wife. I wanted to live in Corpus Christi. I love it here. I love fishing. I love to go to the beach. I want to spend time with my family.

So, we knew that if we were going to write our success story, it was going to be in the coastal bend of Texas. In order to do that, I couldn’t have five Oyster Bars or five Surf Clubs in a small kind of tertiary market city like ours. I knew that I had to kind of find niches to exploit in the area.

We made the early decision that we were going to be multi concept, multi-unit operators and try to be creative. That is a very different animal than replicating the same thing over and over again.

There’s a culture that exists in every little business, every little family, every household has its own culture for me. And it’s just funny to watch that exist in each one of our (restaurants). It’s like two children each one is very unique in their own thing, and you try to teach them the same values, but they have their own unique personalities.

Q: When you’re thinking about different concepts, do you do some research on what seems to be hot right now? Or is it less about trendy and more about what you think will have good staying power and that you can pull off?

It’s funny, I feel like a lot of people, even in our conversations with some of our frontline employees, they feel like I’m extremely creative and have these kind of whacky ideas. My perspective has been more that I’m solving problems, like looking down at our business from 30,000 feet and seeing issues with it and then trying to create concepts that solve those issues.

…So, I guess I would say a lot of it has been problem solving and not just what’s hot, what’s trendy. That kind of comes into the mix and we see if there’s something hot and trendy that fixes our problems. Now that we’ve kind of developed the real estate to where we wanted it in our strategic plan, it is more of a time to try to make a decision if something is hot or trendy – or the community really wants it.

Q: You’ve got the bakery, you’ve got oysters, you’ve got sushi, those are all specific sets of talents and knowledge base. Besides hiring people who know how to do those things, how do you wrap your brain around these completely different skills sets including marketing, equipment, décor and everything? How do you go into those with a level of confidence that you have that expertise?

You know, it’s my nature, I guess, of building these different things, these varied concepts. Sometimes I feel like I’m banging my head against the wall because it is just, like you said, it’s very challenging and there are very different scenarios and there’s a limited pool of talent. And, ideally, we’re growing our own internal people but you can only move them so fast.

But there’s the demands of our growing community and pleasing the palates, the visitors and the guests, and their culinary wisdom and their appetite for more advanced concepts. It’s just getting more and more developed every year. So, we have a kind of a mandate to keep up with the people who pay us to exist…it’s culture-building, and it’s really the people that drive the business.

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Q: Are there certain dishes that really say “Corpus Christi” that our readers and listeners should know about?

Absolutely! We’re kind of culinary by heart so we like to celebrate all cultures and cuisines…If you’re talking local Corpus Christi foods, South Texan foods, we have a few items that are really important to the culture down here and you’ll find them sprinkled in really all of our concepts. One of them is Gulf Brown Shrimp species. For whatever reason, we have a palate for brown shrimp. They are deeper water shrimp. They’ve got a lot of iodine in them. When you boil them, they turn really bright orange and have a unique flavor. So, we’re particular about only using Texas-caught brown shrimp in our recipes. Of course, there’s locally-caught Black Drum, Red Snapper, Mahi Mahi, Amberjack and a whole list of Gulf seafood that you’ll find at Oyster Bar and a number of our other restaurants but mostly at Oyster Bar where we highlight those and do them over mesquite fires. Mesquite burns very hot…hot mesquite coals. It’s just kind of the way South Texans grill their food. It lends its own unique flavor and searing qualities to seafood, especially.

One thing I would be remiss not mentioning when you talk about unique South Texas products, and one thing we’re very proud of is our oyster farm. When my Dad was stepping out of the family business and passing it along to me and giving me more leash and rein, his life mission was to pass… legalized oyster culture in Texas and build that industry. And we’re very proud to say we have the first oyster permit in Texas and grow our own oysters to supply our own seafood house, which gives us direct control over the quality and the size shape the flavor of our oyster.

It’s grown in Copano Bay, literally 30 minutes away. My dad drives the oysters to our back door every morning, and we know exactly what our oysters are tasting like and exactly where they came from. And now, I think, as of next year, there will be 18 oyster farmers on the Texas coast. So not only is it a great win for our consumers and the quality of our products, but it’s a great win for our bays and estuaries.

Brad Lomax, owner of Texas Oyster Ranch and patriarch of the Water Street restaurant family. Photo courtesy of Water Street.

The old style of harvesting oysters was very harmful to the Bay system and we really need to leave those wild oysters out there for the fish to breed and eat on and continue to keep our precious environment. And I mean, that’s one of the number one reasons people come down here is to fish, surf and be on the water.

And it just wasn’t a culture match for us to be harvesting oysters the way they do. So anyway, we’re very if you’re in South Texas, you should try Copano’s. UNO’s is what we call them, are our homegrown oysters down here, and the environment wins and the consumer will win. And also, I just think a unique culture down here.

(Editor’s note: Copano Uno Oysters are from the Texas Oyster Ranch, owned by Richard’s father, Brad Lomax.)

And one of the reasons that this Tex-Mex concept is working is El Camino is that we’re really featuring foods that were invented in this part of the world, grilling game, grilling over mesquite fajitas…cattle rancher lifestyle foods, churro beans – they were all invented down here, unique to the area and basically span from Laredo to Houston. So we’re kind of right in the heart of that, and we’re very proud to serve that menu, even though people think “yellow cheese” and “Tex-Mex” and, you know, that it’s kind of a frowned upon cuisine. But It’s the food that we grew up on down here, and we’re very proud of it. And we think we do a really great job of it, not only in our restaurant, but a lot of the operators out here do a great job. So, I would encourage people that visit South Texas to come, you know, give the land where fajitas were invented and try it.

Q: Not that you aren’t doing enough already but what are your plans for the future?

It becomes increasingly difficult to keep and support each one of these unique “children” in their growth so we’re taking about 18 months off to just focus on that… I could give you a whole laundry list of things we throw up on the wall every year…Sometimes it makes sense to just focus on what you’re doing and feel solid about it, you know, and then go into growth mode later.

I have a responsibility and pride to keep up with our reputation. My dad is a great restaurant operator and did a great job building teams and I don’t want to do anything that I don’t feel we can be excellent at. We’ll grow another unit when I feel we’re firing on all cylinders at each of the ones we have right now.

To learn more about the family of restaurants, click the links above or visit Water Street Market.

-Story by Courtney Drake-McDonough, Publisher & Managing Editor of RealFoodTraveler.com and host of the Real Food Traveler Podcast which is available on iTunes, Spotify, Amazon Music, Pocket Casts and more.