What You'll Get
Few things are as satisfying as a good meal or the thrum of a crossbow as it sends a bolt into a ham. Hit the spot with this Groupon.
$10 for $20 Worth of Modern American Lunch
The lunch menu—served Tuesday–Saturday from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.—highlights rustic, regional American dishes such as mustard-coated rabbit tenderloin with salsa verde and red-onion marmalade ($14), persian chicken salad with grilled pizza bread ($10), and a customizable longhorn burger that 29-95 food critic Alison Cook summed up in one word: "wow" ($15, served with fries or slaw).
For every Groupon purchased, Chef Monica Pope will donate $1 to Making It Better, an organization dedicated to improving literacy and life skills in under-served elementary-school students.
The Fine Print
Promotional value expires Nov 6, 2013. Amount paid never expires. Limit 1 per person, may buy 2 additional as gifts. Limit 1 per table. Valid only for option purchased. Dine-in only. Not valid for happy hour specials or alcohol. Valid only for lunch from 10 a.m.-5 p.m. on Tues.-Sat. Not valid on holidays. Not valid for special menus or prixe fix menus. Merchant is solely responsible to purchasers for the care and quality of the advertised goods and services.
About Sparrow Bar + Cookshop
After 20 years in Houston's culinary scene, Monica Pope was in need of a change. In 2012, she reinvented her signature restaurant t'afia to create Sparrow Bar + Cookshop. The name makes a statement not only because it highlights the lineup of spirited beverages (think quirky, organic-gin cocktails and a wine list that includes Texas sakes), but also because it revives the medieval concept of a cookshop: a communal food stop where travelers and the locals who lacked their own kitchens once gathered. For Monica, the term conjured a rustic, uncaged mentality that she reflects each day in her restaurant’s industrial-yet-cozy environs and on the daily changing, localvore menus that have been profiled by publications such as Eater.
When she's not leading in-house cooking classes, Monica is busy innovating in the kitchen. Her seasonal dishes include apps such as watermelon-radish salad and chili-peanut and black bean soup (which the menu invites you to share…or not) and entrees such as a lamb cutlet with saffron-sherry aioli or a date-covered Gulf red snapper that celebrate American, Mediterranean, and Asian flavors. The menu’s one constant, a portobello or longhorn burger, welcomes customization with ingredients such as beet chutney and crushed avocado or the chef's signature written in red-curry catsup.
Servers dressed in blue-suede boots and handmade-leather welding aprons ferry these dishes through an environment that Alison Cook characterized as exuding a "raw industrial warmth" in her Houston Chronicle review. Pope's attention to "keen visual detail” has produced an exposed-brick space in which metal ceiling girders and oxidized pizza-pan lanterns hang over custom laminated-wood chairs at black metal tables. Antique columns hold up a communal table made from a thick slab of salvaged wood around which private dining parties gather.