17-06-2025
How a James Beard Award-winning Texas Chef Is Reshaping New American Cuisine in the Houston Suburbs
Chef Thomas Bille doesn't just serve food — he tells stories.
At Belly of the Beast, the intimate restaurant he runs in Spring, Texas, with his wife Elizabeth, Bille combines his Mexican American heritage, French culinary training, and family memories into dishes that are personal, playful, and genre-defying. From caviar-topped empanadas to birria tacos with crisp, cheese-laced edges, the menu is a heartfelt mash-up of fine dining and home cooking — and it's earned him both a Bib Gourmand nod from the Michelin Guide and a James Beard Foundation Award, which he won on June 16 at the Beards awards ceremony in Chicago.
Bille's passion for food and fusion started early, inspired by his parents, who cooked often. His father, once chef of a French bistro who worked his way up from dishwasher, rarely took the family out to eat — 'unless it was for Chinese food or Pizza Hut,' he says. Instead, Bille tagged along at work, with cooks slipping him filet mignon and lobster Thermidor from the line. By age 10, he was cooking for himself, making French toast, eggs, and pepperoni grilled cheeses. Years later, as a single dad, he enrolled in culinary school, graduating at the top of his class before landing jobs catering and serving as the chef for top Los Angeles restaurants, Qantas Airways, and hotels like the Ritz-Carlton and JW Marriott. After serving as executive chef at Los Angeles's storied restaurant Otium and staging at Michelin-starred spots, Bille, Elizabeth, and their three kids relocated to Texas in search of a neighborhood with better schools, a lower cost of living, and the possibility of opening their own restaurant.
The Billes first launched Belly of the Beast as a pop-up in 2018. The name was inspired by Bille's hectic experiences in hotel kitchens where the kitchen team easily cooked for more than 500 people a night. 'We'd say, 'Man, we're in the belly of the beast now,' Bille says. 'I thought, 'This would be a really cool name for a restaurant,' and I ran with it.' In February 2020, the Bille's opened a 24-seat counter-service spot in a converted house in Old Town Spring. Weeks later, though, the COVID-19 pandemic hit. The Billes quickly pivoted, serving family meals to-go and offering outdoor seating. Still, a landlord dispute over the space's increasing rent resulted in the Billes closing Belly of the Beast in mid-2021. After a stint at the now-closed Chivos, where Bille launched a nixtamalized masa program, the couple reopened Belly of the Beast in November 2023 inside a humble strip mall — this time, on their own terms.
Now, Bille is free to write what he calls a love letter to diners and his past. The menu includes odes to his Mexican American upbringing, Baja cuisine, and his eldest daughter's Persian-Armenian heritage. There's summery street corn agnolotti that combines the comfort of homemade pasta and elote flavors; birria tacos with cheesy, crisped edges and salsa rojo; a yam dish with tortillas that tastes like Mexican Thanksgiving on a plate; and potato empanadas with a silky mashed potato-Comte cheese filling.
'Everything's personal and coming from my heart and soul. What I serve here, you can't get it anywhere else but here,' he says.
Defining the Belly of the Beast's cuisine can be difficult. The Billes call it New American but through the lens of a first-generation Mexican American who spoke Spanish at home, honored family customs, and immersed himself in diverse cuisines while growing up in Los Angeles. Simply put, it's his upbringing on a plate, he says. 'It's Mexican ingredients and Mexican techniques,' he says. 'But it's my own version of things.'
As with many of his other dishes, Bille reached back into his past to conceive the potato empanadas, which draw inspiration from papas con queso and his mother's taco gorditos, hard-shelled crispy tacos filled with meat, cheese, crema, and lettuce. 'It's a delicacy that I and other children of immigrants eat,' he says. 'How can I elevate this humble dish?' Bille says he channeled his experience working for French chefs by making a nouveau version of pommes aligot, folding Comte cheese into mashed potatoes for a silky filling that is piled onto masa. His mother then molds those potato-packed masa pockets into empanadas and fries them. Similar to caviar service, Bille serves the empanadas with a side of crème fraiche, caviar, and chives.
The street corn agnolotti, a Belly of the Beast fan favorite, nods to the esquites of Bille's youth — corn on the cob or sweet kernels in a cup served warm with mayo, cheese, lime, and chili powder. He transforms that memory into delicate agnolotti filled with sweet corn, glazed in a corn broth-butter emulsion, and topped with cotija, roasted kernels, and a homemade Tajin-influenced seasoning that uses his secret combination of dried chiles, lime zest, and powder. 'It's an elevated version of what I grew up eating — corn in a cup but pasta,' he says. The dish is only on the menu during summer, when corn is sweet and in season, making it a fleeting pleasure that's earned a cult-following.
When Bille moved to the Houston area around six years ago, he says the city was a bit behind on the birria taco. The quesabirra wave had already hit Los Angeles starting in 2015, with places like Teddy's Red Tacos taking inspiration from Baja California. But for Bille, it was more than a trend. 'I grew up with birria being made with goat,' he says. 'I've been making birria all my life. We'd have a big giant pot every two months.'
Bille says he started making the birria in a crockpot, stuffing it with Oaxaca and Chihuahua cheeses that would melt over the sides, creating crispy, laced edges. He debuted the dish at pop-ups and it quickly became a local favorite. From his original opening in February 2020 to the closing in June 2021, Bille estimates he sold 16,000 birria tacos. 'I made 98 percent of those personally,' says Bille, a tiring feat that made him want to take them off the menu entirely. Elizabeth encouraged him not to, and today, birria tacos are still a Belly of the Beast staple.
Bille creates a paste from adobo, charred tomato, guajillo, Mexican chiles, cumin, allspice, clove, bay leaves, and other warm spices that he rubs onto a combination of beef cuts, including chuck roll and beef shank. The beef is marinated overnight and then pre-roasted in broth from the previous batch and cooked low and slow for at least four hours until the meat grows tender falls apart. Bille assembles the taco, stuffing homemade tortillas with the beef and cheese and frying them to create the signature cheese crust before it gets served with onions, cilantro, a salsa rojo, and a side of broth for dipping.
Evolved from a highly guarded recipe, Bille compares this seasonal dish to Mexican Thanksgiving on a plate. 'In L.A., everybody had a yam taco, but they weren't great,' says Bille, so he created his own. Similar to preparation for a candied yam, Bille peels and purees yams before combining them with butter, maple syrup, piloncillo Mexican brown sugar, lime, and sea salt. He then packs the yam mixture into a tortilla and garnishes the taco with an earthy almond salsa macha, queso fresco, and chicken cracklings for textural contrast. The dish sold out at an event, with 700 tacos consumed that night alone. That same recipe lives on at Belly of the Beast, with the special That's My Yam plated and served with a side of tortillas during the fall.
Though Bille considers himself more of a savory chef, he's given his take on one of the most iconic Latin desserts — the tres leches. The cake itself, made from a sponge cake batter, is soaked in milk, heavy cream, evaporated milk, condensed milk, and a splash of vanilla. The cake then gets topped with meringue, made from egg whites and passion fruit juice for a bright tartness, and torched for an added layer of flavor that Bille compares to burnt marshmallow. 'The char creates a nuance that cuts through the sweet and creates this bite,' he says. 'It's a pretty damn good tres leches.' See More:
