Miguel Ramirez cooks Wednesday March 15, 2023, in the kitchen at Aga’s Restaurant in Houston.
Houston Chronicle/Hearst Newspap/Houston Chronicle via Getty Imag
As America’s fourth-largest city, Houston, like much of Texas, is often viewed as a place with occasionally charming stories to be told. It falls to national journalists to pull up and tell stories that essentially boil down to “Did you know this place you thought was a hellhole has culture?” A great distillation of this dynamic happened last month surrounding a popular Houston restaurant.
In August, Business Insider published a roughly 20-minute video on Aga’s Restaurant, the Southwest Houston Indo-Pak powerhouse. Host Havovi Cooper toured the restaurant’s insane operation, revealing that Aga’s is one of the busiest restaurants in the United States on Uber Eats. She sat with owner and Aga’s CEO Shaukat Maredia, who described running Aga’s as a “food factory” in the video.
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BI’s video did pretty well; I saw it a few times on both my X and Instagram feeds and several friends shared it around. It was cool to see a Houston spot get some national love. Then, this week, Aga’s got some more love. The New York Times published a massive profile of Aga’s headlined “Is This Houston Strip-Mall Joint the World’s Busiest Restaurant?” Written by food reporter Priya Krishna, who is from Dallas, the story similarly touts that Aga’s is the top restaurant on Uber Eats and goes inside the restaurant to see what has made it so successful.
Then, locally, the Houston Chronicle jumped on the story a few days later. Already, the Chronicle had somewhat surprisingly put Aga’s at the top of its highly regarded Top 100 restaurants list in 2025, which didn’t hurt for national outlets in search of a story. And let’s not even get into all the influencers who regularly rave about Aga’s. (Of course, it’s not illegal or plagiarism for an outlet to write the same story as another. Let he who has never cribbed a story idea from another publication cast the first stone.)
“We’re getting a lot of attention from the community around the world.”
But believing, perhaps foolishly, that we had reached Peak Articles About Aga’s, I called up Maredia. I was curious where all this attention was coming from and, if such a thing is even possible, bringing in more business. But just a few minutes into my conversation with Maredia, he informed me that another article about Aga’s had just come out that morning.
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“Did you see the article from People Magazine?” Maredia asked.
I had not. He implored me to read it and call him back. I did him that courtesy and read the story, somewhat bafflingly headlined “This Houston Indian-Pakistani Spot Makes the Most Uber Eats To-Go Orders of Any Single-Location Restaurant: Here’s How (Exclusive).” How this story was exclusive, exactly, was lost on me; it cites extensively from both the New York Times and Business Insider, though Maredia is interviewed in it. Words used to mean something!
But regardless of what information was reported first, or what was exclusive to whom, the publicity has helped. Maredia told me that since the video and Times article, he’s seen an influx of visitors from as far as Canada to see just how Aga’s does it all.
“We’re getting a lot of attention from the community around the world,” Maredia said.
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Shaukat Sal Maredia, owner of Aga’s Restaurant, helps customers with takeout orders Wednesday March 15, 2023, at the restaurant in Houston. He said his restaurant was preparing for Ramadan.
Houston Chronicle/Hearst Newspap/Houston Chronicle via Getty Imag
“It’s difficult for people to accept”
But that attention hasn’t been universally positive. A viral X post about Aga’s claimed that the restaurant’s success is proof that Houston has no culture.
“Houston’s so juiceless that everyone sits at home ordering delivery and the most popular delivery restaurant in the world is a South Asian restaurant in a suburb that’s grown to a banquet hall with 9 chefs and 200 employees with a call center and delivery driver annex,” the post read. Houstonians, myself included, pushed back.
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Smart, funny and sometimes unhinged look at the week that was.
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Houston is one of the most diverse places in America, and Aga’s sits at the intersection of several especially diverse Houston suburbs. Some 655,000 South Asians live in the Houston area, by some estimates. It sounds contradictory if you’ve never been to Houston. And Maredia speculated that Aga’s gets so much media attention because it’s a story about a large-scale operation in an unlikely place, if you’re not in the know. The restaurant famously has lines out the door and operates a call center to keep orders going around the clock.
“It’s an incredible scene,” Maredia said. “It’s difficult for people to accept that a South Asian restaurant dominates the world.”
And Maredia isn’t going to complain about the attention, especially as the restaurant prepares to expand to Austin and Dallas.
“This attention helps us go faster,” Maredia said. “And this is an endorsement, right? When you get endorsements from the Houston Chronicle to The New York Times to People Magazine, Business Insider, I’d say those are endorsements that you cannot buy.”
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Dining and Cooking