{"id":406283,"date":"2025-11-26T15:45:12","date_gmt":"2025-11-26T15:45:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/406283\/"},"modified":"2025-11-26T15:45:12","modified_gmt":"2025-11-26T15:45:12","slug":"only-1-houston-spot-makes-opentable-list-of-2025s-top-100-restaurants","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/406283\/","title":{"rendered":"Only 1 Houston spot makes OpenTable list of 2025’s top 100 restaurants"},"content":{"rendered":"

For the past month, Uncle Dibbz<\/strong> has been, shall we say, going ham on social media with the myriad videos of alternative Thanksgiving dishes. He\u2019s dropped how-to clips for such recipes as Cajun-roasted turkey, honey-baked ham\/hens, oven-bag turkey, and six-piece fried turkey (to go). Basically, if you don\u2019t want to cook a bland ol\u2019 Butterball this Turkey Day, Dibbz has you covered.<\/p>\n

Who is Dibbz, you say? Well, he\u2019s a North Jersey-born, Georgia-bred, Houston-based chef who\u2019s been building quite the foodie rep online. Several videos across his TikTok<\/a>, Instagram<\/a> and YouTube<\/a> pages, from his cajun-boiled fried chicken (2 million on IG) to his \u201cPropose to Me Pasta\u201d (12.3 million on TikTok), has amassed millions of views. But Dibbz (government name: A.H. Bowden) wasn\u2019t always a culinary content creator. He used to spin music back in Atlanta as DJ DiBiase, named after retired wrestler Ted \u201cThe Million Dollar Man\u201d DiBiase. \u201cDiBiase is a mouthful to say, so people just always call me \u2018D\u2019 or \u2018Dibbz\u2019 for short,\u201d says Bowden, 37, during a Zoom interview.<\/p>\n

He was making a nice living as a DJ, even serving as rapper Big K.R.I.T.\u2019s touring DJ for a while. But when the pandemic hit, the gigs obviously dried up. <\/p>\n

\u201cI was living in Miami at the time,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd, you know, when you have a lot of time on your hands to think \u2013 but also need to figure out a way to, you know, sustain an income and everything like that \u2013 the ideas start coming,\u201d<\/p>\n

Like most DJs at that time, he was doing live mixes on Instagram. But his days throwing cookout parties in Atlanta inspired him to start doing his cooking videos, where he used his very own seasoning. Of course, he had a lemon pepper blend, which he used in a lemon pepper hot wings video<\/a> that currently has over a half-million views on TikTok. <\/p>\n

\u201cI’m about to go live to DJ later that night, and my phone was just going off with orders,\u201d he recalls. \u201cSo I’m like, where are these orders coming from? And it’s not from my friends. I’m seeing the cities and the states. I don’t know these people.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thanks to his videos, which usually end with him saying his signature line \u201cThat\u2019s good shawty!\u201d (that\u2019s also the name of his cookbook<\/a> he released last year), Dibbz went into the seasoning business full time. He eventually hired another person to help send out the piles of orders he was receiving. <\/p>\n

He even got an order from former Dallas Cowboy Emmitt Smith, one of his favorite athletes. \u201cI remember doing a book report on him when I was in fourth grade,\u201d he boasts. <\/p>\n

Although Dibbz has a flair for making meals that border on decadent, he\u2019s an ardent practitioner of cooking with natural ingredients, especially in his seasoning. He has several low-sodium seasoning, including Bebe\u2019s Salt Free<\/a> \u2013 named after his mother, who had open-heart surgery a few weeks before the pandemic started. <\/p>\n

\u201cI don’t think a lot of people understand the amount of toxins and chemicals that go into a lot of these seasonings,\u201d he says. \u201cYou’re starting to see it in the news now. A lot of the foods with certain dyes are being taken off the shelves and things like that.\u2019<\/p>\n

Soon, Dibbz moved himself and his new business to Houston, a favorite place to perform as well as a town whose hip-hop got him into music. He cites local chopped-and-screwed gods DJ Screw, Michael 5000 Watts, and OG Ron C as his holy trinity of influences. To give props to the music of his new home, he created a hot sauce \u2013 called HXT Sauce \u2013 whose uncharacteristically large bottle resembles Promethazine cough syrup (aka the key ingredient in lean, the preferred purple cocktail for the city\u2019s rap community). <\/p>\n

\u201cIt’s not necessarily about promoting that usage,\u201d he says. \u201cBut, at the same time, it\u2019s just a homage to one of the factors and influences of screwed-and-chopped music.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dibbz still indulges in spinning records from time to time. The Waxaholics\u2019 DJ Big Reeks has gotten him to break out the vinyl a few times during his Thursday-night sets at Alley Kat Bar & Lounge in Midtown. But creating new recipes, dropping delicious content and proving you can eat and live in a hearty, healthy fashion still remains his full-time mission. <\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m not just talking about eating cauliflower rice all day and every day, but just eat real food,\u201d he says. \u201cWe’re eating fake food. That’s the bottom line. We’re eating fake food and my whole purpose is to inspire people to eat real food and that starts with real ingredients, real herbs, you know \u2013 real natural seasonings.\u201d<\/p>\n