Insider Tips

Check out visithoustontexas.com and houstonmidtown.com prior to your visit. These sites include ideas, addresses and links for restaurants, shops and attractions.

The quarterly Midtown News, available for free at Spec’s and other outlets, includes a useful street map, although only places that advertise in its pages are pinpointed.

Explore Midtown in style with the REV (gorevgo.com), a fleet of electronic, zero-emissions vehicles. Friendly drivers provide transportation for tips only.

Buy a CityPass ($39) for savings at several museums, Space Center Houston, the Houston Zoo and the Downtown Aquarium.

Enjoy the city’s diversity. Recent estimates show that 42 percent of Houston’s 2.2 million residents are Anglo, 33 percent Hispanic, 18 percent African-American and 7 percent Asian or other.

Ask the Concierge

Freddie Floyd, chief concierge at Downtown’s hip Hotel ICON, recommends Discovery Green, a 12-acre urban park next to the convention center. An ice-skating rink (yes, in Houston) is open November 26 to January 18. Floyd also reminds us that the House of Blues, known for “serious music therapy,” is steps away. The Downtown Aquarium (actually an amusement park with a Ferris wheel and white Bengal tigers) gets Floyd’s nod, too, as do recreational pursuits along Buffalo Bayou in the shadow of city-center skyscrapers. “Take a leisurely 30-minute boat ride or try a canoe or paddling trip,” Floyd says. “Everything is provided.”

I’ll add these tips of my own: Don’t miss Space Center Houston (spacecenter.org), the Johnson Space Center’s visitor complex southeast of town, or the city’s stellar museums of fine arts and natural sciences. Houston also is one of the nation’s best cities for live theater, with Downtown’s Tony Award–winning Alley Theatre, other professional companies and two Broadway-style tour programs in town. The massive and still fashionable Galleria, on Westheimer Road, attracts 24 million visitors annually to its 375 stores and restaurants, two hotels and ice-skating rink.