French Chefs & Pirates: Houston’s Biotech Community Bonds Over Chili

[Updated 5/4/15 5:08 pm. See below.] The sky threatened thunderstorms but the only jolt came from the spices at BioHouston’s latest annual chili cookoff.

Houston’s biotech and life sciences community gathered for the 12th time not only to make chili and share drinks but show off their creative sides, with booths and costumes that included Parisian chefs, pirates, flaming (devil) tutus, and a Houston Texans tailgate.

Like last year, David Carter of CPG entertained the crowd with his guitar and he was joined on stage by Billy Cohn at Texas Heart Institute who jammed on his trombone (while wearing scrubs). The THI team, as is their custom, had prepared a dance routine—this year it was a baguette-holding dance to “Alouette.”

Oh, and there was chili—lots of it. We judges had quite a few offerings tickling our taste buds. This year, I judged the non-traditional category, some of which featured additions like cinnamon or corn. (Brave stuff considering this is Texas.)

[List of winners updated.] Here is the complete list of winners:

Traditional Chili
1st – Boulware & Valoir
2nd – Lonza Houston
3rd – Aviara Pharmaceuticals

Non-Traditional Chili
1st – UH Society for Biological Engineering
2nd – Texas Heart Institute “Mobile Chili Brasserie”
3rd – Strategia

Spicy Chili
1st – JLabs “The Teams of JLabs
2nd – IBTS Toxic Chili Team
3rd – BCM Tropical Medicine “TropMed Like It’s Hot!”

Best Themed Booth
1st – Cyberonics “Tu-Tu Hot Chili”
2nd – Texas Heart Institute “Mobile Chili Brasserie”
3rd – TMCx

 

Author: Angela Shah

Angela Shah was formerly the editor of Xconomy Texas. She has written about startups along a wide entrepreneurial spectrum, from Silicon Valley transplants to Austin transforming a once-sleepy university town in the '90s tech boom to 20-something women defying cultural norms as they seek to build vital IT infrastructure in a war-torn Afghanistan. As a foreign correspondent based in Dubai, her work appeared in The New York Times, TIME, Newsweek/Daily Beast and Forbes Asia. Before moving overseas, Shah was a staff writer and columnist with The Dallas Morning News and the Austin American-Statesman. She has a Bachelor's of Journalism from the University of Texas at Austin, and she is a 2007 Knight-Wallace Fellow at the University of Michigan. With the launch of Xconomy Texas, she's returned to her hometown of Houston.