BioHouston Chili Cookoff: Vampires, Convicts, Hippies, & More

Houston—More than 600 people in Houston’s biotech community played hooky on Friday to cook chili and commune with each other at BioHouston’s 14th annual Chili Cookoff. The event drew nearly 40 competitors in the culinary contest with prizes awarded to the best chili in traditional, non-traditional, and spicy categories. (I was one of the judges in the spicy category.)

Bellicum Pharmaceuticals took top prize in traditional and spicy chili, putting them over the top to net the Grand Chili Champion award. (Lexicon Pharmaceuticals won first place in the non-traditional category.)

Kevin Hlavinka with LivaNova won the jalapeno-eating contest. The performance was so dazzling, the exact number of peppers can’t be recalled, according to BioHouston. LivaNova’s Speakeasy won the best booth contest. And if they gave out best costume accolades, my vote would have been for Jeff Larson at Salarius Pharmaceuticals, whose commitment to the Dark Prince included red-tinted contacts.

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. View all posts by Angela Shah