The Wrap Named for a Neighborhood
The Third Ward is one of Houston's oldest historically Black neighborhoods, a place where soul food traditions were carried, protected, and passed down through generations of home cooks long before restaurants started putting them on menus. Naming a wrap after it wasn't a decision Chef Pat took lightly.
Collard greens and black-eyed peas are two of the most enduring staples of that tradition — foods that trace back through the Great Migration to the fields of the American South, carried north and west by families who refused to leave their kitchens behind. Chef Pat wanted this wrap to honor that lineage directly rather than borrow from it loosely.
So instead of a tortilla stuffed with disconnected ingredients, he built the wrap around a collard green leaf itself — sturdy enough to hold everything, and the first flavor your mouth actually meets.
You don't get to use these ingredients without understanding where they came from.
Chef Pat
Using a collard leaf as the wrap itself — instead of the filling — is harder than it sounds. Raw collard greens are tough and bitter, with a rigid center rib that cracks instead of folding. Chef Pat blanches the leaves briefly in salted water, just long enough to soften the fibers and mellow the bitterness without cooking away their structure, then shocks them cold so they hold their color and snap.
The black-eyed pea hummus is made in-house, blended smooth with tahini and lemon to give the wrap a creamy backbone that a traditional hummus recipe never needed to solve for — it has to hold a wrap together, not just sit on a plate. Smoked chicken adds the char note, pickled jalapeño brings the acid, and a Tabasco aioli — made with a hot sauce born less than a hundred miles from where this recipe lives — ties the whole thing back to the Gulf Coast.
L.LeSure