Tag Along with Liza Koshy (and Her Mom) as She Thrifts, Grabs Coffee, and Eats Ethiopian in Houston (2024)

From Vine viral fame and time as a MTV TRL correspondent to roles in movies that span genres—horror, dance, and action among them—Liza Koshy’s career is sinuous and wide-ranging. This year, the multifaceted actress-producer-creator voices an autobot named Arcee in Transformers: Rise of the Beast, as well as roles in A Family Affair with Nicole Kidman and Zac Efron and My Ex-Friend’s Wedding alongside Ariana Debose. When she’s not in LA for work, Koshy splits her time in Houston, her hometown and where all of her family still lives. On Koshy’s day off, she traverses all over the sprawling city for Tex-Mex, thrifting, and more.

I will be bringing you through a city that is the most sprawling city ever. So this is going to be an ideal day if Houston was built like New York and everything was 10 feet away from each other, but we put mileage on our cars and we pay a lot less for gas than New York does. That's why we love our trucks down here.

So we start with SoulCycle. I am changed forever by LA. I'm definitely a cycle queen now. I highly encourage anybody who loves a concert to just go to SoulCycle. I am a front row queen and I love losing—pardon my French—my sh*t on a bike. So that's the way I start my day. And then at that point, my mom knows, obviously I'm out for the day, so she asks me to grab some groceries for her, which I of course do because I think I'm her favorite daughter [she has three]. So I go to H-E-B.

Then we go to Leopard Lounge, which is actually in Midtown. But we love thrifting. My mom raised me going to garage sales, thrift shops, and vintage shops. My grandmother owned an antique shop in Virginia. I'm raised on giving new life to old objects, old furniture, old clothes. And so I've actually sworn off buying any new clothes unless it's gifted or thrifted. And it's been about two and a half years since I made that pact with myself to not buy anything new. We fight over who pays because my whole family's love language is gift giving. So we knock each other out at the register until someone is on the floor and one gets to pay. Then we go by Discovery Green—this large park area where they set up a whole ice rink during the holidays. They'll put up lights and you can walk through a parade of lights at Christmastime. And it just feels like our little area of magic.

We book a movie at iPic, we get a drink, and have a good time. Most recently we saw Barbie. I saw that for the second time. It was so good. Then we go home because my sister's coming home from work, my dad's coming home from work, and my other sister's coming home too. There's five of us, and I got one brother-in-law. Everybody comes over for dinner. So, we all fight over who's eating what or what we're ordering from where. Our Tex-Mex is unbeatable. We order chicken from Fajita Pete’s and we doctor up our own fajitas. My sister, brother-in-law and I want Lucy's Ethiopian. So we also order Lucy's—the injera bread is impeccable. It's very similar to Indian food, which is why it feels so comforting to us. We also order from Nidda Thai because my mom wants that. The green curry there is incredible.

But yeah, that's my day in Houston. And then we end the day with some sort of dessert that I've convinced myself I can make from watching a single video on Instagram.