Best Hobby Shop | G&G Model Shop: Hobby shops have become huge chain stores these days. Rice Village has become a charmless strip of overpriced Gap-like outlets. So it's a little bit surprising that tear-it-down Houston has a charming old-timey hobby shop, and that it's in Rice Village. G&G has been around since TV was new (it has the retro sign to prove it) and specializes in trains, airplanes and other modeling minutiae. Says one hobbyist we know, "Hobby shops, like the neighborhood drugstore, are an anachronism now that Internet stores can sell for so much cheaper. But what you miss by not supporting your local hobby shop is being able to hang around, swap tips with other modelers, ask advice from proprietors, that kind of thing." And that's just the "kind of thing" that G&G specializes in. Long may it do so.