Nouveau Grub
Stephan Pyles and a passle of other innovative restaurateurs are putting their brands on a new dining experience: provocative, informal decor served up with stylish and healthy food, all at a fair price. Texans are eating it up.
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As recently as a decade ago, says Del Grande, “You could go to some brick retail building, gut it, put in some white tablecloths and a great chef in the back, and it would work. But nowadays you have to have a great kitchen that prepares food with style and signature, along with an environment that gives the place a holistic sense.” As such, the new Texas restaurants share a look that is entirely in keeping with the Nouveau Grub Ethic: dramatic and provocative but unintimidating and, at bottom, informal. They are large single-room affairs with open kitchens and unsequestered bars, so that all the action is on display and the separate dramas coexist on a single stage. In place of walls, clever lighting and multiple tiers create a subtle illusion of comfortable distance. Both the ornamentation and the presentation of the food reflect a kind of accessible hipness, and there is no danger of being outdressed by the waiters.
It is almost unthinkable for a Texas restaurateur to open an establishment today and not incorporate a Nouveau Grub design. The Star Canyon blueprint follows it to the letter, Pyles’s obsession with unique flourishes notwithstanding. Paesano’s and Biga are both currently housed in classic compartmentalized structures, but their River Walk sisters will each feature the open-air look. Especially telling is the newly redesigned Anthony’s in Houston. The magnificent but always somewhat stuffy Tony Vallone establishment now possesses the electric dynamism of its younger siblings, La Griglia and Grotto, without giving a culinary inch.
A central Nouveau Grub Ethic tenet is that the food be affordable. The Texas dining boom is so acute that it has been taken as evidence that the state as a whole has transcended economic recovery and is now returning to brash prosperity. In fact, the Nouveau Grub establishments are now outperforming the rest of the Texas economy for the simple reason that they reflect a sense of fiscal sobriety. Upscale diners don’t have the expense-account budgets or hedonistic impulses they displayed a decade ago. They will take imaginative Southwestern cuisine over caviar and an evening’s worth of see-and-be-seen over two hours of being smothered by a team of officious waiters. “The new generation of customers isn’t into soggy-serious dining with a hush in the room,” says Del Grande. “It used to be that you went out to dinner, then to a show, then somewhere else for a nightcap. Nowadays, eating out is the event of the evening.”
Put simply, the mission of these restaurants is to serve interesting cuisine in equally arousing environments—to provide an experience but one that isn’t financially extravagant for either side. The economy rules the chefs and designers, who dictate the food and the ambience. From this has arisen a kind of pastime. That Texans are now not only what they eat but where they eat has elevated the status of Nouveau Grub entrepreneurs to a level unimagined by the campfire cooks of another era. Improbably, they have become culture czars.
“The one thing that needs to be taught at the culinary institutes that they aren’t teaching,” says Stephan Pyles from behind the steering wheel of his Jaguar, “is Business 301. I mean, did I know anything about business when I started Routh Street? Hell, no. And looking back on it now, we were out of control from day one.”
The Star Canyon chef believes that a handful of great Texas chefs—such as the Mansion on Turtle Creek’s Dean Fearing, Cafe Annie’s Robert Del Grande, and Biga’s Bruce Auden—possess a soulful genius that cannot be taught and that mere skillful execution cannot hope to replicate. Certainly Pyles is among their number, but it’s a particular point of pride to him that he has learned how to be a successful businessman. He religiously reads the restaurant trade papers and can tell you more than you wish to know about wait staff and inventory costs. Little about his physical appearance suggests that Pyles has spent most of his adult years in a kitchen. He is of slight build and fastidious dress; it’s hard to imagine him up to his elbows in prawns and ancho sauce, embroiled in the messy alchemy of his chosen field. On the other hand, Pyles cannot step into a Dallas restaurant without being accosted by admiring chefs and former patrons of Routh Street. Like his cuisine, Stephan Pyles fulfills a new paradigm in the restaurant business. He exudes the self-preoccupied air of a brooding artist, a man whose strong, dexterous fingers seem more at home with his craft than with the glad-handing imperatives of the front office. Yet Pyles is also an articulate and worldly man who knows the business inside out. It’s good press for Pyles to emphasize his Big Springs beginnings and how he travels not to France or Italy but rather to Mexico to gather culinary ideas. All the same, it does not take much conversation with Pyles to elicit from him his close connections to the nation’s most high-profile chefs: Wolfgang Puck, Mark Miller, Julia Child, Alice Waters, and Paul Prudhomme. Pyles is both a down-home boy and a player, and in his case, the disparate ingredients work.
If the Nouveau Grub movement works, it will be in large measure because of a new generation of Texas chefs who shares Pyles’s combined kitchen artistry and business savvy. For that matter, if Star Canyon prevails, it will be because of a concept that acknowledges the outdatedness of Pyles’s claim to fame and, in turn, reveals the chef as a Nouveau Grub convert. From the time Routh Street Cafe opened its doors in November 1983 to its closing in January 1993, the restaurant was a lavish temple of Reaganomics. Corporate customers like the Southland Corporation regularly blew mounds on expense-account orgies of caviar and rare wine in Routh Street’s private room. Pyles himself willingly participated in the excesses. His culinary perfectionism led him to use only the finest cuts and the freshest condiments, throwing by the wayside enough material to stock a second restaurant. “We never had a real budget,” says Pyles as he shakes his head in amazement. “Instead we had questions—can we buy this ingredient, can we remodel that—followed by the answer yes.”
In the Nouveau Grub era, Pyles and other chefs have learned the necessity, and even the joys, of frugality. The Texas restaurant boom would not be taking place if the new establishments served entrees in the Routh Street range of $22 to $30. Star Canyon will get by as others have, by economizing in the kitchen so as to keep entrees below $20. The staples of Nouveau Grub no longer include truffles, foie gras, and raspberries out of season. Catfish, red snapper, sweetbreads, and local game are more like it. As owners pay closer attention to how chefs are spending their money, chefs look for bargain ingredients. “My philosophy now is that the best products are the ones that are in season, meaning they’re also the most economical,” says Pyles. “Sure, we can use rare ingredients, but not with reckless abandon. I’ll serve foie gras only when the price is right.”
The trick to preparing meals that amount to both adventurous cuisine and low-cost comfort food is a balancing act that is replicated in the style of the restaurant itself. A new restaurant must be provocative, but it musn’t chase people off. “Restaurants now emphasize casualness and at the same time, they offer a show,” says Pyles. “Star Canyon will be like a wealthy rancher’s house in that it’ll be a warm, comfortable place. But it’ll also be very open in design so that wherever you’re seated, you can see all the action.”
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