Texas Food Conquers the World!
From Riyadh to the Rio Grande, Southwestern cuisine is sweeping the globe, thanks to the skill—and salesmanship—of a group of ambitious Texas chefs.
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Given their backgrounds and the heady climate of experimentation, it was almost inevitable that this group of ambitious young professionals should turn to Texas dishes. Why couldn’t French methods be married to the traditions of Mexico and Texas? Suppose you added a purée of ancho chiles to a classic demiglace? Why not take a corn husk and make a tamale of rice pudding with crème anglaise? The only possible answer to these questions was another question: Why not?
As Greer and I finished lunch, she passed me a yellowing photograph from the August 5, 1984, Dallas Times Herald showing the gang of seven lined up behind a table, looking like a bunch of baby boomers at a suburban dinner party. It was surprising to see, in retrospect, how un-Southwestern the table appeared, with its white china and sedate presentations. Similarly, the story, by Michael Bauer, shows a trend still in its infancy. Bauer wrote, “Greer dabbed oil on her hands to protect them from the [jalapeños]. The technique was new to Ferguson, who appreciated the tip.” But the menu he described—swordfish in achiote, grilled corn salad with poblanos and cilantro—was already getting with the program.
All told, the Algonquin Round Table of Texas cooking met perhaps half a dozen times. Greer, who had a natural instinct for public relations, took the lead and engineered a number of events. It was she, for instance, who saw to it that Bauer was invited to dinner, and the series of three articles that he subsequently wrote were some of the earliest to recognize what was happening. In fact, the name “new Southwestern cuisine” seems to have been first used in print on August 7, 1983, in a story that Bauer wrote on Greer.
Over the next several months and years, the group—collectively and individually—cooked for anyone who would do a story. As newspaper food sections and magazines chronicled the spread of Southwestern cuisine, it became apparent that the idea had simultaneously occurred on the West Coast, where John Sedlar (then at Saint Estèphe in Manhattan Beach, California) and Mark Miller (then at the Fourth Street Grill in Berkeley) were serving jazzed-up posole and blue-cornmeal dessert crêpes to flocks of customers. This both reassured and spurred the Texans on. They got themselves invited to entertain food writers like Ellen Brown of USA Today, and they asked famous chefs like Jean-Louis Palladin to come see what they were doing. In October 1984 Marian Burros, the well-known New York Times food writer, was interviewed by a local magazine, in which she said of Dallas restaurants, “There’s a real revolution going on” with the emerging Southwestern cooking. Times restaurant critic Craig Claiborne heaped praise on Pyles and Fearing. In a major coup in 1985, the Mansion hosted the American Institute of Food and Wine’s dinner honoring Julia Child, at which the menu included whole catfish and blue-corn tamales. The Mansion’s waiters were horrified at what they were asked to serve the grande dame of cooking in America, but Child loved it.
Of all the activities that garnered national recognition, though, one of the most significant was the Hill Country Wine and Food Festival. Started in 1986 by Ed and Susan Auler, the owners of Fall Creek Vineyards, the festival grew in a matter of three years to be a major American food event. Wine and food professionals from all over descended on Austin each spring, where they attended seminars and took time out for creative lunches prepared by, among others, Del Grande, Fearing, Pyles, and Greer. The press took to calling the four young cooks the “Texas mafia,” a name that fit their friendship and single-minded focus.
The final ingredient that boosted Southwestern cuisine onto the national stage was oil—not the extra-virgin stuff but Texas crude. The oil boom of the early eighties not only provided legions of Texans with disposable cash but filled grocery and specialty stores everywhere with exotic imported foodstuffs from Mexico, Europe, and Asia. The boom also fostered an attitude conducive to creativity. Dean Fearing, who has observed Dallas in high times and low from his vantage point at the glitzy Mansion on Turtle Creek, says, “When the economy is good, your customers are open to new things. When they have expendable money, they’re willing to experiment.” Judged by this yardstick, the eighties were exactly the right time to launch a daring and unproven culinary style.
It has now been twelve years since Southwestern cuisine began. Of the original group who plotted around Anne Greer’s grill, four have kept in touch with the Southwestern style but basically moved in other directions. Amy Ferguson relocated to Hawaii. Kevin Hopkins is a partner in a Dallas Thai restaurant, Toy’s Cafe. Avner Samuel is at the Landmark restaurant at the Melrose Hotel in Dallas, cooking in a “global eclectic” style that incorporates Southwestern influences. Greer dropped out of sight for several years to care for her son after a devastating car accident. These days she does restaurant consulting and is planning another Southwestern cookbook. As for the other three mafiosi—Pyles, Fearing, and Del Grande—they have ridden the movement to national culinary stardom and beyond.
Southwestern cuisine is now a mature master, an elder statesman. It has created its own classics, including jicama slaw, cilantro pesto, tomatillo-poblano sauce, roasted-corn salad, mango pico, and more. It has also been copied far and wide, though not always with integrity. As Pyles says, “In the past five or six years this whole style has filtered down into restaurants that are certainly more approachable and less expensive than ours. Restaurants like Chili’s and Bennigan’s all serve something that screams ‘Southwestern cuisine.’” Which is why the Texas trio are at pains to put some distance between themselves and the mainstream, dumbed-down versions that populate mid-level eateries all over the country.
They are also at pains to emphasize that they have moved forward and expanded their repertoires. Del Grande jokes, “I look at older menus—tamales-stuffed-with-achiote-shrimp-and-ancho-poblano-jalapeño-serrano-mole—and they seem like a cartoon.” Of the three, his style remains the most Mexican and rustic, but over the years it has softened and become more subtle, with multinational highlights. Fearing’s style has taken off in Asian, Middle Eastern, and North African directions. And Pyles has developed what he calls the New Texas cuisine, with sophisticated spins on traditional Southern, Mexican, cowboy, and Cajun dishes.
Southwestern cuisine has been very good to Texas. The state’s romantic, rough-hewn image provided a ready-made backdrop for the movement, while the style’s finesse dazzled critics, who never expected such refinement from the land of cactus and Cadillacs. It trained a national spotlight on the state, and over the years it has done as much to raise the status of Texas culture as have institutions like the Kimbell Art Museum and the Houston Grand Opera. Southwestern cuisine has permeated the country like mesquite smoke, but as Fearing says, “One of the most marvelous things about that whole explosion is that everyone’s eyes are still on Texas.” If you want the real thing, you still have to come here to get it.
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