Texas Monthly Talks
Dean Fearing
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We have this Block Island swordfish, from off the coast of Rhode Island. I have not been a swordfish lover for ten years. I just got tired of it. In the eighties I couldn’t get enough of it—it was like steak to me—but then I turned cold. I hated the texture of it and the feel of it. I didn’t have it at the Mansion for years. So Joel Harrington, my chef de cuisine [at Fearing’s], brings in swordfish, and I roll my eyes back, and he goes, “What?” And I say, “I hate swordfish.” And he goes, “Well, try this.” We put it on the grill, and I’m telling him, “You know, swordfish is out of my vocabulary now.” Then I eat the swordfish, and I’m like, “That’s different. I love the texture, and I love the taste.” I’m in love. So we do this dish all around the swordfish. We grill it over mesquite, we mop it with an ancho-honey glaze, and we put it on vegetable chilaquiles sitting on top of a corn purée. Then we do an almond-poblano relish on top of the fish. It’s just an upscale, Southwest-style dish.
Do you ever eat anywhere else?
That’s all I do. It has to be good food, and that goes for every level and every price point in this town. I love Primo’s Bar and Grille, a Mexican restaurant on McKinney [Avenue, in Dallas]. I met my wife there—got to like that. After all these years, it’s still one of my favorites and one of my kids’ favorites. I have two boys, nine and ten, and they’re not shy about food, because they grew up in this business. As much as Lynae and I would like to go to Charlie Palmer’s, the boys go to restaurants with us, and they get a little bored sometimes. We go to Houston’s—
Dean Fearing eats at Houston’s!
We love it, and I’ll say that to anybody. Here’s the thing: I was born and raised in eastern Kentucky. I wasn’t born in downtown Paris. What do I love? I love Southern food. I love soul food. I love barbecue. I learned about food in dives. I have my best inspirations in dives rather than in any of my chef friends’ top-tier restaurants, because it’s all about how you twist the food to make people really understand it. I go to the restaurants of some of my better friends, and they stand over me at the table and I’m in a cold sweat, because I don’t want truffle whipped potatoes. Let’s get current: Using white truffle oil, which is not even real truffle, in a good mashed potato is passé. That’s not real food. Put corn in the potatoes, put some cheese in with it, make it a little white trash—that’s a potato people can sink their teeth into. That’s a potato we sell every night in this place.
Do you cook at home?
Oh, yeah. All I do is think about and eat food seven days a week. I never get tired of eating. My quest in life is never to eat a bad meal. And so, even at home, I challenge myself. I don’t do intricate food, but it has got to taste good, because I have three people at the table. Lynae and the boys are my worst critics. If I goof off and do something stupid and it’s not going to taste good, I get called out pretty fast.
What kind of dish might you make at home for your family?
It’s all rustic. It’s roast chicken—but let me tell you, it’s basted roast chicken. I baste it with garlic and herbs and all of that. My wife is a potato fanatic. She loves mashed potatoes, so some kind of mashed potato is on that plate. And then, you know, we’ve got growing boys, so I try to be good about it. There’s always a vegetable with wild mushrooms or whatever. And there will be a twist in there somewhere along the lines of a sauce because I’m a sauce guy from my growing-up-in-the-kitchen days. Today at lunch, I was with our general manager, Mike Gluckman, and we got this Tasmanian sea trout. I said, “Mike, you hungry?” And he goes, “Yeah.” And I said, “You know what? I’ll cook lunch.” So I get behind the line—
You weren’t cooking for the entire staff?
Just the two of us. He wanted to try this fish. I said, “Hey! Let’s do something.” And I sautéed some green beans with shallots and garlic—lots of it—and I put the trout over the mashed potatoes with corn and cheese. Then I said, “Mike, give me two seconds. I’m gonna make a sauce.” I julienned this sage and lots of shallots and garlic and lemon juice and chicken stock and olive oil, and I made a little pan sauce with all of it and poured it over the fish. And we’re eating, and Mike turns to me and he says, “This is really good!” And I say, “Yeah, this is kind of like the old French style: made in the pan, a fish-sauce thing.” And he says, “No, no, I’m telling you: This is really good. We have to put this on the lunch menu.” That’s how you get people excited. Good cooking will go a long way. And, hey, I was taught by the best—the best French guys in the business.
A word or two about how you learned all this. As you say, you grew up in eastern Kentucky. The legend is that your family was in the hospitality business.
In ’65 my dad met this guy out of Memphis, Tennessee, who was starting up all these Holiday Inns. He saw the light and joined up, and I think we lived in every city in the Midwest—wherever there was a Holiday Inn. From the time we were in junior high, my brother and I had to report to the Inn after school, and my dad would put us to work in the kitchen. We hated it until payday.
The great chef got his start cooking in the kitchen of a Holiday Inn—that means there’s hope for us all. And only a couple years later, you’re safely ensconced at the Mansion.
I’d been working for about a year as the fish cook at the Pyramid Room, at the Fairmont Hotel, in Dallas, when our sous chef, Bernard Molfit, brings in the newspaper and says, “Read that.” And I’m like, “Who is Caroline Hunt and what is the Mansion?” He said, “This is an oil baroness lady, one of the richest ladies in Texas, and she’s gonna open this incredible restaurant. I’m not going anywhere, and you need to move up, so you should go over to the Mansion and get the saucier position.” I said, “Really? Do you think I can get it?” And he said, “Yeah, you’re gonna get it. Just go over there.” So the next day, no joke, I go over there, and the chef asks me what I want to apply for. I said, “The saucier position,” and before I even say anything else, he looks at my résumé and says, “You got the job.”
Just like that?
Just like that. Eight-fifty an hour. More money than I’d ever seen in my whole life. I was, like, rich! I could go to Neiman Marcus every six weeks and buy a shirt. And I did.
After all these years, you’re still excited about what you do.
You can’t work [at Fearing’s] unless you have a high personality, like me. That’s the honest-to-God truth. If you come in here and someone is a dud, you need to tell me, because they’re fired. Everybody’s going to be happy, and everyone’s going to be grateful that somebody walked through that door and is spending money. And it starts with me. I shake hands and truly thank people for coming in: “What can I do for you?” and “If you need anything, let me know.” In this day and age of recession, you can get away from all your problems for a couple hours, come in and talk and eat food and drink wine, and it doesn’t have to be expensive. You can enjoy life, and that is what restaurants are doing for us now. It’s the way we get away.
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