HOT TOPIC When you hear the name the Burning Pear, I challenge you not to think of British funnymen Peter Cook and Dudley Moore’s classic skit about a restaurant called the Frog and Peach (“There’s only two . . . dishes, really,” Cook says to Moore. “There’s frog à la pêche, which is a frog done in Cointreau and with a peach stuffed in its mouth. And, ah, then, of course, there’s pêche à la frog . . .”). Thankfully, neither creation is on the menu at the Burning Pear, a two-month-old Sugar Land restaurant owned by Fort Worth chef Grady Spears and Austin chef Lou Lambert. There are, however, many upscale Texas dishes, including excellent fried green tomatoes with homemade ranch dressing and wild-boar ribs with a chipotle-cactus pear sauce (pig à la pear?). The gentrified cowboy philosophy also influences combinations like brown-sugar-and-mustard-rubbed ribeye and asparagus in Tabasco hollandaise. In case you’re curious, the restaurant’s name refers to the ranching practice of burning the thorns off prickly pear cacti so that cattle can eat them safely. What would Cook and Moore have done with that tidbit of information?
