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Patricia Sharpe

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Executive editor Patricia Sharpe grew up in Austin and holds a master’s degree in English from the University of Texas at Austin. After working as a teacher (in English and Spanish) and at the Texas Historical Commission (writing historical markers), she joined the staff of Texas Monthly in 1974. Initially, she edited the magazine’s cultural and restaurant listings and wrote a consumer feature called Touts. She eventually focused exclusively on food. Her humorous story “War Fare,” an account of living for 48 hours on military MREs (Meals Ready to Eat), was included in the anthology Best Food Writing 2002. Many of her stories appear in the 2008 UT Press collection Texas Monthly on Food. Her story about being a restaurant critic, titled “Confessions of a ‘Skinny Bitch,’ ” won a James Beard Foundation award for magazine food writing in 2006.

Sharpe has contributed to Gourmet, Bon Appétit, Saveur, and the New York Times. She writes a regular restaurant column, Pat’s Pick, for Texas Monthly.

1224 Articles

Food & Drink|
January 20, 2013

A Star-Spangled Spread

This Fourth of July, forget the fried chicken and potato salad. Our potluck picnic, cooked up by six top Austin chefs, is full of culinary fireworks. Plus... extra web-only recipes!

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Food & Drink|
January 20, 2013

Your Bird Here

Turkey, shmurkey! This Thanksgiving, when your mother-in-law gets ready to serve up boring old tradition as a main course, you should cry fowl and turn her attention to these other fine, feathered, delectable friends.

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Eat My Words|
January 10, 2013

A Barbecue Food Porn Workshop Not To Be Missed

Hey, all you Instagram users: Learn from an expert and you won’t have to edit those food pictures nearly as much. At Smitty’s, in Lockhart. Famed Texas magazine photographer Wyatt McSpadden is doing a road trip and day-long workshop in the barbecue capital of the world—Lockhart— next month. Participants

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Food & Drink|
January 1, 2013

Gastronome on the Range

At Stampede 66, Dallas chef Stephan Pyles’s latest gig, the symbols of his West Texas youth are writ not just large but colossal. Wild horses fashioned of gleaming wire come bursting through a solid wall. A giant rattlesnake of screen wire and glowing LED lights stretches its fifty-foot length

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Eat My Words|
November 29, 2012

First Look at the Pass, Houston’s New Hot Spot

Ahem. If you’ll scroll down to the seventh picture, below, you’ll see that there are only two macarons on the plate. There were initially three macarons, but yours truly grabbed the third one and demolished it in one bite before realizing that I had not taken a picture. Damn! It

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Eat My Words|
October 1, 2012

A German Looks (Longingly) at Texas Barbecue

At the third annual Texas Monthly BBQ Festival on September 23, one person was amazed by the spectacle of the species Carnivorus texensis engaging in its defining behavior. That person was Takis Würger, 27, a visiting writer for the German magazine Der Spiegel, which is published in Hamburg. Würger has been

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Eat My Words|
August 8, 2012

Texas Grabs Seven Spots on Bon Appétit List

Talk about coincidences. I was eating lunch at Elizabeth Street Café, in Austin, one of my favorite new restaurants (great Vietnamese-style fried rice with crispy oysters today, and amazing avocado ice cream. . . but I digress). When I got back to my desk, there was an email from a

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Food & Drink|
July 31, 2012

Roost

There I was, sitting all alone at tiny Houston restaurant Roost, fielding frenetic text messages from three friends. A sad litany of flat tires, run-on meetings, and road closures explained their conspicuous absence. At many another place, a seriously incomplete party would have been getting the ol’ stink eye right

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Pat's Pick|
June 30, 2012

Driftwood

JUST WHEN I THOUGHT Oak Cliff couldn’t possibly shoehorn another modish 
restaurant into its gentrifying streets, along comes Driftwood and gives that notion a kick in the head. Silly me, I imagined that Lucia, Bolsa, Mesa Veracruz, Campo, Oddfellows, 
and Chicken Scratch—to name 
only the more recent ones—might signal impending

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Food & Drink|
May 31, 2012

Uchi

FIRST COMES THE ARCHED eyebrow. Then the significant pause. Then the question: “Well, how was it?” This is the reaction of my Austin friends when they hear I’ve been to the Houston location of Uchi, Texas’s restaurant of the moment. Yes, Austin is eaten up with curiosity and jealousy, poor

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Food & Drink|
March 31, 2012

Woodshed Smokehouse

HOLY SHIN! THE SIGNATURE dish of the two-month-old Woodshed Smokehouse is so paleo that you can almost hear drumbeats when they deliver it to your table. Tipping the scales at a minimum of three and a half pounds and smoked over hickory to an ebony turn, the brazen bone-in beef

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Eat My Words|
March 26, 2012

Foodways Texas Is Getting Fat and Sassy

Foodways Texas, which was founded in July 2010 “to preserve, promote, and celebrate the diverse food cultures of Texas," held its second annual symposium in Austin this past weekend. A couple of hundred participants listened to talks on the theme of “Texas Preserved”—a deliberately wide-ranging topic that covered

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Eat My Words|
March 13, 2012

The BBQ Snob Is Hanging With the Big Dog

Enjoying his fifteen minutes (hours, days, whatever) of fame, self-declared “BBQ Snob” Daniel Vaughn is in Austin today hanging out with the big dog, Anthony Bourdain, of the Travel Channel’s “No Reservations.”  They’re  seen here at Franklin Barbecue, along with Vaughn’s photographer Nicholas McWhirter, Vaughn’s book agent David

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Eat My Words|
March 1, 2012

Vaca y Vino Is Smokin’–Literally

You may think that as a Texan, you know beef and smoking and barbecue and such. Friends, you don’t know anything about it until you’ve attended the smoking of a whole,  entire, big honking steer. At Vaca y Vino, set for Sunday, April 22, from 1 to 6, three

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Food & Drink|
March 1, 2012

Triniti

APPARENTLY DELUSIONAL, I clicked on Triniti’s reservations link on a Thursday morning, somehow imagining that my friends and I could get into Houston’s newest white-hot dining destination the following Saturday night. What was I thinking? Not wanting to eat at 5:30 or 9:30, we settled for Sunday. Bliss! On that

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Eat My Words|
February 27, 2012

See Paul Win? See Paul Lose?

Will Uchiko’s Paul Qui be the big winner on the season nine finale of Top Chef: Texas this Wednesday, February 29? Or will he be the big loser? Keep your fingers crossed for our Austin boy. If you want to really get in the mood, drop by

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