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.
Amy Ferguson, who has lived in Hawaii for decades now but was instrumental in the development of the Southwestern cuisine culinary movement, talks about reading "Larousse Gastronomique" as a kid, encountering celebrity at a young age, and that time Julia Child kindly told her "you don't know anything."
Thirty years ago, Texans who equated fine dining with chicken cordon bleu and trout meunière suddenly found themselves eating barbecued Gulf shrimp and goat cheese quesadillas. An oral history of the Southwestern cuisine revolution.
A team of notable Dallas chefs will host a locally sourced dinner at the Dallas Farmers Market on Thursday, June 12, at 6:30 p.m., kicking off a fundraising effort for the bipartisan Legislative group known as the Texas House Farm-to-Table Caucus. A menu prepared by Graham Dodds (with Hibiscus), Sharon
A team of notable Dallas chefs will host a locally sourced dinner at the Dallas Farmers Market on Thursday, June 12, at 6:30 p.m., kicking off a fundraising effort for the bipartisan Legislative group known as the Texas House Farm-to-Table Caucus. A menu prepared by Graham Dodds (with Hibiscus), Sharon
If your Saturday evening is open and you live in Austin, you can still get tickets for a four-course dinner that will be prepared by four Austin chefs to help raise funds for a film chronicling the life and work of Diana Kennedy, the 91-year-old James Beard Award–winning cookbook author
The James Beard Foundation named the restaurant in the tiny town Buffalo Gap one of "America's Classics," a designation awarded to places that have "timeless appeal."
From fine dining to local beer, the Texas food scene is exploding with more energy, innovation, and sophistication than ever before. Come along as we hunt down the best new restaurants.
Arro, a French restaurant in downtown Austin, opened in July with executive chef/partner Drew Curren and pastry chef Mary Catherine Curren, his wife, at the helm. Texas Monthly food editor Patricia Sharpe recently spoke with Drew Curren about why he chose to try this cuisine in
“This isn’t a fad. This isn’t a cronut.” So says one of the people interviewed for this New York Times story on the kolache, the traditional Czech pastry filled with fruit, sausage, or cheese. Headlined “The Kolache: Czech-Tex Road Food,” the Dining section feature looks at the growing statewide
Two Dallas restaurants have made Esquire’s list of the twenty best new restaurants of the year, chosen by its longtime critic John Mariani. The pair are Spoon Bar & Kitchen, by chef John Tesar, and Stampede 66, by chef Stephan Pyles. No other Texas restaurants made the cut, although Mariani
This Thursday, September 12, I’ll be interviewing one of the Food Channel’s biggest stars, New York Times–bestselling cookbook author Ina Garten, a.k.a. the Barefoot Contessa. This will mark the opening performance of the 2013–2014 season of the Texas Performing Arts Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Tickets are still
Last week Austin fishmonger Roberto San Miguel called out of the blue to say that he and Shane Stark, the current executive chef at Kenichi and previously with Paggi House, are opening a fish market and seafood restaurant in East Austin, at 2401 Cesar Chavez, at
Quick, name the type of wine you can buy for $10 a glass these days.If you said “plonk,” you’re right.But $10 will actually buy some very decent wine at Central Market’s Wine Week.For the next six days, the market’s five locations in major Texas cities are promoting its wines, and
When I heard that my old friend Bud Royer is going to deliver free pie and cash cards to the folks devastated by the tornado in Moore, Oklahoma, I kept thinking of that famous quote from the Woodstock music festival. Remember? Wavy Gravy stands onstage and yells: “Good morning! What
In the life-is-not-fair department, the untimely death of Austin’s hot sauce queen, Jill Lewis, is one of the most poignant recent examples.Jill—who died on June 4 at the age of 53 after a shockingly brief two-month battle with esophageal cancer—was a friend of mine and one of the city’s best-liked
This past weekend, Austin chef Paul Qui, an admitted landlubber, braved wind and waves to win the San Pellegrino Cooking Cup, an international competition in which ten competing chefs from different countries prepare fancy food on moving boats in Venice, Italy.Despite looking a little dubious about the whole prospect and
Since the closing of Mancha’s Meat Market in Eagle Pass, there is only one place in all of Texas—maybe the entire country—that still serves traditional barbacoa: whole beef heads cooked in an underground pit over wood coals. The sign out front of Vera’s in Brownsville says it all: “Barbacoa en
It’s a wonder that any of the contestants of “Citywide 86’d,” a competition inspired by the Food Network show Chopped, managed to boil a teaspoon of water under the crazy conditions they were subjected to. The kitchen of Austin’s Uchiko (which co-sponsored the event with its sister restaurant Uchi) was clogged
CultureMap Dallas’s Teresa Gubbins reported that well-known and well-liked Dallas chef Randall Copeland, of Restaurant Ava and Boulevardier, has died at the age of 39. The cause of death was unknown, according to a spokesperson for the restaurants. The bio of the Dallas native on the Restaurant Ava website mentions his
You can’t go home and tell your friends that you came to Central Texas and never ate any barbecue. It would be like going to SXSW and not listening to any music. But there are so many briskets and so little time! How do you sort it all out? No
