Posts in category: Press

Lone Star Tastings

If you’re traveling to Texas, here is a sampling of new restaurant offerings in Dallas and Austin:
Fearing’s in the Ritz-Carlton Dallas is the new and sumptuous place where the talents of Dean Fearing, long the chef of the Mansion on Turtle Creek in Dallas, will be on display. Fearing is offering such entrees as maple-black peppercorn-soaked buffalo tenderloin and Anson Mills jalapeno grits and crispy butternut squash taquito; barbecued duck tamale and roasted chili-wild mushroom empanada; and prime ribeye mopped over mesquite. Entrees range from $34 to $50.

214-922-4848, fearingsrestaurant.com

Granny Fearing’s ‘Paper Bag Shook’ chicken with whipped potatoes appears on the same menu as a nice foie gras duo.
By Julia Reed
NEWSWEEK

My friend Robert Harling is a screenwriter who lives part of the time in Louisiana, which means that when he flies to L.A., he is forced to go through Dallas—a lot. But now that Dean Fearing has opened his new eatery, Fearing’s, Harling no longer minds. In fact, he invents reasons to stop there. On his last visit, he took his 14-year-old niece Susan with him, and when she bit into the “chicken fried” lamb chop with smoked tomato gravy, she said, “This tastes like Texas.”

At a time when food fetishists obsessively track the provenance of radishes and happily wait months to score a reservation, a taste of Texas sounds perfect. Fearing’s is unpretentious, not crazy expensive and lots of fun—it may just be one of the best new spots in the country. It’s a restaurant that knows what it wants to be. Chicken-fried steak is not only identified with Texas, it was invented there (by German immigrants to the Hill Country attempting to replicate wiener schnitzel). But a lot of other things taste like Texas, from tacos and barbecued brisket to chili. The state’s considerable bounty includes a mother lode of Gulf seafood and wildfowl (Dick Cheney’s quail-hunting “incident,” you will remember, occurred at a ranch near Corpus Christi), in addition to its livestock; its cuisine incorporates Mexican influences, of course, but also the contributions of the more recent influx of Vietnamese immigrants and the country cooking of the Deep South.

From buffalo tenderloin to barbecued-duck tamales and jumbo lump crabcakes, all of it is amply represented on Fearing’s extensive menu. “It’s so important to have a sense of place,” Fearing says. “I don’t want to do French food. I don’t live in France.” Dean Fearing spent 21 years at the Mansion on Turtle Creek, where he put the Dallas restaurant on the map with such signature dishes as lobster tacos and the world’s greatest tortilla soup. But now that his own name is on the door he has been, he says, “reborn.” At the Mansion, “I always felt I had to create expensive, glamorous food,” he tells me. “We had to add something to the plate to get that $55 or $65 price tag. But here I’m free to do great food the way I want to do it and charge accordingly.” Hence Granny Fearing’s “Paper Bag Shook” chicken with whipped potatoes and all-day green beans appear on the same menu as a foie gras duo.

With Fearing it’s all about seasoning. “Twenty percent of our business is New Yorkers. They come in here and say, ‘Oh my God, we don’t have those flavors’.” As a child growing up in Kentucky, pretty much the only “spices” his mama and grandmama used were salt and pepper, but they used them better than anyone else. “They knew how to season, and that’s 90 percent of the deal.” He waxes on about the “smoky with the sweet” components of the salsa accompanying his sublime barbecued- shrimp tacos. When I ask him the secret to his amazing mashed potatoes, he tells me he adds a pinch of a grated fresh cheese he found south of the border. “What it is,” Fearing says, “is just good-tasting food.”

It is also good Texas fun. Fearing is not only a great cook—he and Robert del Grande, the equally talented chef at Houston’s venerable Café Annie, have a band called The Barbwires, whose CD, “Bliss and Blisters,” is surprisingly good. Since its opening six months ago, his restaurant has been packed every night. When the chef is not in his 2,000-square-foot open kitchen, he works the crowd of bejeweled Dallas matrons and cowboy-boot- wearing hedge-fund managers with an enthusiasm bordering on the manic. “What we all love about restaurants is walking in and knowing you’ve arrived,” he says. “You want people in those seats laughing, waiters hurrying past. You want that addictive feeling of being at the right spot.” And whenever I’m there, I do.

I had called once to make my reservation, and then again to confirm it,
but it wasn’t until I telephoned to say I was running late that I really
heard the greeting.

“Thank you for calling Ubuntu,” a woman chirped, pausing for a comma
before adding, “restaurant and yoga studio.”

And yoga studio?

Somehow that hadn’t sunk in before. And the way she said it, putting the
lotus on a par with the lettuce, filled me with skepticism about this
promised vegetarian Eden in the Edenic Napa Valley.

Her response when I vowed to hustle there from the San Francisco airport
as quickly as possible didn’t help.

“Please,” she intoned in the kind of ultrasoothing voice that only a
person with perfectly aligned chakras and the entire Deepak Chopra
library can summon. “Drive safely.”

What kind of Kumbaya cuisine was I in for?

Several fistfuls of lavender-dusted almonds, some truffle-flecked
polenta and an avocado pudding later, I had my answer: inspired,
exhilarating cooking of a caliber I couldn’t have imagined.

And I couldn’t have imagined it because I’d never encountered it in a
vegetarian restaurant  with or without a yoga studio attached  in New
York.

My trip didn’t shake my conviction that New York is the finest
restaurant city in the United States, with an unrivaled range and depth
of options. But it was a fresh reminder of all the exciting dining
experiences that aren’t duplicated here, and it was a challenge to the
smug superiority New Yorkers sometimes feel.

New York is absurdly blessed, but of course the city doesn’t have it
all. It doesn’t have anything exactly like Cochon, in New Orleans, which
liberates Cajun cooking from its deep-fried clichs. With its stylishly
casual vibe, fatty abandon, worship of pork (cochon is French for pig)
and fervent devotees, it’s a Momofuku on the Mississippi.

New York doesn’t have anything as highfalutin as Guy Savoy, in Las
Vegas, which presents the possibility of not only wine pairings but also
bread pairings for each course. The breads, more than a dozen kinds, are
on a trolley nearly as big as some subcompact cars.

And New York doesn’t have anything as homey as Tilth, in Seattle, which
occupies what truly looks and feels like somebody’s house, complete with
front yard and front porch.

All in all I visited 15 acclaimed, ambitious, promising or intriguing
new restaurants from coast to coast, excluding New York City, in late
January and early February.

I identified these restaurants through extensive reading and inquiries
to food lovers around the country. The work of the chefs at many of the
restaurants automatically draws interest. Other restaurants had simply
generated considerable chatter.

For this survey I defined “new restaurant” as one that opened between
Jan. 1, 2006, and Dec. 31, 2007.

I evaluated the restaurants on relatively equal terms. Each was visited
at dinnertime. Each was visited anonymously. Each had just one meal to
make its case, and each was encouraged to show its best face, in that I
pointed myself toward dishes that were reputed to be, or should be, the
restaurant’s strong points.

The 5 of the 15 restaurants that didn’t make my final cut were Ad Hoc in
Yountville, California, Thomas Keller’s casual counterpoint to the
French Laundry; the two-month-old Takashi, which serves a sort of
Japanese-French fusion in Chicago; Tinto, with an array of artful tapas
in Philadelphia; Lke, the chef John Besh’s brasserie in New Orleans; and
Comme a, the chef David Myers’s brasserie in West Hollywood, California

I had some memorable food at each, but not as memorable as the food at
my top 10 restaurants. In alphabetical order, they are:

CENTRAL MICHEL RICHARD (Washington)

COCHON (New Orleans)

COI (San Francisco)

FEARING’S (Dallas)

FRACHE (Culver City, California)

GUY SAVOY (Las Vegas)

MICHAEL’S GENUINE FOOD & DRINK (Miami)

O YA (Boston)

TILTH (Seattle)

UBUNTU (Napa, California).

They’re a diverse lot, difficult to compare with one another. You can
get in and out of Cochon for under $60, including dessert and two
glasses of wine, while Guy Savoy charges $190, excluding alcohol, for
its abbreviated “90 Minute Experience” of four set courses.

At Coi the chef Daniel Patterson means to create small works of culinary
art, unveiled in a hushed gallery. At Central the chef Michel Richard
serves bistro and brasserie fare in a relatively freewheeling
atmosphere.

In my rankings I put more emphasis on the pleasure a restaurant provided
than on the ambitions it flexed, and I absolutely took cost into
account.

Certain judgment calls  leaving Ad Hoc out of the top 10, for example
were tougher than others. I happened to visit Ad Hoc, which serves the
same predetermined meal to every diner, on one of its every-other-Monday
fried chicken nights, and I had some of the best fried chicken of my
life. But the bean salad before it and the chocolate chip cookies after
weren’t nearly as impressive.

Certain trends came into sharp relief. I’ve used the word brasserie
several times already, and that reflects what seems to be a renewed
interest in French comfort food and classics, which dominate the menus
at three restaurants in my coast-to-coast sweep  Lke, Comme a and
Central Michel Richard  and one back in New York, Bar Boulud, which
opened a couple of months ago.

The prevalence of the brasserie idiom also signals the extent to which
accomplished chefs are turning their attention to less elaborate cooking
and settings. Cochon, with its concrete floors and a picnic-style
communal table up front, is decidedly more casual than Herbsaint, the
New Orleans restaurant that put its co-chef and co-owner Donald Link on
the map.

That’s a studied choice. “I don’t always want to sit down to a four-hour
dinner, but I don’t always want to go to the po’ boy shack down the
road,” Link said in a telephone interview. “And there’s not always stuff
in the middle, where you can have table service, get decent wine and get
in and out on your own terms.”

The attempt to address diners’ desires for uncommon but unstilted
experiences was evident in restaurants in every genre and at every price
point.

For all its elegance and pampering, Guy Savoy has clearly been designed
to make the pageantry less obtrusive. The muted tones of the staff
attire enable an armada of servers to blend into the background.

Fearing’s has three different indoor dining rooms with different looks
and different sound levels for different moods, though the menu is the
same in each.

At Frache, where the cuisine is Mediterranean and entrees average about
$24, white cloths cover the tables, but there’s an open kitchen where
everyone wears a bright red bandanna.

I encountered many open kitchens, some bordered by a front row of
counter seats that give diners a closer look, and they illustrate the
way cooking has officially become a spectator sport. You can watch the
making of your meal not only at Frache but also at Cochon, Fearing’s and
Michael’s Genuine Food & Drink  and at Central Michel Richard, with
which our four-episode season of “Restaurant Survivor” begins.

Fearing’s Dallas

 SOUTHWEST WITH A TWIST

Used to be, you could always tell a Ritz-Carlton dining room by its heavy brocade, dark mahogany furniture and signature cobalt blue glassware. Fearing’s, at the just built Ritz-Carlton, Dallas, dashes those design clichés forever. From the moment you enter the Rattlesnake Bar, which from day one was packed with young Dallasites in their casual boot-heeled best, you get a sense of swagger: the railing is faux rattlesnake skin; the backlighted walls are honey onyx. Beyond the bar, you pass a sunny patio and a glass-walled, conservatory-style dining area, then a more formal room with tufted sofas rather than banquettes. Finally, you reach the main room, which features a huge open kitchen with a polished granite counter where you can sit and watch the sizzle. Meanwhile, the soft Texas light pours through fifteen-foot windows, and desert shades of taupe and brown set off rough stone columns.

The Fearing in charge is Dean Fearing. When he started in the kitchen at Dallas’s Mansion on Turtle Creek, two decades ago, his dishes focused on a Southwestern identiy that married proletarian food, like tacos, with such expensive ingredients as lobster, and there was much smoking of meats and seafood. During his reign Fearing became one of the icons of New Texas cuisine. Since then, Americans’ taste for well-seasoned, boldly spiced, colorful dishes has followed examples set by chefs like Fearing, who has led the way – far away – from the staid hotel-dining-room fare of years past, in which rack of lamb with mint sauce and fondant potatoes ruled.

Fearing’s menu at the Ritz includes hallmark items, like his torilla soup, alsong with bright, brilliant new dishes, such as barbecued oysters with Gulf crabmeat, watermelon-and-jalapeño-glazed quail with a hush-puppy prawn and prime rib of beef cooked over mesquite embers and served with twice-baked cauliflower potatoes. Global flavors subtly influence such regional entrées as juicy pheasant beside curried-shrimp fried rice with white-asparagus tempura. The restaurant’s popularity proves that authentic American food – Texas style, with fresh snap and dazzle – is what real people want to eat. 2121 McKinney Ave.; 214-922-0200; ritzcarlton.com/en/properties/dallas/dining.

– JOHN MARIANI

Fearing’s Restaurant is open at the new Ritz-Carlton, Dallas
By: Mary Gostelow

It is, in fact, a signature dish of one of the most stylishly lovable of chefs anywhere, Dean Fearing, now based at Fearing’s, attached to The Ritz-Carlton Dallas, which opened August 15th, 2007. As hotel GM, Roberto van Geenen – himself a food man through and through – says, it was a good thing the culinary orchestra was playing to its peak from the start, as on the second night one of the guests was the most respected nationwide restaurant critic in the USA, John Mariani. As a result of that visit, Mariani rated Fearing’s, named for chef-patron Dean Fearing, as best new restaurant in the entire country in his annual round-up for Esquire Magazine (November 2007 issue).

Mariani’s words, now: ‘When I entered the polished Rattlesnake Bar at Fearing’s, packed with some of the most beautiful women in Texas sipping house margaritas made with Cabo Wabo Blanco tequila, Damiana liqueur, and organic agave nectar, then passed the elegant small dining room set with wide sofas rather than banquettes, then arrived at the bright expanse of the more casual main dining room, with its shiny counter and broad tables surrounding a huge open kitchen, I suspected this was the place.’

It is said that the restaurant’s interiors cost $6 million, and it is honestly difficult to know how it could have been achieved for so little. Dean Fearing had a considerable say in how the place would look, as did van Geenen and the hotel’s owners at the time, Crescent Real Estate Equities Co. The main design element, however, came from Atlanta-based Bill Johnson. Give us a restaurant, everyone said, that hinted at Texas but not too much so, something that is bang up to date but timeless. The result is a strategic bar, leading to seven different dining areas that seat a total of 166 guests, with a further 40 seats outside.

First that Rattlesnake Bar, its 15 foot high ceiling formed of mahogany and dark leather panels, like its walls. The lower parts of the bar, like a ceiling-held tester panel overhead, are back-lit honey onyx, from Pakistan. The 12 foot long bar itself is leather and extends round to a snake’s head.

Next you go into your dining area of choice, perhaps a light cool place that has 700 tiny white Murano glass fish hanging overhead, or into what looks like an airy winter garden, complete with murals and some tables set with one six foot tall white leather arm chair paired with a three foot tall brown armless chair. There is a 20-seat wine tasting room, its glass walls holding 6,000 bottles (the glass can be made opaque at the touch of a button). But the most buzz is probably in the main room, next to the open kitchen that feeds all these people.

Right next to the service counter is a tall square chef’s table, like a Gulliver-sized chef’s chopping block which seats eight people, at high stools, on all its four sides. We sat at a normal height table, a big square chunk of smooth-as-satin oak, which blended perfectly with a ceiling-high column of small squares of rough sand-colored stone and, overhead, square and rectangular parchment lampshades held by whipping along adjacent sides.

Dean Fearing, whom I had not seen for seven years, came rushing out with that charismatic smile of his, greeted me as his long-lost friend. ‘Well hello you-all, how lovely of you to have popped by to see me, what can I do for y’all?’ As always he was in his customized Lucchese boots and, indeed, instead of his name or Fearing’s logo, a stylized F, embroidered on his white chef’s jacket is – a pair of cowboy boots. (In fact Fearing is Kentucky born, but he considers Texas home, and when he is not cooking, appearing on his television shows or writing yet another book, he may well be playing his vintage Fender Telecaster guitar, with his all-chef band, The Barbwires.)

Dean Fearing told us that he really wanted everyone to feel at home. Few of the tables have white linens: ours was set with brown straw-weave mats, Rosenthal bone china with the F logo, Hepp flatware and Riedel glass. Breads came in a dark brown square wicker basket. Menus were covered in brown leather. Fearing’s chef, Joel Harrington, whom I had last seen at Laguna Niguel, was cooking that night. As Mariani said, Fearing and his team searches the countryside for inspiration, using all varieties of home grown peppers, dried chillies, jicama, cilantro, tomatillos, Texas hill country wild game, birds and venison in the ever-changing menu. The dishes have plenty of Texas swagger. You can choose a barbecued-shrimp taco with mango-pickled red-onion salad and a smoky citrus vinaigrette, or watermelon-and-jalapeño-glazed quail on a three-bean salad with a hush puppy made from prawns, or the prime-cut rib eye of beef “mopped over mesquite”.

In fact, as always we ate more simply, and fortunately the two chef’s-complimentary amuse fitted that bill too. After our order was taken we were brought shot glasses of a lobster bisque. Although Fearing’s signature appetizer starter is Dean’s tortilla soup with South of the border flavors, I went for an Impressionist-look dish of a hamachi (yellowtail fish), named for Tokyo’s Tsukiji market. The hamachi duo gave me a flash-seared five-spice blodge with avocado wasabi purée, and a fish tartare with pomegranate seeds, hearts of palm and miso cream. I did choose Fearing’s signature main course entrée, however, namely a maple and black peppercorn soaked buffalo tenderloin, two big chunks on a couple of purées, an off-white Anson Mills jalapeño grits and an orange splodge of crispy butternut squash taquito (this dish, I thought, was more like a Braque painting). The grits were so gritty, by the way, that I later researched Anson Mills, and found intriguingly that the organic facility behind a car-wash in Columbia SC had been started by a career-changer, a historic restoration and hotel and restaurant designer, Glenn Roberts, in 1998. He grinds what is known as Carolina Gourdseed White corn as described in an 1850 tome as the finest corn in the Appalachians, which he freezes before grinding, www.ansonmills.com.

Fearing’s restaurant is all about these charming curlicues, the minutiae that add up to a great dining experience. Take the servers, for instance. Their outfits were specially designed by one of Texas’ best, Alexander Julian, a North Carolina-born artist known for introducing color into menswear. Here, for both sexes he has come up with pale lemon and pink shirts with old-fashioned cufflinks – the shirts are worn as overshirts by the line staff, and, tucked in, under black jackets with narrow white stripes by captains.

Before my main course, we were presented with a fine oak box holding six Sambonet steak knives. Choose your own, they said. Choosing a wine from such a splendid list would have been really a challenge, but fortunately the sommeliers, Paul Botamer and Hunter Hammett, chose a Domaine Serene, Willamette Valley 2004 Pinot Noir from Mark Bradford Vineyard in Dayton Oregon, www.domaineserene.com.

After that we were all offered another shooter, this time a shot glass of Dr Pepper. We were also, of course, lavishly encouraged to have dessert – but you know what, we had no room (and anyway I want a reason to go back!). As we left, I was given the bottle’s label, stuck to a card that was signed by both sommeliers, and I was offered a menu signed by Dean Fearing, and a personal note from our main server. This place certainly has plenty of what is often called the renowned Texas swagger.

Unless you happen to live nearby, honestly the only way to enjoy Fearing’s restaurant is to stay in the luxury Ritz-Carlton Dallas, a 218-room property that wraps itself around the restaurant – and is, itself, encompassed, as if in a set of Russian dolls, by high-net-worth luxury residences. The hotel, designed by Frank Nicholson, is an immensely soothing place. Think marbles and soft cactus and cream colors. WOW.travel especially likes corner suite 705, for its amazing sunrise views over the rapidly expanding Uptown skyline, and for the fact it is only ten yards walk along to the Club lounge. When staying there, too, WOW.travel heartily recommends a facial from the highly talented Sundari, who has several years’ experience making Hollywood Big Names looking even better.
www.ritzcarlton.com/dallas