Food Interview: Pat Sharpe Of Texas Monthly On Texan Cooking

It would be fair to say that Texas Monthly's Pat Sharpe is one of the arbiters of taste for Texas cuisine. Sharpe is not only a native Austinite, but has been writing for the magazine since 1974 - the year before we were born. Never shy, Ms. Sharpe's "Where To Eat Now" article annually frames the discussion about the state's best new restaurants, and the magazine's features on best burgers, Top 50 BBQ restaurants, and best small-town cafes are saved by subscribers as a veritable roadmap for what to try in the coming months and years. We recently spoke with Sharpe about her latest project, a feature issue on Texan cooking and iconic foods.

We're going to focus on the "How To Cook Texan" issue, but I wanted to ask first in general when people meet you and sort out who you are and what you do, are they more inclined to ask your opinion about restaurants or food or are they more inclined to give you theirs?

The first thing people say after they meet me is..."if you're a restaurant reviewer, how come you're so skinny?" And then the second thing they say is "what's your favorite restaurant in..." whatever city that we're in at the moment.

Fair enough.

[Laughing]

Now this new issue might be a little deceptive to people who aren't paying attention to the tagline. Folks might feel that it's about new Texas food or new Texas restaurants, and it's really focused more on cooking iconic Texas dishes. Where did you guys come up with this concept, and why was it something that was important to you?

You know, [TM Editor] Jake [Silverstein] thought the idea up, and I think it just hit him one day. Actually, we'd done a couple of food stories recently, but it just seemed like, "'wow, why have we never done this story before?" Because it's so obvious, it's so perfect for us. So once he thought of it then there was just nothing to be done except to actually do the story.

Looking through the article, there are certainly some iconic dishes - the fried chicken, the brisket, the rib eye, that kind of thing. Do you have any opinions about what makes cooking 'Texan' that's maybe a little less obvious than the focal ingredient of the dish? Are there some things that are Texan touches that are important to you?

Hmm...good question. I think that there is a sense about an iconic Texas dish. Not that it [needs to have] been around forever, or since the 19th century, but that it's got some roots in Texas. And certainly that it goes back a generation. Which would be - what, you could say 25 years. I think that in order to be really identified with the Texas character, it can't be something that's new that we all like, it's got to be something from our roots. And those are really the cattle industry, the oil industry, the heritage, so I think that it's got to have some sense that it comes out of our past.

That leads me to this - we've had this explosion in the past three or four years where a lot of chefs like John Besh are either coming into our market or really finding a new level like David Bull and there is a more cosmopolitan influence in some of our big cities on what is happening in our best restaurants. I'm wondering if you feel that that is taking away from some of the uniqueness of a visit to Texas from an outsider. How do you feel about that trend generally - that the food is really changing in Texas right now in probably a way that it never has before?

I think food has been changing in Texas - really since about 1975. And it's the same thing, but just more and more all the time because that's when I started with the magazine. That was the period of great immigration into Texas from other parts of the country, and we were growing so fast then, and the cities were bigger and there was more money and there was this tremendous real estate boom. I think that's when this whole modernist era of Texas began. So I think that is not new at all, and I think we've become more international and more cosmopolitan, and more of all of those things in the last 35 years. So I would draw a very distinct line between the iconic Texas dishes that rise out of our heritage from the new modern contemporary Texas that is a heritage that we share with the rest of the country. Because I think you can look at any big city and the same thing has happened there, like Chicago, Los Angeles, New York. Our two big cities, Dallas and Houston, are right in line with what is going on there.

Do you have any archetypes or any restaurant examples that you think stand the test of time in mixing those two things - the old and the modern, places that you've gone back to again and again over time? I know that's a challenging question.

I would say that about the whole Southwestern cuisine movement, which (of course) has just been completely integrated into modern cuisine all over the country. You can find examples everywhere, and nobody even thinks about it as a distinct thing. But, once upon a time back about 1983, Southwestern cuisine was new, and there was what I'd call the Texas branch of it. It was created by Texas chefs, and then there was a whole branch created by Mark Miller at Coyote Cafe in Santa Fe and John Sedlar out in California. But there was a Texas branch, too, and it was created by Stephan Pyles and Dean Fearing and Robert Del Grande. They really bridged that gap between what I would consider the more iconic part of Texas - which is to say some of our Mexican foods, those flavorings and ingredients, and the upscale, very chef-y part of modern Texas cuisine and they put the two together. It was a watershed! It was huge. People who weren't around then just don't know that. It was game-changing, the whole Southwestern cuisine movement. You can actually date it to the day that Michael Bauer (who is now with the San Francisco Chronicle)...he was with the Dallas Times-Herald then. He's the one who gave it the name, and it was a true culinary movement in Texas. It bridges what I feel is the two prongs of Texas cuisine, the iconic and the modern.

This is super interesting and educational for me. I love that you mentioned Stephan Pyles, because he's still such a force in Dallas, and honestly, his newest spot Samar was probably the most fun meal that my wife and I had all last year. We were so entertained by some of the ideas that were coming across the plate there [the restaurant mixes Indian, Spanish, and Mediterranean food.]

Stephan really reinvents himself every time he opens a new restaurant! There will never be anything [quite] as successful as Star Canyon, which of course was his iconic turn, but he's always done something new, time after time.

How do you feel on the whole that Texas chefs are incorporating the national trend toward being locavores and incorporating the bounty of local products. Do you feel that we're ahead of the curve or behind it compared to the rest of the country?

I think we're right up there with it. Ahead of the curve? I don't know, but certainly that's the dominant movement right now nationally is local sourcing. I see it all the time with all of the new restaurants that are chef-driven. That's what they have to do before they do anything else. Before they even create their menus, they have to get their farmers and growers lined up and then they create their menus based on what they can get in their hands.

Are there favorites of yours in recent years in terms of favorite Texas products, be they cheeses, beers, things like that, that you feel are great to see on restaurant menus when you're traveling around checking everything out?

There are so many, and there are so many that I've never heard of! They're very small, but once they get on a menu, they get this whole different level of exposure, which I think is fabulous. Of course, there's Pure Luck goat cheese, which is just about my favorite goat cheese in the whole state, and there's also a good one that's called Latte Da, which is a goat cheese that's made near Fort Worth. That's a great one. I'd say the cheeses in particular. And I will say that one of the very, very earliest was The Mozzarella Company in Dallas, which deserves a huge amount of credit for starting the whole artisan cheese movement back, gosh, 30 years ago. Paula Lambert. She's been so generous, and so consistently good at what she does.

We've just had the Texas Hill Country Wine and Food Festival this past week, which showcased a lot of the dishes that in your issue, and also a lot of our state's best chefs. But I want to talk to you about your event that Texas Monthly did at the Long Center last fall, The Texas Monthly BBQ Festival. You guys came out of the gate with this event, and it had a really reasonable ticket price. We were very skeptical about what was going to happen as a first go-round, and I have to say that it was an amazing, amazing event. What are your plans for 2012?

Well, we're going to have it again. It's going to be in October this year. We'll use the same place, the Long Center. Since we're embodying our Top 50, we probably will have a number of the same participants, hopefully. I think we had between 20-25 last year. So that means that there are another 25 of our top 50 who couldn't come, so maybe some of them will get a little bit of exposure. The ones who came were obviously, just geographically closest, and it was easier for them to get their rigs and their people to Austin. I think we're going to try to pretty much replicate what we did, and make it a little bigger and a little better. It's a fine line between making it bigger and not making it too big.

Right.

I think what people loved about the experience was that there weren't humongous lines. I think we had slightly under 1,000 people [ed. note: the event sold out months in advance - don't delay when tickets go on sale this year!] I think we can open it up and provide some more tickets, but we certainly wouldn't want to do anything like 3,000, because that would destroy the uniqueness of the experience.

As a patron of the event, we thought it was both a great idea that I can't believe nobody had thought of before, and also really an amazing experience given that you guys had not attempted it before. It's so hard to do right on the first go around. We give you high compliments for the way it all came off.

Oh - well, thank you. I take no credit for it. I was a participant! I mean, yes, I was an organizer, but other people did that. So my hat is off to them.

Texas Monthly's How To Cook Texas issue is on newsstands now. To read more from Pat Sharpe, bookmark her 'Eat My Words' blog here.