Mistakes happen quickly; comebacks take a long time. I’ve said that to myself more than once over my career, as those sentiments ring painfully true in both the kitchen and in life. Over and over, I’ve tumbled from the tops of mountains that took me years to climb. And each time, I’ve made the long, laborious ascent back to the summit.
My latest campaign has been the steakhouse and American beef. How a New York chef came to Texas, much less how I came to own a steakhouse in Dallas, is a piece of a much longer culinary tale. It’s a story with many generous spoonfuls of success right alongside several heaping servings of failure. I want to tell a little bit of my story not out of vanity—to be sure, this tale often doesn’t flatter me—but to describe how a chef develops, how a surplus of manic energy can be defused through the kitchen, and how acquiring a foundation in the basic elements of cooking can help you lead a rich life. I also want you to understand me so that you can ultimately see what Texas, Texas beef, and serving steak in America mean to me. Even though you might have seen the cover of a magazine proclaiming me the “Most Hated Chef in Dallas” or watched me on Top Chef or read about my public dustups with the restaurant critic here in Dallas, I want you to know that what matters to me is creating beautiful food and making customers happy. Yes, I’m prone to volatility. I suppose I’m an old-school chef in that sense, but I’m also grounded in a way I’ve never been before in my life, thanks to Texas and thanks to beef.
One thing most people don’t know about me is that every day I run. Like a frigging windup doll, I get on a treadmill and race my legs for an hour, sometimes more. I do it in the late afternoons after work—and before work continues. People ask, “Don’t you tire yourself out? Aren’t you already on your feet day and night?” The answer is yes, I’m on my feet all day long. And, no, I don’t tire myself out. The running is in fact to let off steam, to burn off the excess energy that buzzes in my mind and body every day. If I didn’t run, I’d probably burst. And I’ve been like that my whole life. I’ve been running, burning energy, moving. Always moving. Sometimes to my benefit, sometimes to my detriment. But always, always moving.
I’m not sure where the energy comes from. Maybe it belongs to Thomas Kenyon. That’s the name on my birth certificate. I was born to parents I never knew. I heard my biological father was an Irish gangster, but I don’t know for sure. They put me up for adoption as an infant only weeks old, and I was taken in by second-generation immigrants, a Czechoslovakian couple already in middle age. My new grandparents didn’t speak English, only Czech. Suddenly, I was John Tesar, the only identity I’ve ever known. But just as I am now a New York chef who has found his identity a long way away in the state of Texas, sometimes I wonder what the dynamic of being a kid with Irish DNA raised by strict Czechs has done to me. It must produce some amount of internal tension and energy. Most chefs have a lot of tension and a lot of energy. Probably not as much I do, though.
I grew up about as far culturally from Dallas as could be imagined in America—in the boroughs of New York City and, perhaps more significantly, on the shores of Long Island. My parents were very strict and disciplined. One major theme was work. The other was food. My mother was relentlessly in the kitchen, putting breakfast, lunch, and dinner out for, at minimum, the four of us—and for five times that when the extended family came over. So, in a way, I’ve always been in the restaurant business—as busboy, server, and host in my own home.
My grandmother would make the Czech food—rabbit in dill cream sauce, venison-and-potato dumplings. My aunt would make the salads and the apple pie. My mother had spent time with Italian women and made Italian food. Every Christmas Eve was the Feast of the Seven Fishes—squid, clams, fried flounder, fluke, every type of fish known to man. On the weekends at our house in the Hamptons, we would always have guests. You’d wake up, and there’d be ten people at the breakfast table, with my mother scrambling eggs and frying bacon for a small army. Every once in a while, I’d be asked to make eggs Benedict because I had shown an interest in the kitchen.
My father was a banker. Today, you think of some guy in a Brooks Brothers suit climbing out of a black car on Wall Street, but it wasn’t like that. My dad was more like someone you’d see in one of those Martin Scorsese period pieces. He was a small-time banker working in Queens and never made more than $50,000 a year. Though my father wasn’t Italian, several of his clients were in the mob, and they always treated him really well. Sometimes he’d come home with twenty pounds of meat they’d given him, or cheese and olive oil, caviar and booze—stuff we couldn’t afford. He had good taste, though. His favorite white wine was white Burgundy, long before it was cool.
In my early youth, I was witness to this kind of old-world kitchen—everything made from scratch every day—and as I got older I absorbed it. The first time I cooked anything by myself was at age twelve. While my mother was out running errands, I pulled down a cookbook and produced crescent cookies from scratch. When she got home, her first reaction was, “These look just like mine!” When it comes to cooking, I’ve always been a sponge. I’m sure I had just watched her make cookies enough times that I’d internalized the process.
It was also during this time that I had my first steak. My father worked in the Queens neighborhood of Kew Gardens, and one day, I remember he took me with him when he went to eat at a mob-owned steakhouse. He ordered a filet mignon that had been perfectly sizzled in the restaurant’s gas-fired steak broiler. Its magical aroma preceded it as it came to the table—savory and beefy with a perfume of meaty deliciousness. It came out perfectly browned and juicy, and I’ll never forget it. I just fell in love with meat and thus fell into a phase where all I wanted to eat were steak and lamb chops.
I had little inclination how much my life would change when my father bought a lot out on Long Island near Shinnecock Bay. Long Island, its wonderful bay, and the Hamptons would play huge roles in what I was to become. But first I learned what it meant to be bay people.
The name Tesar comes from Tesach, which in Czech means “carpenter.” And my father very much lived up to his name. He was a natural master carpenter. (He was also an incredible pianist; I think it was being so talented with his hands but relegated to a job in a suit behind a desk that drove him to drink.) I saw his woodworking side flower when we’d go to the Hamptons. First, he built our house. He also built boats, beautifully rendered wooden boats with curved sides and polished, gleaming staves. Proof of my adoption is that, though my name is Tesar, I have none of my father’s talents: I can’t cut a piece of wood straight to save my life.
But I can cook—and our family’s cooking took a new turn as more and more of our lives revolved around the water. Our cuisine wasn’t farm to table; it was bay to table. My dad worked the bay himself. A passionate fishermen, he’d often take me out with him to cast lines for flounder. He knew all the local fishermen and clammers and oystermen, and many a night, he came home with a bounty of the freshest seafood. We often had crowds on these weekends, and he’d get buckets of lobster and crab, and we’d spread newspaper over the tables and bury cases of Heineken in ice. The boys would be in the backyard shucking littlenecks and steamers. And in the fall, we’d cook scallops. At dinnertime, we’d heave twenty lobsters up on the table with french fries, sliced tomatoes, and corn on the cob.
On my thirteenth birthday, my dad bought me a surfboard, signaling a profound shift in my life, because I started to evolve from being a nerdy kid to hanging out with the surfers. This was the early ’70s. Surfing culture today might mean yuppies in Patagonia fleeces getting a morning surf in before sipping on green tea soy lattes in meetings with venture capitalists. Back then, surfing was counterculture—it was edgy, nonconformist, rock and roll.
As I became a pretty proficient surfer, I discovered pot and the beach and new people. I started hanging out with the cool kids. When I turned fifteen, my parents trusted me enough to let me go out at night. At curfew, I’d run home from wherever I was—always running—because I didn’t have a car.
Two friends from the beach were both cooks at this celebrated local joint, Magic’s Pub, and lived in the apartment above it. They got me a job as dishwasher, the beginning of my restaurant career.
Magic’s was a legendary place in Westhampton in the ’70s. Its cozy interior was furnished with reclaimed wood paneling. Oak tables were set with blue-and-white-checkered tablecloths during the day, red-and-white checkers at night. Everyone hung out at Magic’s, high society and low.
When I mention the Hamptons, you must realize this was before it was the Hamptons of today. Back then, the Hamptons was an artist colony. Montauk was a fishing village. Manhattan’s wealthy still decamped here during the summer, as they always have, but the culture was much more laid back. There was a real literary culture out there. When I worked at Magic’s, Jimmy Breslin and George Plimpton would sit at the bar and talk to me while I made Bloody Marys. It was these customers and their lively, intellectual conversation that caused me to fall in love with the romance of the restaurant business. The guests were the most interesting people I could ever imagine.
Magic’s menu was classic bar food, but it had purity and was cooked with heart. There was the famous Magic burger that’s memorialized to this day on my menu at Knife—on a toasted English muffin with Vermont yellow cheddar cheese, applewood-smoked bacon, lettuce, tomato, and onion. There was crispy fried shrimp; the steak came with gravy made from chicken stock, Maggi sauce, and sautéed button mushrooms, and you could order french fries or a salad with it.
At first, I was the dishwasher, washing every plate by hand. The next summer, I “graduated” to putting tomato and lettuce on the plates, and I made tuna fish sandwiches at lunch. The following year, I was full-on in the kitchen—cooking steaks and burgers and starting to realize I have a pretty good touch, even with this simple food. I just instinctively knew when to flip the steaks, when to turn the heat down. I never sweated or pressed. That year, 1976, I decided to stay out in the Hamptons year round instead of going back to attend school and live in Queens. I graduated high school early at seventeen and moved in with the guys from Magic’s. This time of my life still glows in my memory—working, cooking, listening to music, surfing.
As I discovered cooking—both the art of it and the simple fact of it as a job that earned me money—my life changed. The sparks that ignited America’s food revolution were just starting to catch in places like San Francisco and New York. I wasn’t there yet, but I knew that I enjoyed the act of feeding guests and didn’t mind the long hours. My energy seemed to have no bounds. After work, we’d sometimes trek into the city, and I’d find myself at Manhattan’s big-time nightclubs (disco!) until the wee hours.
I worked at Magic’s from 1976 to 1979. At age twenty, I left for Club Pierre, a swanky new restaurant opened by the rich New Yorker Francine Farkas, whose husband owned Alexander’s department store. In the South of France, Francine had met these two elegant chefs, Pierre and Alain, whom she brought to New York and helped get fixed up in this restaurant in the Hamptons. Their place was a major step above Magic’s—classic French food rendered by real French chefs. In its heyday, to get a reservation at Club Pierre on a Friday night was next to impossible.
During the daytime, Pierre designed the menu and Alain made the pastry. Pierre cooked effortlessly, in an apron and with a cigarette balanced on his lip like Errol Flynn. At night, he never cooked. Unlike entrepreneur chefs nowadays who run to put on a chef’s coat before going out on the floor to meet guests, Pierre never wore a chef’s coat at night. He wore a gorgeous suit and worked the floor like a pro—always perfectly dressed, always perfectly charming. His slicked black hair and little French mustache were accessorized with Cartier, Hermès, and an eternally half-full glass of champagne.
Pierre was my original mentor. My first job at his restaurant was garde-manger—keeper of the pantry and preparer of cold food. I started making salads—salade Niçoise, salade verte. We tossed the Caesar salad tableside to order. The next year, I graduated to hot food. My station was the grill, the steak broiler, rack of lamb persillade, and the Dover sole.
I was loving life. At night after work, I headed to Marakesh, which was the nightclub at the time in the Hamptons, and stayed out until four in the morning. Then I’d head to the beach, where I’d sleep for a couple of hours until the sun came up. If there were waves, I’d surf until ten or eleven, take a nap on the beach, and then go to work for the rest of the day and all night. That beautiful, peaceful, eternal beach saved me. Had I worked in the city, I would have slept off my partying in some dark hole of an apartment. In the soft sand and clean, pure light of the Hamptons, I’d be refreshed because I was in the ocean all morning.
It was Pierre who taught me how to make béarnaise sauce. As I grew more proficient, we’d spend the afternoon in the kitchen together as he walked me through the menu I’d be cooking. By the third year, I knew what to do on my own. He let me run the kitchen while he paraded through the dining room. Pierre loved my work ethic and rewarded my natural ability. I enjoyed the cooking and the positive feedback from diners. I felt my skills growing. Club Pierre, I thought, was just like getting an education in France—that is, until I went and got a real one.
In my second year at Club Pierre, I decided to explore the epicenter of cooking, Paris. It was 1981, and I was twenty-two. Business in the Hamptons is seasonal. It dies after Labor Day, and Pierre would close the restaurant, meaning I had time to kill. My girlfriend at the time was a Yale graduate and spoke French, so we decided to venture to France together for four months. Her mother was well connected and got me an audition for La Varenne. Founded in 1975 by British-born food writer and cooking teacher Anne Willan, La Varenne was becoming renowned in the food world as an intimate, highly serious cooking school that offered accredited, professional degrees. Importantly, teaching was done in both French and English, which meant most of the students were Americans. It attracted the legends: Simone Beck, Julia Child—I met them all there. Many prominent American chefs had been students there too. Jonathan Waxman had gone through just a couple of years before I did, and I met the late Judy Rodgers of San Francisco’s Zuni Café while there.
There were six or seven of us, and we were taught directly by two wonderful French chefs: Fernand Chambrette and Claude Vauget. In the morning, we executed the menu the chefs designed for us as they stood by and corrected technique. Then we’d all sit down and eat the lunch we’d just cooked with any guests who happened by. The afternoons were filled with demonstrations by real professionals like Michel Rostang. This was the first time I encountered delicacies like white truffles and foie gras. They graded us not just on skills but on our ability to execute dishes perfectly within set times—not too different from some of the challenges on Top Chef. I graduated by acing the final test—a full four-course meal.
This experience led to a multiyear stretch for me in which I’d travel to France at the close of the Hamptons season. Only that first year did I attend school. Afterward, I’d just travel around the country, interning at French restaurants for a week or two here or there, in between dining at Michelin-starred restaurants.
The ability and the knowledge I possess today I owe to those years in France. Theoretically, I’m in the second generation of new American chefs, but we all were inspired by the brilliance of French culinary technique and sensibility. It wasn’t merely an education in the French kitchen; it was an indoctrination into a food culture we didn’t have in America.
I’m one of the dying breed of chefs who went to Europe to learn. We didn’t learn it second- or thirdhand or, god forbid, not learn it at all—as is the case with so many chefs I see in the States. We learned it firsthand. The chefs who did this became the ones who transported American cuisine into the present. Alfred Portale went to work for Jacques Maximin, and Larry Forgione worked at the Connaught in London; they both changed the New York dining scene. Jonathan Waxman, Jeremiah Tower, and Alice Waters went to France, and it changed the American dining scene. France may be the Old World, but people forget that it is also responsible for the birth of our modern food scene. If you really want to learn about food, travel. Travel to France.
The first summer at Club Pierre I worked garde-manger. Second summer, I was the broiler man. Third summer, I beat out the sous chef to take the chef position. By the fourth year, I ran the restaurant. And by the eighth year, I owned the place. Pierre moved back to France, and the restaurant was for sale. I took what would have been my college tuition, and I borrowed $36,000 from my father. My partner borrowed the same sum from his brother, who had made it big on Wall Street, and we were suddenly restaurateurs. I was only twenty-eight years old, and I owned the restaurant where I learned how to cook. Life was good. Knowing what I now know, I might even say too good.
We renamed the place Hampton Square, in homage to Joyce Goldstein’s groundbreaking Square One in San Francisco, which was the buzz of the culinary world those days. In the summertime, we killed it, as usual, cooking Pierre’s classics. A busy restaurant in the Hamptons can make enough money during the summer that you can just cruise the rest of the year. But I never cruised. I never stopped hustling. And I never stopped cooking and improving.
After Labor Day in the Hamptons, when everything shutters, I started going into Manhattan to cook, where the food scene was electric. In the previous era, fine dining meant staid, formal French restaurants that were stuck in dishes of the past—duck à l’orange and the like. Now chefs were coming back from the South of France, the Rhône, and Italy, bringing new ideas, fusing together multiple cuisines from the Mediterranean. And the city was literally eating it up. A 1997 New York Times article by Marian Burros reflected on the era, saying that “at this time, the names of the famous chefs were on the cognoscenti’s lips, their unlisted phone numbers eagerly sought by yuppies determined to sample $50 beggar’s purses and $30 roast chicken. The excitement created by their restaurants—the Quilted Giraffe, Huberts, Jams and Arizona 206—was even greater than the clamor at today’s places to be seen.”
I ended up getting shifts at one of New York’s new iconic joints. Arizona 206 was run by a chef barely older than I was, Brendan Walsh. He too had worked and traveled in France, as well as Italy and California, before he boldly introduced New Yorkers to the flavors of the American Southwest. It was eye opening to work with different flavors than ever before. Arizona 206 was my first exposure to Anaheim chiles, smoked chicken, freshwater fish. It was the first time I worked with pickling. I also had a job at the restaurant next door, and I’d work doubles all winter long between the two places, while sleeping at the house of my ninety-year-old aunt in Queens, commuting in and out (at all hours of the night) on the E train.
I was learning from the crème de la crème of New York chefs at the time. Employers loved me because I was a workhorse. Thanks to the Zen of surfing, I was also calm in the eye of the storm—an adrenaline junkie who stayed preternaturally serene during the rush. Of course, I also bore a myriad of emotional problems that hadn’t even revealed themselves, because I was too busy working my butt off and then partying until the wee hours. I also realized then that I had a particular talent in cooking, kind of like a photographic memory. I can go into restaurants and order a dish and, after seeing it and tasting it, completely intuit how to cook it myself. I learned a lot not just in the kitchen but in the dining room, seeing what other chefs were doing.
But beyond going to Manhattan for experience and inspiration, I also brought Manhattan back out to the Hamptons. All summer long we’d get mako shark, and swordfish and bluefish, and flounder and fluke and lobster, right out of our backyard. I brought this seafood into the ’80s with a California overtone. Hampton Square was hopping; I played rock and roll, and we had a late-night bar scene crowded with Wall Street guys who flocked there because there were also girls and cocaine. And we were making money.
Then things started to go awry. Left to my own devices in the kitchen, I’d be fine forever. It’s life outside of the kitchen that can prove tricky for me. In the third year of my ownership, I bought out my partner, who left me with $53,000 in payroll taxes. I had just gotten married, and my father-in-law bought in to become my partner, which wound up being a train wreck.
To try to get out from under those payroll taxes, I borrowed my friend’s catering truck, rented equipment from his business, and catered parties during the day. I hired a friend of mine from the city to oversee the parties. Starting at six in the morning, I’d prep all the food for the parties and then still make it to Hampton Square each night to cook for our 200–250 covers. I paid off the $53,000, but it took a toll. I’d literally be snorting cocaine all day long to be able to maintain this manic schedule. I had a daughter with my wife, but after a year, we separated and divorced. I was blacklisted from my family, and I wasn’t allowed to see my daughter. It was as ugly as ugly can get.
And times were changing. The business started to slow a bit. The center of Hamptons fashionability was shifting from Westhampton to East Hampton, and restaurant competition had arrived. Wall Street hitting bust at the end of the 1980s didn’t help. I sold the restaurant, getting out before the whole thing crashed down on me.
I lived on the little amount of cash I had gotten from the sale of Hampton Square until that money ran out and I got evicted from my apartment. I’d lost everything I built over the last ten years, including my family, my cars, my daughter, and my reputation. Even my girlfriend. So I turned my back on the Hamptons and headed into New York full-time, sleeping on a friend’s floor while I tried to figure out what to do next. One good thing about being a chef is that, so long as you have a willingness to work hard and a modicum of talent, you can always get a job. I did the only thing I knew how to do—started from scratch.
It was 1990–1991, and scratch was a place called Formerly Joe’s on the corner of Fourth and Tenth in the West Village—an unassuming place that catered to the neighborhood. This is where I met Anthony Bourdain, whom the owner brought in to help me cook. Bourdain was a bright young guy who loved food but had clear aspirations to be a writer. We had many great conversations in that kitchen and late into the night when we’d go out after work. I made ends meet by doing a little private chef work.
Thanks to a stroke of good luck, I got the opportunity to become chef at a new place, the Supper Club, where a big raise in salary helped me truly get back on my feet again. This was the heyday of New York’s club scene in the 1990s, and, as its name suggests, the Supper Club turned into an all-out club after its dinner service. MTV shot Unplugged there; the nightclub attracted models, power brokers, musicians. I brought Bourdain over to be sous chef with me, and for two years, we ran that kitchen.
Unfortunately, two of my worst restaurant memories were at the Supper Club. One was a kitchen nightmare on New Year’s Eve, when the reservationists overbooked my expensive prix fixe meal and then doubled down on the misery by letting the rambunctious clubbers in too early. An unholy mess, it left the diners screaming for their food as the room became flooded with New Year’s partiers. That night’s level of yelling, stress, and chaos has never been rivaled in my career.
Another horrible memory is of the night we hosted the James Beard Awards Gala. I came up with this idea of doing foie gras and puff pastry. To merely say that the dish didn’t work is an understatement that fails to capture the all-encompassing horror of the experience. First, it was a terrible dish. A lot of times—and I still do it to this day—I don’t know exactly how to cook something and I just learn by doing it. Most of the time it works out; occasionally it doesn’t. At this time, I had barely ever worked with foie gras and not since my schooling days in France. I overcooked it and didn’t know how to portion it properly, so I was left trying to stuff this greasy, mushy, overcooked foie gras into puff pastry. But it wasn’t just the dish; it was the audience. Not only was I making this unholy mess for the James Beard Foundation’s extreme foodies, but I was flopping in front of four other accomplished chefs who were cooking the meal with me. Three worked under Daniel Boulud at Le Cirque, and the other was Laurent Manrique, a brilliant chef who grew up in Gascony, the region of France most known for foie gras, and who would go on to own his own foie ranch in California. It was like butchering “Hey Jude” in front of Paul McCartney.
Of course, I survived. And a couple of years later, after recouping my reputation as a chef, the world brought me some investors who wanted to back me in my own place.
The years between 1995, when I opened 13 Barrow Street, and 2001, when I left New York, saw some of the best and worst times of my life.
While it lasted, our little storefront in the West Village, 13 Barrow Street, was a fabulous joyride, a sustained high. We were open every day from 4:00 P.M. to 4:00 A.M. The food at 13 Barrow was in the hot style of the time—fusion. I never wanted to be labeled a fusion guy, but it was impossible not to be inspired by the likes of Jean-Georges Vongerichten, who was blowing minds at the Drake Hotel. He wasn’t on the radar like he is now, but chefs were aware of what he was doing. We had a raw bar and a juice bar, and I was doing sushi and sesame noodles and California fusion pizzas—we had tandoori chicken with mango-fig chutney pizza and Peking duck pizza. Such dishes might sound odd today, but they had their own internal logic. After all, it’s not too big a stretch to go from naan or a fluffy Chinese bun to pizza crust. The dishes were addictive and just what people wanted for a late-night meal. Food industry folks flocked to our ongoing late-night party. I remember one night after we received a rave from New York magazine, in our little forty-nine-seat space we had the entire Sirio Maccioni family at one table, Tom Colicchio at another, Bobby Flay at yet another, and Anthony Bourdain all in the house at the same time. And the bar was packed with Wall Street moguls. Another night, during a blizzard that had shut down the town, I remember sitting at the bar drinking and talking with Uma Thurman and Sarah Jessica Parker as the city sat silent under the snow.
In that review, Gael Greene wrote of me, “In a town that is bursting with kitchen talent, it’s still a thrill to discover a player hurtling to a new high.” She was spot on with everything, including the high. That I was able to cook from 2:00 P.M. to 4:00 A.M. every day while entertaining crowds and hanging out with fellow chefs at the end of the night was thanks to regular infusions of alcohol, cocaine, and pot. I worked while on those substances. Far from a way for me to escape, they helped me engage and focus in the eye of the storm.
Needless to say, 13 Barrow Street imploded, thanks to hidden fees, unscrupulous and inept financial partners, and my own fiscal bungling. When it ended, I cleaned up and went sober.
After this, my boom-and-bust cycle would continue. I had, as Bourdain described it in his essay collection Medium Raw, “a striking tendency among people I’ve liked to sabotage themselves.” He also called me “probably the single most talented chef I ever worked with,” before accurately noting that I “pretty much wrote the book on this behavior pattern: finding a way to [mess] up badly whenever success threatens, accompanied by a countervailing ability to bounce back again and again—or at the very least, survive.”
Once again, I revived myself by becoming chef of another bizarre restaurant-meets-dance-club called Hush. I served delicious, creative food in the early part of the night, and then by ten thirty, the place was a thumping dance club. Another rave about my food from New York magazine made the experience rewarding, and I found my footing again for a couple of years, which led me to Vine, a big, high-profile, ambitious restaurant down in the Wall Street area to be opened by some megawealthy developers. It seemed like a good opportunity at the time, a natural progression into a more serious, high-profile restaurant.
I’ll cut to the chase. In my career I’ve had multiple New York magazine reviews, all stellar. I’ve been reviewed in The New York Times, always positively except for a single one-star review. The one-star review devastated my life, and it was for Vine.
This was the year 2000, and a new cadre of chefs was reinventing food in New York City, supported by the critical pen of Bill Grimes at the Times. Grimes had identified the new style of restaurant in a different review, writing that “the outlines of the trend are not clear yet, and I’m not sure what name to give it, but there’s something afoot on the dining scene … a number of talented chefs with strong resumes have chosen a quiet career path, opening small restaurants where everything is modest except the ambitions of the kitchen.” We had a critic that was heralding change, and Vine didn’t match the model he favored. In the Vine review, Grimes didn’t exactly hack me to bits. It was worse than that: He bled me out slowly with thin, morbid cuts. “The food is quite decent, in a middle-of-the-road, easy-listening sort of way,” he wrote.
No one is going to stop in midsentence and exclaim over it. But no one is going to complain, either.
In just about any American city of half a million or fewer inhabitants, Vine would automatically be the best place in town.
Here, it merges into the crowd.
In case you might have thought otherwise, chefs take reviews very seriously. Easy listening—he compared my food to Muzak! I’ve never forgotten that, and my reaction to the bad review was so powerful as to be almost cliché. I couldn’t get off the couch. So faint was the praise in the review that the end for me was a foregone conclusion. One day, I walked into the office of the director of operations and caught him interviewing the new chef.
After losing my job, it took me a while before I felt like showing my face in public again. When I finally reemerged, I’d spend my days biking on the waterfront. Filled with angst and anger, I’d ride around the West Side, distracting myself from the pain.
One day in Hell’s Kitchen at the intersection of Forty-Fourth Street and Tenth Avenue, I paused to look at what appeared to be the construction of a restaurant from an old gas station. As I was peering in the window, this guy from inside walked up to me and made conversation.
“So what do you do?”
“I’m a chef.”
“Oh, really? We’re opening our first restaurant,” he said with a beginner’s enthusiasm.
He asked where I worked. I told him a little about my situation and asked if they were looking for a chef.
He said, “We sort of have one already, but tell me about yourself.”
So I told him, and he was impressed enough to ask for my phone number.
Not terribly long after, he called me. “Why don’t you come talk to my partner, Bruce?”
I talked to Bruce, and later we did a tasting. They loved my food, and at this point, I was just looking to hide out and work anonymously somewhere no one would find me.
The restaurant, called 44 & X Hell’s Kitchen, still exists today. Back then, it turned out to be just what I needed. I found my groove cooking every night for a new set of people, in a new corner of the city with an entirely different culture and population. The place started hot—all these Broadway entertainers frequented us. I remember Nathan Lane often holding court at the bar. (Broadway guys were party animals.) We got a positive nod from the Times and three stars from the Daily News, and New York magazine gave us an enthusiastic shout. I helped build this wonderful little joint out of nothing right after the worst failure of my life, and it felt great. I just put my head down and worked, tried to live a more balanced life. Then came 9/11, and I decided I needed to get the hell out of New York.
And get out I did, almost as far as one can go. I took a job running multiple restaurants at a ritzy new development at Northstar in Lake Tahoe. I gave up my sublet in Manhattan, bought a Ford Explorer, got a dog, and lived the good life in Tahoe for three years. What can I say? It was a welcome respite from the nonstop grind of New York. Not that we didn’t work hard. But the surfer boy in me loved the fact that I also got in 120 days a year on the slopes.
But, as they always do, things ran their course. After three quiet years, I guess the universe decided I’d had enough snowboarding, pot smoking, and hanging out with twentysomethings. One day, my fishmonger called and said, “Are you ready to come back to reality soon? Because Rick Moonen just got a deal in Las Vegas and needs a chef to run RM Seafood in New York.”
Rick and I kind of knew each other, so I flew to Vegas to meet him. We hit it off, and he offered me the job. The caveat was that I had to move back to New York that week. I said, “What the hell,” and embraced the change that was being thrust at me. It was upsetting to have to give my white Lab to my neighbor, but leaving all my stuff behind was liberating.
The next thing I knew, I was subletting a place on East Twelfth and Third Avenue. Soon enough I was hustling lunch and dinner out the window at RM Seafood six days a week. I became Rick Moonen while the real RM went out to Vegas to build his kingly restaurant.
But before too long, I was needed to help shore up the Vegas restaurant, so I started an insane schedule of working half the week in Vegas and then flying back to work half the week in New York. From the reputation I gained as chef de cuisine for Rick Moonen, I got the call from headhunters looking to find a chef to replace the legend Dean Fearing, longtime chef of what many considered Texas’s finest restaurant, the Mansion on Turtle Creek in Dallas.
I’d never been to Texas. Moving there had never even crossed my mind. But I was ready to shake up my life again. Ready for the wild ride to continue with a twist I could have never foretold. And continue it did.
I’ve taken over for a few people in my time, but those experiences were nothing like following Dean Fearing when he decided to move on. Coming for this job to Big D, as they call it here, was like flying into town on a magic carpet. My arrival was a big deal; I was ushered into Dallas high society like I was a movie star. While I relished receiving praise for my craft, I’d never enjoyed much of the limelight, as the kitchen occupied so much of my time. All the attention I received changed my life, and I didn’t quite know how to handle it. Dallas, as you might imagine, has quite a different dynamic from New York. And being chef at the Mansion, the dear old Cougar Palace, was an insane place to try to comprehend Dallas. The Mansion was as fussy and traditional and wild and idiosyncratic as Texas itself. I was encouraged to stay out late, throw parties, and meet people, because it brought attention to the property. They wanted me to be like Dean, because, well, Dean was—and will always be—the man.
But it’s hard to think of two people with more different styles than Dean and I. I had to try to learn something of that whole Southern hospitality. Dean relishes striding through the dining room, shaking hands and kissing babies like the chef royalty that he is. And the people of Dallas absolutely love such a parade. You have to be a personality here in Texas, which is a lesson (and a skill) that has taken me time to learn, if I’ve learned it at all. To this day, I certainly don’t behave much like a Texan, though I understand the game much better.
At the end of the day, however, you can be the most famous chef in the world, but it’s really about what you put on the plate. And that’s one thing Dean and I have in common. We cook. I was very proud to carry on the Mansion’s tradition.
I earned the title “Most Hated Chef in Dallas” in a D Magazine profile that came out after I left the Mansion two years after I started. The title was deliberately provocative, but the article didn’t paint me in a bad light. Rather, it detailed a few of the scuffles I had gotten into and talked to some rival restaurateurs who didn’t like me (and some who did). Like they say, you can take the kid out of New York … Let’s just say it took a while to get used to the kitchen culture of Dallas, and I was happy to move on to pursue my own thing upon leaving the Mansion. Certainly, I had ruffled some feathers in Dallas, made some enemies. But I’d also made lifelong friends. Most important, I learned not to give a crap about what other people thought of me. My personal journey to get to this point had led me through enough twists and turns that I wasn’t going to sweat the attention—good or bad. Indeed, as Oscar Wilde wisely stated, “There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”
But no matter whether the attention’s good or bad, it’s crucial to both the mind and the soul to have one person who believes in you unconditionally. Not long after I moved to Texas as chef of the Mansion, I found myself down in Austin cooking at the Hill Country Food and Wine Festival (may it rest in peace). While there I happened to meet a pastry chef from the Driskill Hotel, someone who would change my life. Tracy and I hit it off immediately; from the beginning, we had a depth of personal conversation that I rarely found even in people I’d known for decades. I had a girlfriend at the time, but Tracy and I stayed in touch. Ultimately, one thing led to another, we started seeing each other, and after I left the Mansion, we got married.
I had no idea at the time how significant this relationship would end up being for me on multiple levels. This was years before I got into beef, before I ever conceived of Knife. Tracy’s family were cattle ranchers in Texas and had been for over a century. She’s the child who flew the coop; the rest of them still live in the small town of Stephenville. My brother-in-law runs the family ranch. My sister-in-law is an expert in animal husbandry (she studied with Temple Grandin, the renowned animal scientist who revolutionized the slaughterhouse, making it more humane) and married another rancher with massive holdings in South Texas. Every holiday and on many weekends, we’d visit the ranch, and I learned more from this family about cattle and the beef industry than I ever thought I could. In 2010, Tracy and I had a son, Ryder. For once, my personal life was grounded, even if professionally I was still trying to discover my niche.
After the Mansion, I drifted for a while in the vapor of a couple of hasty decisions—back to New York for a few months into a booby-trapped situation, to Houston and into another one—but nothing felt right or was seemingly destined to succeed. I even went on Top Chef just to challenge myself and do something different—that experience is a book of stories entirely of itself. Suffice it to say that doing the show was a great, terrible, life-changing decision that I don’t regret making at all. I succeeded on the show, and it served me well. That’s why, despite the torture, I agreed to go back and do it again in 2016.
Upon coming back to Dallas, I realized that this was the place I needed to be. For better or worse, it had reluctantly accepted me, and I it. I’d accomplished a lot. But I could also ask myself, what had I accomplished? I’d cooked for others. I’d stood in for Rick Moonen. I’d followed Dean Fearing in a restaurant and institution that was bigger than both of us. What had I done that expressed me? Who was I as a chef?
I first attempted to answer that with Spoon. Spoon was a very personal venture, a high-end restaurant devoted to fish in the middle of northern Texas cattle country. But in emphasizing fish, I was playing against Dallas’s beef-obsessed flow while paying homage to chefs I admired and from whom I’d learned a great deal—Eric Ripert and Rick Moonen. More personally, I was tracing a path back to my earliest days of cooking, eating, and living off Shinnecock Bay with my family.
Against all odds, Spoon was a hit in Dallas and beyond. It got great reviews and made Esquire’s ten best new restaurants list. I was bringing in some of the world’s greatest product—uni, oysters, geoducks, king and Dungeness crab, spiny lobsters—and it was beautiful. I was so proud of the food we were doing there. And despite the fact that business was good, Spoon ended up closing because of shaky finances.
Even before Spoon had officially closed, we had already opened up Knife across town. And I knew Knife was going to work. Just as Spoon’s seafood had captured the essence of my youth on the water, Knife was a bridge between that first memorable bite of steak I had with my father and my adopted state of Texas, where after years of searching, I feel I have finally found myself. As lovingly articulated in the rest of this book, this is Knife.
