After 20-plus years at The Mansion on Turtle Creek, Chef Dean Fearing opened Fearing's in August 2007 at The Ritz-Carlton, Dallas. Named “Restaurant of the Year” and “Table of the Year” by Esquire Magazine in 2007 and No. 1 in Hotel Dining in the U.S. by Zagat in 2009, Fearing’s has received accolades from The New York Times, Newsweek, Food and Wine, and Modern Luxury, among others. Also, Chef Fearing was presented with the April 2009 Silver Spoon Award by Food Arts. Learning How To Cook staff caught up with the world-recognized chef last week for a private peek inside the head of this amazingly dedicated foodie.
LHTC:You cook on TV, and you have cooked for the Queen, presidents, and celebrities. Who were you most nervous to cook for? DF:I think my one and only time I actually was speechless was when Mick Jagger came in for dinner.I am not a person who ever gets choked up or tongue-tied.I went straight to the table, not a problem, until I looked at him.When I looked at him, my voice dropped, and my brain was saying, “Say something, Stupid.”I could not squeak out a word.Finally he’s says to me, “Chef, what ARE the specials tonight?”I was so embarrassed! I said, “Oh, we have this rabbit, and we have this and that.” I left the table, and I was like, “OOOOOOOH!I’ve ruined it!My big moment!”That was it.That was the one and only time. LHTC:Your cuisine is said to have been inspired by the backyard barbecue. You are “The Father of Southwestern Cuisine.” DF: Yeah, not the grandfather. That’s Stephan Pyles.
LHTC: Not only were you using jicama, cilantro, and tomatillos before they were readily available in the grocery store, you were cooking with those ingredients before the average cook even knew what they were. How did you start discover these and incorporate them into your cooking?
DF: Well, I discovered ALL of these items through my Hispanic cooks, and it was through their mothers’ cooking that they introduced me to the very basic laws of Southwest cuisine at the time, which was how to make a great salsa, how to make a mole. What ARE the greatest uses of cilantro? This was me asking questions with them teaching me the long term cooking of their parents, mainly their mother. And with that, I started to incorporate those basic rules of great Mexican cooking into a more modern approach, using more modern techniques and methods.
LHTC:Have you been cooking with any new unknown ingredients that aspiring chefs should keep an eye out for? DF: I think there are always unknown ingredients, because unless you are in the fold – the cooking fold - a lot of products would always be foreign to people who don’t cook. That list can go on and on. Just chiles themselves, dried chiles. I always say probably 95% of the public don’t even know what to do with a dried chile, let alone what it is and the name of it. That’s what I love about Southwest cuisine. A very small group really understands it, but I think it’s a wide, vast group that absolutely loves the taste of it.
LHTC: Of all of the places you have traveled, where were you most inspired? DF: That is not a one-town, city, region, place answer. I am very inspired everywhere I go. There’s always something that I find that rocks my boat, and that’s what I love about cooking. I could say the time I was down at Patricia Quintana’s ranch in the Yucatanwas amazing. It WAS because her cooking staff made a breakfast, lunch, and dinner that just spun my head off. I went to Thailand. Any of those exotic places where you’ve never really been, and you step into that country for the first time. That’s pretty exciting stuff for me, because it’s a whole new awareness. Walking intoItaly for the first time, and Paris, and London, seeing what great Lebanese and curry restaurants were all about, not the Americanization, but the real deal. All of that will stimulate me to no end.
LHTC: You have said that you could be a vegetarian. What are some of your favorite vegetarian dishes? DF: I said it just yesterday. I could be a vegetarian. I think, probably, as I get on down the road, I will be a full-blast vegetarian. Because I think about what I had yesterday. It was a stir-fry, no meat, no nothing, but just the use of chiles, garlic, the use of great sauce that gives you the flavor that stimulates to no end. That tasted so good, and I didn’t need fish or a piece of meat to go along with it. And I was the happiest guy. I say that all the time when I have something prepared like that. I may make a soup or roast some root vegetables and make a sauce for them. It’s just that every time I do that, it just fortifies me to think that, yes, this can be something that everybody could really enjoy whether you like meat or not.
LHTC: What’s your favorite restaurant (in the world), other than Fearing’s, of course? DF: Oh, that’s another one of those trick questions. That’s a tough one. One of the most unique restaurants is L’ami Louis in Paris. We were doing this big tour of France, came into Paris and ate at all these unbelievable 2-star, 3-star, 1-star places. A friend of ours told us we needed to go to this restaurant that had a wood burning stove. His father, Louis, was the actual chef at one time. Louis had passed away, even before I started going there. But he was one of one of the last chefs to use a wood-burning, true wood-burning stove. Not a grill, but a stove where you load up the wood. I just had to see what that was all about. When I walked in, it wasn’t a formal dining room. The wall paper was just curling off the ceiling. It was the winter time the when I was last there, and everyone just threw their coats in a big ol’ pile by the front door. The place was old. His son took great care of us. We sat down, and everything I had from this oven was smoky flavored, just naturally, from the wood burning. I just found it fascinating that here in Paris, there was a Southwest element. It was the best roasted chicken with a little faint taste of smoke to it. It was comfort food deluxe. There was a stack of foie gras about a foot high with a stack, like decks of cards stacked on top of each other, of toast the same way but all off the grill with grill marks, and golf ball-sized scallops that were in a Provencal sauce that was just delicious, and little legs of lamb and whole chickens.
LHTC: You have participated in fund raisers and barbecues that benefit the Texas Scottish Rite Hospital, and your band the Barbwires has played. Where else can we catch a performance of the Barbwires? DF: Well, September 4th, Friday night, we’re going to have a 2-year anniversary party here at the restaurant, and the Barbwires are going to be alive and kicking.
LHTC: Was there a moment in time when you had to decide between becoming a rock star and a celebrity chef? DF: (Laughing) At the time, the phrase “celebrity chef” wasn’t, I don’t think, even invented. It was either be a rock star or a cook, or a musician or a cook, is more like it. But, yes, I went down that path and to that fork. I had to make a big, big decision. I had friends that were musicians, and they were playing bars. It just seemed like there could be an element of playing music, which I still love doing, that could be a rude awakening in the sense that you might not ever get as far as you want to go. At least with cooking, I could be eating. All of my musician friends were like these little skinny guys because they never got to eat. I thought, what would be the harm in being able to make your living in cooking and still play music?
LHTC: You say that your love for food and music are equal. Do you have a favorite band/album that you like to listen to when you cook? DF: I think it’s evolving. It’s always new music and old music together. There’s always a new band or a new singer out that just amazes me, but there’s also the greatest music in the whole wide world [which] is the music that we grew up with. I’ll never tire of Derek and the Dominoes with Eric Clapton, The Allman Brothers, The Birds, and Poco, and dot, dot, dot, dot, dot.
LHTC: What was your last musical discovery? DF: Ryan Adams, he’s been around, and I have been listening to him for a long time. He constantly inspires me.
LHTC: What is your favorite kitchen tool? DF: An 8-inch French knife. And a cutting board, a good wooden cutting board.
LHTC: Has it been that way since the beginning? DF: Well, I was a gadget-guy for a long time. You needed your big mixer. Maybe I use that once a year. It was easier to chop by hand than to clean out a food processor. I’m still a gadget-guy, don’t get me wrong, and I still have all of the gadgets. But when it comes to Sunday night cooking at home, it’s a knife and a cutting board and great pots and pans.
LHTC: What item would we be surprised to find in your kitchen? DF: Besides those items? All the other gadgets…collecting dust. I mean I love inventive; I love the invention of, whether it’s clothes, boots, guitars, kitchen equipment. I am the gadget guy. I love it all and I find myself constantly buying things that I know I don’t need or I probably won’t use, but I got to have it.
LHTC: I know you are a big fan of cowboy boots, or more specifically Lucchese custom cowboy boots. How many pairs of cowboy boots do you own? DF: 28 one-offs. Very custom one-off pairs of boots.
LHTC: You are all over the internet. You are on YouTube and you even have your own Wikipedia page. Do you ever Google yourself? DF: (Laughing) It was 5 years ago, somebody told me that I was over a million hits on Google. I think that might have died down now. I didn’t believe him, so I did Google myself, and I was amazed that I had more hits than Bobby Flay. We were comparing. It’s kind of one of those things that will amaze you. I never think about it, but I did it. It was like, wow!
Dean’s Final Comment: Eating surpasses sports figures. Eating is what everybody does. You may like a team and you make like these players, but everybody eats. Everybody gets excited about food.
Dean Fearing's Barbecue Shrimp Taco with Mango-Pickled Red Onion Salad
Serves 4
Ingredients: 1/2 tablespoon vegetable oil 1 cup peeled, deveined, diced shrimp Salt to taste Fresh cracked black pepper to taste 1 cup diced onions 1 cup Barbecue Sauce 1/2 cup grated Jalapeno Jack Cheese 4-6” Flour Tortillas, cooked and warm Mango Pickled Red Onion Salad (recipe follows) 1/3 cup grated cotija cheese or Mexican Farmer’s Cheese 1/3 cup toasted and coarsely ground green Mexican Pumpkin Seeds 4 fresh serrano chilies 4 sprigs fresh cilantro
Directions: Place oil in a large saute pan over medium heat. Add shrimp to hot pan and season with salt and pepper and sauté for one minute until shrimp turns red. Add onions and saute for two minutes or until translucent. Stir in Barbecue Sauce, bring to a boil and quickly remove pan from heat. Add cheese and stir to combine until cheese has melted into mixture. Place a warm tortilla in the middle of each warm serving plate. Spoon equal portions of shrimp mixture into the middle of each tortilla. Roll each tortilla into a cylinder with the seam side down. Then add a small portion of Mango-Pickled Red Onion Salad on top of each taco. Sprinkle with cotija and Mexican pumpkin seeds and garnish with fresh Serrano chilies (to be eaten like a pickle for the adventurous) and sprigs of cilantro.
MANGO PICKLED ONION SALAD Makes about 4 cups
Ingredients: 2 ripe mangoes, peeled and cut into julienne Pickled red onion (recipe to follow) 3 cups of julienne green cabbage 1 cup small diced jicama ½ cup of toasted pecans ¼ cup finely sliced fresh cilantro Smokey Cumin Lime Vinaigrette (recipe to follow) Salt to taste
Directions: Place the first six ingredients into a medium bowl. Slowly add vinaigrette until salad is lightly coated. Season with salt and serve immediately. SMOKEY CUMIN LIME VINAIGRETTE Ingredients: ½ cup olive oil ½ cup vegetable oil ½ cup fresh lime juice 1 small onion cut into small dice and cold smoked for 20 minutes 1 cup fresh orange juice ½ tablespoon of toasted whole cumin 2 tablespoons malt vinegar 3 tablespoons maple syrup Salt to taste Directions: Combine the first three ingredients into a medium sized bowl. Add smoked onions, orange juice, cumin, vinegar and maple syrup to a small sauce pot and bring to a boil. Cook until mixture has reduced to almost dry, about five minutes. Place smoked onion mixture into blender and puree until smooth. Add to oil and lime- juice mixture. Season with salt and stir until completely blended.
PICKLED RED ONIONS
Ingredients: 1 red onion ½ cup white wine vinegar ½ white sugar Pinch of salt
Directions: Peel onion. Cut in half and slice into very thin half-moon shapes. Put in a small bowl and set aside. Heat vinegar and sugar (50/50) in a small saucepan over medium heat, stirring constantly. When sugar dissolves, remove from heat. Add pinch of salt and pour over onion in container and cover with plastic. Put in the refrigerator and allow to stand overnight and pickle approximately 8 – 12 hours. When cool drain onions and use for salad.
