Nobody believes me when I say I’ve decided to retire. “What?!” they exclaim. “You have the best job in Texas!” Yes, I know. My job is fantastic. For the better part of fifty years I have been Texas Monthly’s designated eater, exploring and writing about this state’s rowdy, brilliant, perennially shape-shifting food scene. The pace has been relentless. On a typical day I might roll out of bed in the morning thinking about the lamb kebabs I’d eaten in Houston the night before. Sixteen hours later I would shut my laptop with images floating in my head of the fried seafood platter I’d devoured in Galveston. I’d be having filet in peppercorn sauce in Dallas while scrolling through a list of new restaurants in Fort Worth. Once, when a neighbor saw my car pull out of the driveway for the umpteenth time, she waved and shouted, “You’re never at your cute house!” I just smiled, waved back, and pointed my car toward I-35.
And so it went until 2020, when the pandemic hit. Overnight, the world that had been my oyster snapped resoundingly shut. Now I was at my cute house—all the time. When things returned to something resembling normal, I made my plans to get back on the road again. In a state of nervous anticipation in the spring of 2021, I headed off to Houston. But to my enormous surprise, what I’d once found exhilarating was now exhausting. I kept going, sure I would bounce back, but no. It was the same with the next trip. And the next.
Loath as I was to admit it, time had caught up with me. Now what I really wanted was to be home every night. I wanted to pick up an order of enchiladas verdes and binge The Great British Baking Show.
And so, early this year, I made a decision that brought equal parts relief and regret: I would retire at the end of 2024. No sooner had I announced my departure—and convinced people that I meant it—than everyone asked, “What are you going to write about for your final story?” Good question.
I had an idea. Nearly twenty years ago, in 2005, I wrote a piece that we headlined “Confessions of a ‘Skinny Bitch,’ ” about a few of the top questions people ask you when they find out you’re a restaurant reviewer (and what they call you, half jokingly, behind your back). I answered a lot of them, but there were some I didn’t get to. First, though, let’s revisit the one question absolutely everyone asks: How did you get this job?
Well, here’s the answer: I owe my career to a photo of a nekkid man. He was discreetly posed (thank God), lying on his side in a meat case on the July 1973 cover of a new magazine I’d spotted at the grocery store. It turned out that the decidedly porcine cover boy was a metaphorical stand-in for the infamous Texas pork barrel, setting the tone for a story on the state’s best and worst legislators. I laughed out loud, bought a copy, and subscribed a month later (the price was $10 a year). To tell you the truth, I needed some comic relief around that time. After briefly teaching junior high school English and Spanish, I had been writing historical markers for the state for more than five years. The pay was good, the job steady, and I was bored out of my mind.
Six months later I was reading the Austin American-Statesman, and another picture caught my eye. In it about a dozen members of the Texas Monthly staff were sitting around a table at an area barbecue joint celebrating the publication’s first anniversary. They were about my age (thirty), semi-long-haired, nerdy-smart looking, and I suddenly knew that, more than anything, I wanted to work at the magazine. I bombarded the staff with my résumé until I finally got an interview, six months later. In the fall of 1974 I was hired as an editorial assistant at a salary of $650 a month. I considered the nearly 40 percent cut in pay well worth it.
On December 1, I showed up for work at a bare-bones second-floor space north of downtown. The desks and typewriters were secondhand, and the twenty or so staff members were all sharing offices. (I would later realize there was a small colony of bats living in an air shaft adjacent to the building next door; you could hear them squeaking if you stayed after dark.)
About fifteen minutes after I arrived I heard a loud SLAM! and looked up to see a large stack of typeset printer’s galleys on my desk. “You! Proofread this!” The pages were the restaurant reviews and the calendar of cultural events. I started reading, and—I know how naive this sounds—the entire state seemed to open up like a travelogue, especially the big cities, with their symphony halls and basement jazz venues, dimly lit nightclubs and fancy restaurants. As I read, I imagined what it would be like to order a towering chocolate soufflé at Tony’s, in Houston, or the famous garlic-butter shrimp at Paesanos, in San Antonio.
As the magazine’s subscriber list grew—and the staff moved into successively better quarters in downtown high-rises—I got to try a little of everything. I typed letters, I edited features, I wrote stories. But the ever-expanding restaurant reviews were what I really loved. One day I asked our editor at the time, Bill Broyles, if I could eat at some of the restaurants when I traveled on assignment, so I could do a better job editing our local reviewers’ copy. Soon I was having teriyaki shrimp at Pelican’s Wharf, in Corpus Christi, and veal Milanese at the Carriage House, in Fort Worth. As time passed, the dining guide became my little fiefdom. Within a few years I found myself in charge of the first of the massive food stories that became our stock-in-trade: barbecue, tacos, burgers, small-town cafes, Tex-Mex. All were logistical nightmares, but one in particular is seared in my memory.
On a dark day in 1999, Greg Curtis, then our editor in chief, assigned me a story on the best Mexican restaurants in Texas and in towns just over the border. To avoid ridiculous hotel bills, I needed to eat at three or four places a day. I would show up at the first spot on my list at eleven o’clock and order enough dishes to feed a Little League team. The plates would arrive, covering the table, and I’d eat two bites from each while madly scribbling in a small spiral notebook. The minute I finished eating, it was “Check, please!” and on to meal number two. I’d managed to coax a few friends to go with me, but every last one bailed after the second stop. In between trips, I staggered back to Austin to detox. By the time it was all over, I had visited 125 restaurants in thirteen cities, and our cover story, “The Joy of Mex,” ran in November that year. Without quite realizing it, I was rehearsing for the position of restaurant critic.
My timing, it turned out, was perfect, because the Texas dining scene was taking off in a big way. Back in the early eighties, the West Coast–based food movement known as New American cuisine had started to move across the country, and it wasn’t long before a group of charismatic young chefs in leading restaurants in Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio were in on the act. Soon they were astonishing their customers with elevated Texas and Mexican dishes: lobster tacos, goat cheese quesadillas with cilantro pesto, black-bean-and-corn salsa. When a Dallas journalist wrote about “Southwestern cuisine,” the name stuck. Four of the ringleaders—Houston’s Robert Del Grande and Dallas’s Dean Fearing, Anne Lindsay Greer, and Stephan Pyles—became the Texas faces of the movement.
The radical notion of mixing and matching culinary traditions spread. By 2003, the quietly brilliant chef Tyson Cole, of Austin’s Uchi, was wowing customers with dishes you’d never see at old-school Japanese sushi bars. Less than a decade later, in 2012, the Houston restaurant scene got the star it deserved when irrepressible, bear-hugging chef Chris Shepherd opened Underbelly, where he merged cuisines from around the world. Side by side on one menu you could find Korean-style braised goat and Appalachian vinegar pie.
Texas was on a roll, and its chefs were becoming celebrities: Between 1991 and 2017, nine of them won James Beard awards. As a surprising side effect, the state’s newfound luster rubbed off on anyone who covered the scene. At parties, people were fascinated to find out I was a real live restaurant reviewer. Finally, in 2005, I wrote the aforementioned “Skinny Bitch” column. Today, now that I’m stepping away from the spotlight, I thought it might be fun to write a follow-up, starting with the inevitable first question.
Are you still skinny?
I weighed 117 pounds in 2005. Today I weigh 119. When I know I’m going to have several rich meals in a row, I’m fanatical about portion control. I used to say that was my primary weapon, but these days I give a lot more credit to skinny genes. My dad was six two and weighed 175 his whole life. His mom was thin as a rail too, even though she made the best fried chicken in the world—old-school, flour-dredged, skillet-cooked—for every Sunday dinner.
Are there foods you won’t eat?
I’ve eaten alligator, guinea pig, iguana, and rattlesnake. I’m happy crunching up small insects, such as chapulines (fried grasshoppers) and chicatanas (flying ants). I enjoy organ meats—lamb kidneys, beef heart, sweetbreads, calf fries. But I’ve never eaten anything truly outside my gastronomical comfort zone, like, say, fermented shark. And ever since I was eight years old, I haven’t touched bananas. The texture is gross!
Have you taken cooking lessons?
Yes, and each one was an adventure. At Ann Clark’s La Bonne Cuisine school, the owner-instructor ordered a whole salmon shipped on ice to Austin from Houston so we could prepare a coulibiac, with the fish enveloped in pastry like beef Wellington. At another class, taught by Frank Yi, the owner of Austin restaurant Hunan, a fellow student asked how to kill a chicken—hypothetically. Yi insisted on demonstrating with a bird from his flock. Early on, I spent a week at an elegant school in Madrid. Much later, I attended classes at three cooking schools in San Miguel de Allende. Back in Austin, at a Mexican cuisine seminar taught by the formidable Diana Kennedy, she testily shushed the audience of chitchatting socialites as if they were naughty schoolgirls. Years later I traveled to her house in Mexico to do an interview. When I confessed I was starving, she fed me squash-blossom-and-poblano tacos in her sunny kitchen.
What is your greatest food memory?
A trip to France. In the summer of 1983 I managed to line up reservations at five of the country’s two- and three-Michelin-starred restaurants: Alain Chapel, Beaumanière, Georges Blanc, Pic, and La Pyramide. My partner and I rented a red Renault and for ten days drove from one cream-and-butter-besotted meal to the next. At Alain Chapel, as best I can remember, there was a glorious gateau de foies blonds, a concoction of chicken livers, beef marrow, and an insanely rich lobster cream sauce. At Beaumanière we ordered a Charolais steak just to see how different it could be from a Texas steak. Very: refined, sumptuous, spooned with bordelaise sauce. At Pic, I remember a bowl of tiny wild European strawberries—a summer day somehow transmuted into one extraordinary bite. I had eaten extremely well at a handful of restaurants in Texas before the trip. But after it, I knew the difference between excellent and magnificent. To review accurately, you must have experienced the best, the mediocre, and the worst.
What’s the most astonishing restaurant you went to?
I wish it were in Texas, but it was a few thousand miles away, in Roses, Spain. El Bulli is closed now, but it was the three-star Michelin restaurant where Ferran Adrià dazzled the culinary world with the delicious kitchen magic called molecular gastronomy. Every year, hordes of hopeful epicures applied for reservations, and tables were awarded by lottery. Miraculously, in 2010, friends of mine won. Our meal was classic El Bulli: 37 gorgeous bite-size courses, mysterious and seductive. The highlight was Adrià’s famous liquid olives: a puree of Spanish green olives miraculously enveloped in a transparent membrane, like tiny edible water balloons. When you bit into one, a little geyser erupted deliciously in your mouth. The cost of our meal, not including the considerable amount of wine we drank, was $325 per person. Best. Bargain. Ever.
As a critic, how did your process change over the years?
In the early days I’d jot down notes and draw sketches in small spiral notebooks that I concealed under the tablecloth. When smartphones revolutionized restaurant reviewing, I took pictures. Periodically I go through and weed out the photos on my phone, usually when I’m on a long flight or bus ride, so I have only about 11,000 today. I would have loved to record voice memos, but most dining rooms are too loud.
Did you prefer visiting a restaurant alone or with friends?
My ideal meal would start with friends. We’d catch up, have a glass or two of wine, share a few laughs. Then—no offense!—I’d wave a magic wand, and they would vanish. Then I’d get down to business tasting the food. You’d be surprised how many more details you notice if you don’t have be polite.
What did you do when a restaurant was just plain bad?
I did so much advance research that I rarely ended up at a truly awful place. If I did, and the dishes were terrible, yes, I would certainly say so. But I didn’t rub a restaurant’s nose in it. I had no interest in being mean-spirited, and a negative review wouldn’t work for my column. We called it Pat’s Pick for a reason.
Did restaurant owners ever complain about negative reviews?
The first decade or so, when Texas Monthly was new, they did. Owners in Texas, unlike those in New York, were not used to being reviewed, and they were incensed. Early on, when I was very green, I addressed a group of Austin restaurateurs, and my little speech quickly turned into a roast—of me: What are your qualifications?! Just who do you think you are?! They calmed down after they got it out of their systems. Another time I got a phone call from an owner in Houston who wanted an immediate re-review. I said we couldn’t do that. He called me a bitch and then gasped, “Oh! I’m so sorry! That’s not like me. I’m just under so much pressure.”
How many restaurants tried to comp your check?
Quite a few, especially years ago, when reviewing was not as common. At the end of the evening, the server would announce with a flourish, “Your meal is on the house!” I would say, “Oh, thank you, but I really have to pay.” The server would then reply, “I’m sorry, but I was told not to give you a check.” I’d politely ask to see the manager. He would appear, all jovial and faux apologetic. We’d argue, but he wouldn’t give in. Luckily I always kept cash in my purse. I’d figure up what I owed, plus a tip, and leave it on the table.
What advice can you give a budding restaurant reviewer?
Recognize that it’s hard work. Folks assume I swanned about on an expense account visiting fancy restaurants, drinking wine, and exchanging bons mots with my friends. Well, actually, that is what I did. But to get an accurate picture, I tried a lot of food—a minimum of eighteen dishes for my monthly column (six people total, three dishes each, spread out over two visits). And after I’d polished off the last bite of tiramisu or passion fruit sorbet, I’d go back to my hotel, change into my pajamas, open my laptop, and spend 30 to 45 minutes typing up detailed notes on flavors, presentations, service flubs, and the hopefully brilliant insights gained during the evening. Several days later, I’d write the actual column. Then the process would start all over and I’d do it again. And again. And again.
How has the Texas restaurant scene changed in fifty years?
Let’s order some coffee and dessert, and I’ll tell you.
My first restaurant memory is from when I was about seven. I was at the Driskill Hotel, and I had the dish that I feel sure sparked my future career. It was a dessert called a Flowerpot, created by Helen Corbitt, who was to become one of Texas’s best-known chefs. It was adorable: layers of cake and ice cream topped with brûléed meringue garnished with a daisy and served in a teeny clay pot. (It was more or less a baked Alaska.) The dish itself was special, but so was the concept of eating food outside the home.
That was still the case when I started reviewing, in the seventies. Most people ate dinner (or “supper,” as we called it in Texas) at home. When we did dine out, it was often in nice restaurants where meals were served in three orderly courses. Chefs stayed in their lanes (mostly): You went to an Italian restaurant for spaghetti carbonara, to a French restaurant for trout amandine. And the cooking could be perfected because menus rarely changed.
The dining rooms had carpets, curtains, and tablecloths, with elevator music or light jazz playing softly in the background. You could actually converse with your friends. (If you wanted to carouse, you went to a bar.) The ideal place for a restaurant was a charming old house or a high-ceilinged downtown building; second choice was a space in a nice shopping center.
And the prices! You didn’t have to skip a house payment to eat out. In this very magazine’s dining guide, “inexpensive” meals were labeled “Under $3,” and expensive ones were “Over $7,” minus alcohol, tax, and gratuity. (A popular Fort Worth restaurant, Dr. Jekyll’s and Mr. Hyde’s, offered all-you-can-eat spaghetti for 75 cents and beer for a dime.) Customers wore what they would to the office or for a night out, and lots of fancy places had dress codes. A man without a jacket would be lent one in a gigantic size. He wouldn’t forget next time. Good restaurants thrived, with plenty of happy repeat customers.
As I write this, five decades later, that world is as quaint as knee pants and pinafores. Dining out is expensive (overall food prices increased 25 percent from 2019 to 2023, according to the USDA), thanks to the rising cost of everything from ingredients and cleaning supplies to labor and leases. The old service model is long gone, with “small plates” and “large plates” now landing on the table in no particular order. (A cheery “We’ll course it out for you” actually means “You’ll get it when it’s ready.”)
And forget talking to your tablemates. Twenty or so years ago, in a desperate effort to appear hip and modern, many restaurants adopted the “industrial look,” ripping out their carpets, curtains, and tablecloths. Soon there was nothing between you and the drunk party at the next table except bare concrete and exposed beams. Compounding the noise problem is, of course, booze. The more customers drink, the more they order—of everything—and while that helps the profit margin considerably, it also kills off civilized conversation.
And finally, even as independent local restaurants struggle to gain traction in this ever-more-costly environment, well-funded chains from elsewhere are swooping in to snap up choice locations. In short, the uncertainty and financial stress in the dining sector today rivals, if not exceeds, anything I’ve seen in my fifty years as a supremely well-fed but increasingly worried observer.
Still, I love Texas restaurants, and I will miss helping readers find the one thing that can make you forgive all the noise and the crowds and the chaos: a glorious bite of food.
In recent memory I have tasted a shimmering sphere of silky-smooth corn juice resembling a golden egg yolk at Ishtia, in Kemah; scallion hotcakes in an amber cap of caramel sauce spiked with Aleppo chile at Auden, in Houston; a celestial omelet topped with lemony hollandaise sauce at Cullum’s Attaboy, in San Antonio; and grilled Wagyu short rib glazed with aji panca, honey, and soy, at Pacha Nikkei, in Houston.
Even our most hidebound mainstays—barbecue and tacos—are being reinvented. In San Antonio, Stixs & Stone blends Big Red into corn masa to make astonishing pink tortillas stuffed with smoked beef cheek and pickled watermelon rind. In Fort Worth, Goldee’s Barbecue serves sausage Laotian style, with rice and spicy-sour jeow som sauce on the side.
Imagination is alive and well, and the creative spirit that started with the pioneering chefs of Southwestern cuisine forty years ago is just getting stronger. Whether staffed with classically trained chefs or tradition-focused cooks, kitchens are sending out astonishing dishes every day, and I’ll miss being one of the lucky few to try them all.
I’ll still go to restaurants, of course. My greatest pleasure may well be returning to a place just because I like its food. I won’t miss having to try a bizarre dish—snails in lime aspic, anyone?—just because it might be brilliant. I will miss the expense account, as will my companions. (But I’m probably going to keep doing reviews for the online Dining Guide, so that will help out.) I won’t miss the obligatory note-taking. I will and won’t miss being recognized when I walk into a restaurant. To tell you the truth, it’s been kind of fun being “that skinny bitch” all these years (except for the time I actually got called a bitch).
But on a personal note, I’ll miss coming downtown to work in my quirky little five-sided office on the seventeenth floor of a big office building, where I can see our pink-granite capitol from the window. I’ll miss the poster over my desk of Houston chef Hugo Ortega in a red apron roasting oysters on the beach (our December 2016 cover story). I’ll be sorry to leave behind our several-hundred-volume culinary library, with its facsimile copy of the first cookbook ever published in Texas, in 1883, by a group of Houston church ladies. I’ll miss monthly deadline bagels courtesy of editor and New York native Jeff Salamon, who announces their arrival with clever emails; he recently wrote these lyrics, to be sung to the tune of “My Favorite Things”: “Gravlax and cream cheese and capers and onion / Pastrami-smoked salmon, but never a Funyun™ / A boiled-and-baked bread product shaped like a ring / These are a few of my bagel-ish things.” I will miss my faithful coterie of restaurant reviewers spread across the state, whose work I edit every month.
But of course what I will miss most, what makes me almost want to postpone retirement for just a while longer, are my colleagues. I’ve watched so many of them come and go over the years, often beginning as starstruck interns, then joining the staff and turning into amazing writers and editors, finally going on to major newspapers, magazines, and even to Hollywood. As for my present coworkers, they are cut from the same cloth. There is no finer group of journalists in the country. I’ll miss passing them in the hall, chatting them up in the kitchen, and sharing foxhole moments during deadline week. I hope they’ll continue to invite me to the irregularly scheduled but predictably hilarious karaoke nights at Ego’s, about a mile south of the office. (Who knew there was such amazing musical talent on staff!) Just let me know. I’ll show up. Promise.
This article originally appeared in the December 2024 issue of Texas Monthly with the headline “Check, Please!” Subscribe today.
