Food and Wine Across America: Dallas

 The Early Show was in Dallas seeing what there was to eat and meeting Chef Dean Fearing:

A winner of multiple culinary awards, Fearing has hosted TV shows and written two cookbooks.

After graduating from the Culinary Institute of America, he worked in restaurants across the country, eventually becoming executive chef at “The Mansion on Turtle Creek,” (a luxury hotel here in Dallas), a position he held for 21 years.

Fearing was enticed to leave when the folks at the city’s brand-new Ritz Carlton offered him his own eatery.

He told the trade journal “Restaurants & Institutions,” “(The decision to leave) was definitely the timing and the thrill factor. I’d just turned 51 and I have two boys, at that time 6 and 8, and I said I want to do something different. I loved The Mansion. The Mansion was great. I had the best ride of any chef in America. I couldn’t have gotten any more press over 21 years. I have probably seven scrapbooks at my mother’s house to prove it. It truly set me in the place where I wanted to ever be, goal-wise, as an American chef.

“But I thought, ‘Gosh, I’m 51. I could retire. Do I really want to venture out and do something that I think is the next step for modern dining?’ I do. And that is to get away from fine dining to a come-as-you-are approach, but still serving on bone china, fine wine glasses and silver from Germany, doing it without tablecloths and doing it on placemats. But with a cool placemat, an edgy tabletop; doing it with beautiful, dark mahogany tables and with sunlight coming in to the restaurant, and doing all seven rooms different in concept. But with … only one menu, and making that menu interesting enough for everybody.”

Fearing’s Restaurant opens at the Dallas Ritz-Carlton in late August.  To try Fearing’s Braised Beef Short Ribs on Flour Tortillas with Mango-Pickled Red Onion Salad (pictured above) click here.  Go to Amazon for his cookbooks.

 Food & Wine has more information about restaurants, markets and hotels in Dallas.