When I attended the inaugural Austin Food and Wine festival in 2012, my first vision was Tim Byres smoking whole hogs over an open fire. He’d set the beasts, massive and splayed, around a fire as dawn broke over the capital, and by the time ticket-holders flooded Republic Square Park for the Friday evening Taste of Texas event, the skins were crackling mahogany. With a great cleaver, Byres turned out piles of succulent chopped pork, which was pinched in fresh-made tortillas. Festival-goers gawked at the hog heads on the work table. Among the dozen or so stalls where chefs from Austin, Houston, and San Antonio handed out carefully crafted bites, Byres’ corner with its billowing smoke was an attraction. The following night, Tim Love roasted a whole goat on a spit for his cabrito tacos (part of the Rock Your Taco event).
That first year, they were the faces of Dallas and Fort Worth. Smoke. Meat. Soulfully done. (Photos from the roast would end up in Byres’ excellent, award-winning cookbook Smoke: New Firewood Cooking.) They captured the spirit of the year. Sand blew across Auditorium Shores park the following day, like a scene out of Lawrence of Arabia. Love kicked off the sessions with a two-hour grilling demonstration.
This year’s flavor was different. Last weekend there was meat and smoke, of course. But also a seasonal freshness absent in previous years. Call it a sign of the times. One offering at Taste of Texas was a raft of Spring, with baby vegetables—shaved radish, yellow, pink and red beets—and crunchy quinoa served in a barquette over a cushion of sweet-pea ricotta. This from Austin’s LaV restaurant, whose stall itself was festooned with bundles of baby artichokes and heirloom carrots, looking for all the world like a farmers market stand.
If there was a recurrent theme, it was watermelon radishes. Sliced thin, with variegated rings in hues of purple and fuchsia and white, they were everywhere, like springtime targets. (And lamb. Lamb in many guises, and much of it local.)
Dallas’s two representatives at Taste of Texas came right out of this school of seasonal freshness. Richard Blankenship of CBD Provisions served a dollop of creamy, house-made fresh cheese with pickled spring vegetables and sprigs of dill. Omar Flores of Casa Rubia in Trinity Groves had created a Spanish tapas-style escabeche with PEI mussels. Marinated in sherry vinegar and olive oil and topped with watercress blossoms (purple, in case you were wondering), the dish was lovely and fresh and resembled nothing else around. (Meanwhile, Blaine Staniford of Grace and Little Red Wasp in Fort Worth dished out extraordinarily savory candied pork jowel with Napa cabbage slaw, pickles, and pickled mustard grains on a crunchy rice puff. The pork, which simmered in a pan on the side, was deep, aggressive red like a Chinese lacquer box, and delicious. His bite was some of the best work in texture that night—and a favorite, according to my informal surveying.)
Saturday, at Auditorium Shores park, with the Austin skyline as backdrop for a scene of fire pits and presentation tents, Matt McCallister gave a session entitled Preserving the Pantry. As he pickled sunchokes and packed Mason jars with salt to make preserved lemons (something he’s been doing since he was six years old, when he and his mother also brined olives and picked strawberries and asparagus in their garden, he said), he told foraging tales (like the time a sous-chef picked up a copper-head snake) and talked about the difficulty of having a truly seasonal bar program. He was as serious about house-fermented Bourbon-barrel hot sauce and house-made crème fraiche as Byres had been about whole-hog roasting.
Dallas could do worse than cultivate a reputation for being, as McCallister put it, “a little bit obsessed.”
