HOW the SOUTHWEST WAS WON

D Magazine, Nov 01, 2003 by Malouf, Mary Brown

EACH OF THEM REMEMBERS THE EXACT moment it all began,

"I had been working with Southwest cooking in San Antonio," Anne Greer McCann recalls. ''In the '70s, I started teaching chefs to incorporate Southwest ingredients in classes all across the country."

"I went out to see Wolfgang Puck at Spago in LA," Avner Samuel says, "and I thought, 'Why don't we do in Texas what he is doing in California?'"

"There was a dinner at the. Mansion for the founders of the brand-new Dallas chapter of the American Institute of Wine & Food," Dean Fearing remembers. "We served all Southwest dishes."

Stephan Pyles recalls, "it was right after we opened Routh Street Cafe. We allDean, Avner, Michael Bauer (Dallas Times Herald food critic)-went over to Anne's for dinner."

"When the restaurant writer at Cafe Annie couldn't translate my dishes into French, says Robert Del Grande, "I realized I was doing something different."

They're all right, of course. Though everyone agrees that Southwest Cuisine was born 20 years ago the truth is it began many places, in many minds and kitchens, at once.

American cooking was just coming of age in the '70s-Wolfgang Puck had elevated pizza and topped it with fresh California produce; Chez Panisse's Alice Waters was composing prix-fixe menus from local ingredients she bought from farmers who came to her back door. Larry Forgione (New York) and Bradley Ogden (San Francisco) were touting the bounty of heartland America.

American chefs had shaken off their European shackles and were cooking according to the spirit-not the recipes-of classic haute cuisine. That is, like Dorothy, they were rediscovering the wonders of their own backyard. This was the New American kitchen-the best local ingredients prepared using classical techniques.

Hera in Texas, a motley bunch was adapting New American principles to cowboy country. They were from different backgrounds, training, politics, ideals, tastes, and kitchens. Nevertheless, they were lumped together. Dallas food writer Liz

Logan dubbed them the "Gang of Five."

Their maverick attitudes, taste for chilies, and sense of humor changed the way America eats forever.

The Gang Comes Together

OF COURSE, ONLY ONE OF THE ORIGINAL gang is a native Texan.

Stephan Wayne Pyles was born and raised in Big Spring, Texas. His first exposure to cooking was in his family's truck stop, an experience he left behind gladly, shaking the West Texas dust off his shoes to study music at East Texas State University and cat his way around France. His experience at the Great Chefs Cooking School at Robert Mondavi Winery in Napa Valley sparked his culinary creativity, even while he was still working in Dallas at the Bronx in Oak Lawn.

The rest of the Texas culinary creative nucleus is composed of transplants. Anne

Greer McCann (then Anne Lindsay Greer) was originally from Chicago. She was a single mom working in San Antonio when she became fascinated by Mexican cuisine and started teaching classes. "Anne was really the unsung hero of the whole thing," Pyles says. "She didn't even have a restaurant, but she saw a likeness of mind between all of us. She introduced us to each other."

Dean Fearing, a Culinary Institute grad from Kentucky, had worked at Maisonette in Cincinnati before moving to Dallas to work for the Mansion on Turtle Creek. In a fit of youthful enthusiasm, he and Tom Agnew left the hotel to start their own idealistic restaurant in North Dallas. Agnew's in Adelstein Plaza served the most experimental cooking in town.

Avner Samuel was born in Jerusalem and had cooked in Paris and London before coming to the United States. In Dallas, he was the fiery wunderkind at the Mansion when New York's 21 Club sold it to Caroline Rose Hunt's Rosewood Hotels & Resorts, then a fledgling in the luxury hotel business.

Robert Del Grande brought his doctorate in biochemistry from California to his wife's family's restaurant in Houston and transformed the kitchen from French to Southwest.

In 1989, Betty Crocker, the queen of American housewives, published Betty Crocker's Southwest Cooking, Notice, there are still no Minnesota or Kansas or Tennessee volumes. Twenty years after American food found its roots, regional Kansas cuisine has not made it onto menus outside Kansas City.

But you can taste the influences of Southwest Cuisine all over, from the spicy breakfast burritos at McDonald's to the French Room's spring chicken, wild mushrooms, golden raisins, green peppercorn, and roasted tomato flan. There

is a restaurant chain named after the chipotle, the Aztec word for smoked pepper, which no one outside a Mexican kitchen had heard of 30 years ago. Fresh cilantro and chilies are international staples, and restaurants in Paris, London, Tokyo, and Maine serve tortilla soup. The taste of the Southwest is everywhere.

New Americans

IN THE '70s, THE UNITED STATES started coming into its own as a culinary nation, largely because of increased familiarity with France.

Julia Child's revolutionary TV show, The French Chef, had brought French technique into American kitchens, and it also validated our own home cooking with menus and recipes for Indian pudding, New England lobster boil, roast turkey, and mashed potatoes.