Dean Fearing at The Ritz-Carlton, Dallas: “You have never been to a restaurant like this.”
Executive chef at The Mansion on Turtle Creek for 21 years, Dean Fearing opens his own restaurant, Fearing’s, next month in The Ritz-Carlton, Dallas. He tells Executive Editor Scott Hume that the $6 million creation is everything he wanted it to be and nothing like any other restaurant in the world.
By Scott Hume, Executive Managing Editor -- Restaurants & Institutions, 7/24/2007
 Dean Fearing  Fearing's Restaurant: Dining room  Kitchen/dining  Rattlesnake Bar  Scallops With Tangerine Essence  Prime-Cut Rib-Eye Mopped Over Live Mesquite With Cauliflower Twice Potatoes and Crispy Asparagus See Fearing's dinner menu |
After graduating from The Culinary Institute of America, Ashland, Ky.-native Dean Fearing began his culinary career in Cincinnati at Maisonette, a 1972 R&I Ivy Award winner. From there he went to the kitchen at The Pyramid Room in The Fairmont in Dallas. When The Mansion on Turtle Creek opened in 1980, Fearing was sous-chef. He left to open his own Dallas restaurant, Agnew’s, but returned to The Mansion in 1985 as executive chef. The restaurant received its Ivy Award from R&I in 1989. Only an opportunity to partner with The Ritz-Carlton Hotels and open Fearing’s Restaurant in the new Ritz-Carlton, Dallas, could have persuaded him to leave The Mansion.
The Ritz-Carlton, Dallas, and Fearing’s Restaurant are due to open on Aug. 15, so you’re about three weeks out. Are you happy with where it stands?
I’m more than happy. I’m actually pretty calm at this point. We’ve had a few setbacks but nothing major. I think the pre-planning for the past year and a half has helped get us to this point, where we’re really not scratching our heads and wondering what happened. It’s actually looking better, and I truly mean better, than we ever thought.
I’ve only seen renderings but it looks remarkable.
Yes. After looking at renderings for a year, seeing the real millwork and Jerusalem limestone floors, and the cloth and leather and suede ceilings, well, it’s pretty dazzling in real life.
How well does it match what you no doubt had in your head for years for how you’d want your own restaurant to look?
I had a real vision and that was to be timeless, as The Mansion is. There was a timeless element I always loved about the Mansion. It’s having smaller rooms, rooms you could close off in the middle of August on a Sunday night when it wasn’t real busy and keep the energy in one room, so when people arrive, psychologically they knew they had arrived. It wasn’t a Sunday night, a slow night at a restaurant.
I thought that was awfully key to a great restaurant, to be able to, like an accordion, pull it out when you had great business but also close it in when business wasn’t as full, but still give the same feeling. It’s important in the days that we’re living in now, where every place has to be a happening spot. If it isn’t, there’s a psychological letdown that eats away at the service and food, when the food may be the same as when it’s busy. But when there’s downtime, you start to wonder, “Why isn’t anyone here? Why isn’t the place packed?” Then you start to nitpick through the meal.
How much psychological weight was there for you to need to create a restaurant that meets the standards of The Mansion?
[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 doing only one menu, and making that menu interesting enough for everybody. (See Fearing's dinner menu.)
How challenging, then, was it to create that first menu?
I knew it was going to work, because it’s the way [Americans] eat. Well, I guess it’s brash to say that because we haven’t opened yet. I’m thinking it’s going to work. No one’s eaten off this menu yet, but my crew and I think it’s going to work.
But, you know, the attack on Pearl Harbor wasn’t as detailed and planned as our putting this restaurant together was. If we’ve missed one small point, I’ll be quite surprised. It’s just what we want. We love Asian, we love Southwestern, we love steak and healthy foods, and we love cutting edge. And we have all of that on the menu.
And it needs to be there for business travelers. I pity them. They’re on the road four or five nights a week, and you can’t come in and eat fried foods and steaks all through that week. You’d be a human mess. I want to say to the weary travelers, what about a great piece of grilled halibut? But it’s not just grilled, it’s a mesquite grill that’s burning and smoking that fish. You get that flavor of a real grill within a restaurant.
Is that mesquite grill something you knew from the start would be in your restaurant?
Absolutely. For steaks and fish it had to be a mesquite grill. Wood burning, like logs. And served with great fresh summer vegetables. How much better does it get for someone on the road? You feel you can eat healthy.
And then let’s supply a surprise: At the table you have an option to have a healthy sauce with it that may not be on the menu. Then you have a little theater and surprise, a little sense of value. How nice is that?
What kinds of sauces are you planning?
It could be a basil-pepita sauce. We’re going to make it like a pesto but instead of using pine nuts we’re going to use toasted Mexican pepita seeds, pumpkin seeds, which add a little more flavor than pine nuts. To thin it just a little bit, maybe a little chicken stock, so it’s not that heavy pesto thickness. Then what you have is something you can eat and feel good about.
What are the surprises in the décor and atmosphere of the restaurant?
Oh, lordy. This will take awhile. The most stunning part as you first walk into this great hall is that all the ceilings in the restaurant are 18 feet high. So you’re walking into a massive look. In the lounge room you walk in to—which is more than a lounge, it’s the greet station—the millwork is dark African mahogany, and it is just gorgeous. There’s white Jerusalem limestone. You walk straight up to a 9-by-9-foot piece of art, hand painted, which is rippling waters in blues and yellows, offset by the mahogany. The frame—and it’s a theme throughout the restaurant—is bordered in honey onyx a foot wide.
You walk in and, I’m not kidding, you have never been to a restaurant like this. I’ve been to restaurants across America, Europe and Asia, but you’re not going to walk into a design like this anywhere else because you don’t see the restaurant. The restaurant is totally hidden; there’s a total mystery to it, which is the part I love.
You can turn right and go to the indoor bar or left and go to the outdoor bar. The indoor bar is just this knockout onyx-glow bar. In the bar itself are leather panels surrounded by the dark mahogany. And if you go to the left to the outdoor bar, there are five giant live oaks with a fireplace. It’s going to be the cat’s meow.
And it manages to be welcoming and not overwhelming?
Wait, that’s just the bars. The real wows are the dining rooms themselves. You go down a hall to all these dining rooms. We have four more dining rooms plus a wine room. A gallery has a wooden floor with green paneling, 18 feet high, with two 12-foot glass chandeliers on both sides of the dining room. No banquettes; everything is settees. And the beauty is that you’re walking into our only white-tablecloth room.
I felt that it needed that because I don’t want to lose the special-occasion room: people coming in for an anniversary, or cutting a deal or a birthday. That will be the more formal—even though we don’t have a dress code—area where you would want to do that. But it’s only 44 seats.
Will it disappoint you if that more-formal room initially is the most popular?
Well, let me tell you about the other rooms, and then see what you think. Across the hall from the gallery is the Sendoro, meaning path leading outside in Spanish, which is a totally glass–enclosed room. Again, there are no banquettes; it’s all settees, seating 44. This has a different look: a limestone floor with teak furniture with big cushions, teak tables with [table] runners.
The Sendoro isn’t formal; it’s edgy. The candles and the flower holders are edgy. Hey, even the butter dishes and the salt-and-pepper holders are edgy. Still, this is where we start using placemats with bone china on it. And great napkins. Not white napkins, though, tan napkins. We want to get away from all that white. The beauty is that it has three sets of glass doors that open for al fresco dining on beautiful days.
You’re about to say “But wait. There’s more” aren’t you?
I am. The outdoor area, called the Ocaso, meaning sunset in Portuguese, has three waterworks with fountains and jets. All the tables sit around the waterworks. And you’re looking at a park. You can get up and walk into a park that has trees, grass, flowers. There isn’t anything like it in Dallas.
You walk into the kitchen room, called Dean’s Kitchen because the whole dining room is built around the most beautiful custom kitchen you’ve ever seen, and it’s a room that is light paneled oak. It’s rougher wood so now you know you’ve arrived at the party room.
Six huge chandeliers, 6-by-4-feet of rawhide, glowing. You have the onyx-glow border on one wall and inset carpet with the tables on it, but the rest of the floor is Jerusalem limestone. The ceiling will knock you out: a chocolate brown fabric that soaks up all the sound. No runners or tablecloths, just the dark wood [tables] with those edgy tabletops.
The wine room, a 16-top, is two trees put together as a table. Gas chandelier. A stone arched ceiling with the wine cellar on three glass walls. I’m telling you, I get chills talking about it.
It must have been amazing to see it come together.
Bill Johnson, our designer from [The Johnson Studio in] Atlanta, thought I was crazy when we first sat down. He said, “I don’t think there’s any way we’ll be able to pull this off.” And once he designed it, he saw it. And we all see it. Bill Rhodes, senior vice president [of The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Co.], is probably our biggest fan yet. Once you come in, you’ll see it. There’s nothing like it.
Were there any elements you wanted but just couldn’t do?
Bill and I went to the mountains about a year and half ago. Bill’s an old hippie, I’m an old hippie, so it was very easy for us to relate on a creative side. When he brought over the renderings and [The Johnson Studio] did the proposal, it was truly what he and I talked about; it was the vision.
We had to change a few things because of mechanical [needs], but very few. There was never a change made from day one. It was that unusual, but that exciting and new.
Do I dare ask how much this vision cost?
Well, about $6 million. It’s going to look like $10 million. But Bill didn’t have a restaurant in Dallas. This is his first. I told him, if we don’t build the Mecca, you’re wasting your time. But it’s all there. I think he did well.
That must be very satisfying.
Well, this is true: Dallas has been waiting a year and a half for this. It’s pretty wonderful to give this to Dallas, in a big-boy sense. I’m going to be there for 15 years, and that was the whole objective. This isn’t a short-term restaurant for me. This is me and Dallas for a long time.
I want to be happy and I said from day one that I won’t be happy if this isn’t what it needs to be. It needs to help us put Dallas back on the restaurant map.
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