Lou Lambert is a great storyteller. Ask about any dish he’s created, and he’ll have a yarn to go with it. But perhaps his best story isn’t about the food but about how a guy who grew up showing calves at West Texas stock shows and hunting ended up as one of Texas’ top chefs and restaurateurs.
In addition to his namesake restaurant, Lambert’s Steaks, Seafood & Whiskey, Lambert also owns Dutch’s Burgers and Beer by TCU and co-owns Jo’s Hot Coffee and Good Food in Austin. Along the way, he’s earned some impressive culinary credentials, cooked at fancy-pants restaurants from San Francisco to Dallas, and became one of the creators of haute cowboy cuisine.
He says his gift of gab comes from his “proud coon-ass” father, whose family hails from Port Arthur. Lambert’s mama connects him to seven generations of a West Texas ranching family.
As a boy, he spent summers around his family’s West Texas ranch at cattle roundups, complete with campfire cooking. During hunting seasons, Lambert’s mother began refusing to fry up whatever he and his friends had killed and dragged home, so he learned to cook — and liked it.
Lambert became a temporary Fort Worth resident in the 1980s while attending TCU. Working at various restaurants, he found himself pushed out of his preferred kitchen role into management. He ultimately graduated from the University of North Texas’ Hotel and Restaurant Management program and then enrolled in the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, NY.
Lambert said that the rigor of the CIA’s program helped blend his informal training — where the food comes from, how to operate a kitchen — with traditional French cuisine techniques, including charcuterie (making smoked meats such as sausage and ham).
After his CIA externship took him to Wolfgang Puck’s swanky Postrio restaurant in San Francisco in the late 1980s, Lambert finished his CIA training in New York. He returned to Dallas as a chef at Café Pacific. In the early ’90s, it was back to the Bay area to help former Postrio co-workers David and Annie Gringrass open their Hawthorne Lane restaurant.
Time in California left Lambert missing the Texas sun and his family, so he returned to Austin, where he took a job — “temporarily” — as head of Word of Mouth Catering, which launched him into a decade of restaurant ownership in Austin, culminating in 2006 with Lambert’s Downtown Barbecue.
On a quick trip to West Texas in the late 1990s, Lambert met up with Grady Spears, a local celebrity with little formal culinary training but great personal charm who was running a small restaurant in Alpine: the original Reata Restaurant. Together, they brought the Reata and its haute ranch cuisine to Fort Worth. Reata president Mike Micallef recalls Lambert’s charcuterie skills, saying he could turn even the most decidedly non-French ingredient into a tasty ranch treat. “Once he made [goat-meat] pastrami,” Micallef said.
After Reata, Lambert began doing consulting work for the Crestline Hotel group. In 2005, he started working on an upscale/down-home restaurant for that company in Louisiana. But Hurricane Katrina blew through, and the project was shuttered.
In 2007, Spears called again with a deal brewing back in Fort Worth. Based in no small part on Lambert’s connections with Fort Worth developers William C. Jennings and Co., the two opened their casual burger joint named after former TCU football coach Dutch Meyer. (Lambert’s father played football at TCU when Meyer was athletic director.) One thing led to another, and in 2008, Lambert finally got to develop his own upscale, down-home haven, Lambert’s Steaks, Seafood & Whiskey. (Spears is no longer involved in either restaurant.)
Lambert said he’s able to manage multiple enterprises in different cities because he keeps a talented staff. Some of his employees have made careers out of working for him. Larry McGuire started at Lambert’s Liberty Catering in Austin at age 16 and is now the executive chef at Downtown Barbecue. CIA grad Lauro Gonzales, now executive chef of Lambert’s Fort Worth restaurant, started out almost two decades ago as a dishwasher at Café Pacific during Lambert’s tenure there. Gonzales followed Lambert through Texas and decided one day that he also wanted to be a chef. With Lambert’s encouragement and help, the native of Mexico graduated from the CIA.
“I like to develop a culture of hiring and retaining good people and giving them a sense of ownership,” Lambert said.
Even though he bounces back to West Texas and Austin, Lambert is putting down roots in Fort Worth, renovating a house with partner James Smith.
“Fort Worth is like Austin was 15 years ago,” Lambert said. “I love Austin, but its growth has caused some loss of livability. Fort Worth is extremely livable, the quality of life is great here, and the traffic is manageable.”
