No doubt, many people passing by Jon Bonnell’s Fine Texas Cuisine restaurant on Bryant Irvin Road may have wondered how well “fine” and “Texas” go together at the eight-year-old restaurant. Bonnell is arguably one of the area’s best chefs. He graduated with distinction from the New England Culinary Institute and has cooked at some of the country’s most noted restaurants, such as Mr. B’s Bistro in the French Quarter and the James Beard House in New York City. At Bonnell’s, he has consistently combined market research with a hefty dose of respect for North Texas farmers, ranchers, and distributors to come up with his own casually elegant, upscale/down-home cuisine.
He loves local: Most of the ingredients come from within 200 miles of the restaurant. He’s also famous for his “open kitchen.” Enjoy a recipe? E-mail him, and he’ll share it with you, gratis. But that raises the question: If you know you can get any of Bonnell’s recipes for free, why pay for Jon Bonnell’s Fine Texas Cuisine, his new cookbook?
For starters, the chef and his staff have spent a great deal of time adjusting proportions from restaurant and catering cooking for 200-plus to servings for four. While proportion cooking technically produces a better product, it’s hard for the easily confused to convert parts to cups. The book takes care of that for you.
Of course, the book also is lushly illustrated. The photos look, predictably, good enough to eat. Several of the dishes — like the barbecued oysters with Anaheim chile-lime sauce, the tres leches crème brûlée, and the beer-battered goat cheese-stuffed zucchini blossoms — are pictured in stages: first, the raw ingredients; second, the ingredients halfway prepared; and, finally, the end result. Most of the shots were taken by professional photographer B.J. Lacasse. But Bonnell also took a few — of food and of his restaurant — and he’s a competent shutterbug.
The book’s readability is a delightful surprise. A full-page photo of almost every dish gets paired with a full page of the recipe with accompanying introductions. Bonnell wrote the book himself — no ghostwriter, although plenty of food writers would have gladly signed on. He proves to be an able storyteller, and there are some funny tidbits tucked into the introductions to the recipes. Helpfully, the ingredient lists are in a larger, different-colored font, which makes them seem easier to read than, say, a recipe printed from your e-mail.
Not necessarily easier to follow, however. That’s not Bonnell’s fault. If you don’t own a Cuisinart or a pecan wood smoker, you’ll have to adapt or simply skip many recipes. Although Bonnell is generous in listing his sources for handmade goat cheese, wild boar, and ostrich (all available here in the Fort), among other raw materials, some of the foodstuff is simply too hard for a mere chef wannabe to obtain. I, for one, don’t know where I’d come by antelope steaks, buffalo ribs, or fresh oysters on a moment’s notice.
My favorite Bonnell goodie, roasted chile cheese grits, is actually ridiculously simple to make, once you dice the onions. I didn’t have time to find stone-ground grits and poblano peppers, but I can say that instant grits and canned Hatch chiles worked acceptably well as substitutes. And at about a dollar per serving, a homemade version of the dish is a great deal.
A non-chef foodie friend took on the jumbo lump crab cakes with scallion-lime aioli. The upside, she said, was that the recipe was easy to put together and the ingredients easy to find. However, she reported that she could not get the consistency of the crab cakes right and that they kept “breaking apart.” Perhaps there are some things that you just need Bonnell to do for you.
Ultimately, Bonnell loves to teach. The former math and science teacher, who’ll be appearing on CBS’ The Early Show on Sat., Aug. 22, between 6 and 8 a.m., has crafted a book that’s instructional but not overly cheffy. Perhaps the book is for people who like a little challenge. The home cook who could include a Bonnell’s recipe or two in his or her repertoire would certainly dazzle at the next holiday meal or covered-dish supper.
In his acknowledgements, Bonnell thanks wife Melinda and writes that he can’t wait until their daughter, Charlotte, “is old enough to read this book.” That’s a lovely thought: a cookbook as a bedtime story, especially for someone born to love “fine Texas” cuisine.
