The bowl comes to the table almost empty. A neat little pile of smoked chicken, shredded cabbage, radish, avocado, cheddar and tortilla strips sits in the bottom, and then a server pours the broth over all of it right in front of you. It is a small bit of theater for a soup that has been part of Dallas dining for more than four decades. Dean’s Tortilla Soup at Fearing’s is one of the most famous bowls of soup in Texas, and it took a long road to get here.
That road starts in Ashland, Kentucky, a river town where Kentucky, Ohio and West Virginia meet. Dean Fearing grew up there, the son of a hotel man. His father ran the Henry Clay Hotel, a red-brick landmark on Winchester Avenue, and both of Dean’s grandmothers were serious country cooks. He has talked for years about Thanksgiving at his grandmother’s house, with country ham and turkey and pecan pie for twenty people, all of it cooked by one woman. That is still the foundation of everything he puts on a plate.
His father later went to work with Kemmons Wilson, the founder of Holiday Inn, and Dean and his brother were put to work in Holiday Inn kitchens while they were still in junior high. A retired Hilton chef named Harvey Colgin, who had trained under Auguste Escoffier, took the teenager under his wing and helped get him into the Culinary Institute of America in 1976. After graduation, Dean cooked at The Maisonette in Cincinnati, then one of the most decorated restaurants in the country.
Dallas came next, almost by accident. A chef at the Maisonette told him about an opening at the Fairmont Hotel, and Dean, who had never set foot in Texas, packed up and came. He liked it here right away. In 1980 he was the saucier in the opening kitchen at The Mansion on Turtle Creek, and he quickly moved up to executive sous chef.
That is where the soup enters the story. Caroline Rose Hunt, who owned the Mansion, wanted something local on a menu that was still mostly French, and she brought in a tortilla soup recipe from San Antonio. The French chefs in the kitchen were not impressed. Dean has said they called it peasant soup. Diners felt differently, and the peasant soup became the bowl everyone came for.
Dean has been making it since 1981, though not always at the Mansion. That same year he opened Agnew’s, a bold bet on American cooking in a city where fine dining still meant French. People told him it would fail. Within six weeks it had five stars from both of the city’s daily papers, and he was 26 years old. The 1984 recession closed it, and in 1985 he returned to the Mansion as executive chef.
What he did next changed Texas dining. Dean pushed to turn the Mansion’s menu fully Southwestern, built on Gulf seafood, South Texas game, West Texas beef, chiles, cilantro and lime. He and a small group of Texas chefs, including Stephan Pyles and Houston’s Robert Del Grande, gave the movement its shape, and the tortilla soup and the lobster taco he created in 1985 became two of the dishes that put Dallas on the national map. He stayed for roughly twenty years and earned the nickname he still carries, the Father of Southwestern Cuisine.
In 2007 he moved across Uptown and opened his own place at the Ritz-Carlton on McKinney Avenue. Within months, Esquire named Fearing’s the best new restaurant in the country. The soup came with him, and it is still on the menu today.
It has changed, though, and Dean will tell you the current version is the best one yet. He describes it as closer to the way the cooks would eat it in the back of the kitchen. The base is a deep, smoky tomato and chile broth. Smoked chicken, jalapeño, a swirl of cilantro cream, grated sharp white cheddar, cabbage, radish, avocado and crisp tortilla strips go in the bowl. The broth is poured tableside. Dean likes to say it is one soup on the first spoonful and another soup by the last, because everything keeps blending as you eat, and he is right. The cabbage and radish stay crunchy for a while, the cheese slowly gives up, the avocado softens the heat, and by the bottom of the bowl the whole thing has turned richer and rounder than where it started. There is a vegetarian version, too.
Dean and CraveDFW go back a long way, and over the years he has been as generous with his time as he is with his cooking. Anyone who has spent an evening at Fearing’s has probably seen him stop by a table or two. He makes the rounds in a crisp white chef’s coat, blue jeans and hand-tooled Lucchese boots, of which he owns more than fifty pairs. On the right night you may catch him with a guitar in his hands. He plays with The Barbwires, an alt-country band made up of chefs. None of that is why people keep coming back, though. They come back for a bowl of soup that a French kitchen once looked down on.
When we spent an evening at Fearing’s last fall, it started with cocktails in the Rattlesnake Bar and ran through lobster tacos, flash-fried barbecue Gulf oysters finished with Sonny Bryan’s sauce, sesame-seared Chilean sea bass and warm fried apple pies, with Dean stopping by the table to trade stories along the way. Our only regret that night was skipping the antelope. The soup is the other thing nobody should skip, and it is just as good at lunch, with nowhere to be.
Fearing’s is inside The Ritz-Carlton, Dallas, at 2121 McKinney Ave. Dean’s Tortilla Soup is on the lunch menu Monday through Friday from 11:30 a.m. to 2 p.m., at weekend brunch from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., and at dinner, served from 5:30 to 10 p.m. Monday through Saturday and until 9 p.m. on Sunday. Reservations are recommended at (214) 922-4848.
