Twenty-five years ago, a Fort Worth native who had spent a couple of years teaching science and math took a culinary school assignment and gave it a street address.
The assignment, at the New England Culinary Institute in Vermont, was to build a restaurant from scratch. Jon Bonnell researched game farms and ranches around Fort Worth and turned in a plan built on wild game and Texas ingredients. His instructor asked whether the place was real. It wasn’t yet. Bonnell’s Fine Texas Cuisine opened on Bryant Irvin Road in 2001, and it is still there.
Bonnell is fourth-generation Fort Worth. He went to Vanderbilt, came home, taught for a while, and then went off to cooking school. He interned at Mr. B’s Bistro in the French Quarter and was back in Fort Worth by 1997 with that school project already taking shape.
The menu reads the way it did when the idea was on paper. The restaurant lists the Ancho-Rubbed Elk Backstrap and the Pepper-Crusted Buffalo Filet as two of the dishes it’s known for, and the Gulf side of the kitchen shows up in the Pecan-Crusted Redfish and Oysters Texasfeller. Nearly all of the wagyu, venison, quail, wild boar, fish, oysters, produce and cheese comes from Texas farms and ranches. Bonnell was cooking that way here long before it became something restaurants printed on the menu.
The current lineup is on the Bonnell’s menu page.
The restaurant became the anchor for a small Fort Worth group. Waters, his seafood restaurant, opened in 2013 in the West 7th area and moved to Sundance Square in 2017. Buffalo Bros handles pizza, wings and subs. CraveDFW took a longer look at Waters and Bonnell’s career this spring.
The 25th year was not an easy one.
In December, Bonnell was diagnosed with stage 3 squamous cell carcinoma of the tongue and mouth. He had two surgeries, followed by chemotherapy and radiation, and he told Fort Worth about it himself in a Facebook post on Feb. 1. “The prognosis is good, but I will be on this journey to recovery for quite some time, hopefully regaining all of my taste buds, etc by early summer,” he wrote. Thousands of people answered.
For a chef, the taste buds were the hard part. Treatment took most of his sense of taste, and it has come back slowly over the months since.
He announced in March that he was cancer-free. Recovery has run longer than the treatment did. In July he closed Jon’s Grille, the burger spot on Berry Street across from TCU that he had brought back in honor of his late friend Jon Meyerson. He said at the time that his health had kept him out of the restaurant for months and it was time to downsize.
Bonnell’s itself kept going, and this fall it reached 25.
Bonnell’s Fine Texas Cuisine is at 4259 Bryant Irvin Road in Fort Worth and serves dinner Tuesday through Saturday from 5 to 9 p.m. It is closed Sunday and Monday. Reservations are on the restaurant’s site or by phone at 817-738-5489.
More on Bonnell’s restaurants.
