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Photo by Olaf Growald
Black Cat Pizza
The Oven
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Photo by Olaf Growald
Black Cat Pizza
Jaime Fernandez
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Photo by Olaf Growald
Black Cat Pizza
The Prep
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Photo by Olaf Growald
Black Cat Pizza
Local chef Jaime Fernandez decided to open his own pizza joint at the urging of two of his most finicky customers; one is 4 years old, the other, 2. Cooking for his two daughters — or rather, trying to cook for his two daughters — ultimately led Fernandez to open Black Cat Pizza, most definitely one of the hottest new restaurants in the city.
“If you have kids, you know how difficult it can be to find things for them to eat,” says the 31-year-old restaurateur. “But they absolutely love pizza. They love eating it; they love helping me make it. Because it’s one of the only things they’ll eat, eventually I got better and better at making it.”
Nestled into a sleek spot in the burgeoning South Main district, next door to the also-new Funky Picnic Brewery & Cafe, Black Cat offers a small menu that perfectly balances norms with extremes. Cooked in a wood-burning pizza oven, pies come topped with traditional ingredients, such as mushrooms and pepperoni, as well as off-the-grid toppings. Named after the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, for instance, the restaurant’s hottest seller is the TMNT, a field of greens pie topped with snow peas, Brussels sprouts, baby kale, dandelion greens, and arugula.
Other specialty pies feature sweet potatoes, pickled celery, and Thai chile honey.
“It’s really simple how I come up with these unusual pizzas,” Fernandez says. “I think about my favorite foods and how they would taste if I put them all together. It’s as simple as that.”
In the same way that the quality of a taco lies within the tortilla, the most important component to a pizza is the crust, and this is where Black Cat truly excels. Fernandez’s crust is soft and chewy until you reach the rim, where you’ll be greeted with the snap, crackle, and crunch of skillfully blackened edges; there’s not quite anything else like it in Fort Worth.
“People ask me, ‘What kind of pizza is this? Is it Chicago, Neapolitan, or New York-style?’” Fernandez says. “It’s not as crispy and structurally sound as New York, or as thick as Chicago, or as floppy as a Neapolitan. It’s not one of them. It’s a little bit of all of them.”
Although the success of Black Cat has been swift (the restaurant opened this summer, and it’s consistently wall-to-wall busy), Fernandez isn’t exactly an overnight sensation. He spent last year establishing himself as a wizard of a pizza-maker through a series of pop-ups at Stir Crazy Baked Goods, where he sold slices to the nightcrawler crowd, experimenting with various topping combos.
“That was the real test,” he says. “That was when I decided to take this beyond friends and family, who’ll say they like your food even if it’s not that good. When the pop-ups exploded, that’s when I knew I was doing something right.”
Those who travel in foodie circles may recall that, before Black Cat, Fernandez was a cook at Ellerbe Fine Foods, as well as the executive chef at 44Bootlegger, a now-defunct wine bar on Magnolia Avenue.
A native of Central Mexico, he grew up in San Antonio and graduated from Austin’s Le Cordon Bleu cooking school. During a trip back home to Mexico, a friend offered him a gig of a lifetime: cooking at a two-star Michelin restaurant in Spain. That’s where he learned the ins and outs of a kitchen. “I learned more there in six months than I did in the two years I was in cooking school,” he says.
Upon returning from Spain, he settled back into Texas and eventually migrated to Fort Worth. It was during a stay-at-home-dad stint that he and his daughters started making pies together.
A few months later, on the opening day of his brick-and-mortar, hungry customers clamored for a seat. Some waited hours. Others were turned away; the restaurant had run out of food.
“That first day was unbelievable,” he says. “We didn’t expect 600 people in three hours. We expected, if we were lucky, 600 people the whole day. Of course, now we know how much food to make, and we have it down to an art. It’s surreal how much the city has embraced us, just completely surreal.”
“[Our pizza is] not as crispy and structurally sound as New York, or as thick as Chicago, or as floppy as a Neapolitan. It’s not one of them. It’s a little bit of all of them.”
-Jaime Fernandez, owner
Black Cat Pizza
401 Bryan Ave., 817.489.5150, blackcatpizza.com
