Olaf Growald
Before Marcus Paslay opened a string of hugely successful restaurants in Fort Worth, becoming one of the city’s most well-known chefs. Before Molly McCook helped popularize the farm-to-table aesthetic through her culinary wizardry at her Near Southside restaurant Ellerbe Fine Foods. Before Felipe Armenta paired with Graham Elliot. Before our city’s current culinary stars illuminated the scene, there were pioneers.
Call them the architects of Fort Worth’s fine-dining landscape, the visionaries who instilled in our city a love for a truly exceptional meal.
Fine dining in Fort Worth wouldn’t be what it is today without these pioneering chefs who shaped our culinary identity. Certainly, fine dining would exist in some capacity, as it does in every major city. But would Fort Worth be as smartly attuned to French cuisine had Bernard Tronche not opened Saint-Emilion? Has anyone else in Fort Worth combined the spices of Mexican and Texican food as succinctly and memorably as Michael Thomson has at his self-named restaurant? And who knows if Fort Worth would have ever discovered the pleasures of elk tacos and rabbit-rattlesnake sausage had Jon Bonnell and Tim Love not opened Bonnell’s and Lonesome Dove?
The great Walter Kauffman is often thought of as Fort Worth’s premier chef. A native of Lucerne, Switzerland, he perfected the art of fine dining in Fort Worth at his restaurant Old Swiss House, introducing European cuisine and white-glove service to a town inexperienced with either. The restaurant was open for three decades, from 1964 to 1994.
“He paved the way for all of us in the fine-dining industry here,” Bonnell told me in September 2020, after Kaufmann passed away at age 91. “There was a time when if you wanted a nice meal around here, you went to a country club, or you went to Dallas. Walter changed that.”
Many of the chefs who rose in Kaufmann’s wake have made their own indelible marks on Fort Worth’s culinary landscape. And many of them are still cooking in one fashion or another, still running their own restaurants or catering companies, still doing what they love to do, and still innovating and inspiring the next generation of Fort Worth chefs.
These are the visionaries who, from the '70s to the early 2000s, cultivated Fort Worth's now-legendary era of fine dining.
Michael Thomson
Louise Lamensdorf
Bernard Tronche
Bobby Albanese
Tim Love
