Richard King and Molly McCook
Richard King and Molly McCook, Owners of Ellerbe
When Molly McCook and Richard King decided to open a restaurant in Fort Worth, they faced the usual challenges restaurateurs must conquer: maneuvering the maze of the city’s health and building codes, training a staff and developing a menu.
But neither could have imagined what wound up being the biggest challenge in opening their farm-to-table restaurant: No one around here had heard of a farm-to-table restaurant.
What is now a common phrase in Fort Worth was, 10 years ago, a foreign language. Even local farmers had no idea what “farm-to-table” meant or understood what these lifelong friends were up to.
“I remember going to the farmers market and pointing to some tomatoes and saying, ‘I’m going to need a few cases of those,’” recalls McCook. “And they just looked at me and said, ‘A case? How many are in a case?’ They just weren’t used to having people purchase that much product. They’d say, ‘Where in the world is this crazy girl going to take all these tomatoes?’”
The answer, of course, was to Ellerbe. Opened a decade ago this month, in what was originally a 1940s service station, the New Orleans-influenced fine dining spot was the city’s first restaurant to adopt the farm-to-table philosophy, in which food is sourced directly from farms and farmers, not companies.
Soon, both the phrase and philosophy were embraced by other local and regional restaurants. If Ellerbe didn’t bring the farm-to-table movement to Texas, it certainly helped popularize it.
“I wanted to have a focused menu that really showed what we were getting from farmers,” says McCook, the restaurant’s executive chef and co-owner. “And still, to this day, I always create my menus with the vegetables and sides as the centerpiece — and then we put the protein in afterwards.”
It was a way of thinking and cooking and eating that the Shreveport, Louisiana, native connected with while she was studying and working in California. After earning a bachelor’s degree in restaurant and resort management from Colorado State University, she turned her attention to cooking, moving to San Francisco to enroll in the California Culinary Academy.
While in California, McCook worked and trained with several well-known chefs, including Amaryll Schwertner, who showed McCook the ropes of utilizing seasonal and local ingredients. Later, McCook was a sous-chef at famed Los Angeles restaurant Lucques, where she worked under Suzanne Goin, an early apprentice of restaurateur and sustainable dining champion Alice Waters.
In a way, the seeds to McCook’s journey had already been planted. When she was young, she often ate at her grandmother’s house, where what was grown was eaten.
“My grandmother had a beautiful garden, and she grew all these beautiful vegetables,” she says. “Some kids don’t like vegetables. That wasn’t me.” Her grandmother lived on a road called “Ellerbe.”
Meanwhile, King was on a journey of his own that took him through the nuts and bolts of the restaurant industry. Also a native of Shreveport, he moved to Fort Worth, where he graduated from Texas Christian University.
For 15 years, he immersed himself in the local food, wine and restaurant worlds, doing everything from busing tables to managing dining rooms. One gig led to another, and King soon found himself with a corporate position at the Fort Worth-based customer analytics company Buxton, where he fine-tuned his business skills.
After McCook moved to Fort Worth, the two reunited and eventually hatched out a plan to open a restaurant. He knew the business and operations end of things (plus he had an extensive knowledge of wine). She knew food and an innovative way of sourcing it.
“It just made perfect sense to us,” says King, Ellerbe’s co-owner and general manager. “We’d been friends forever. We’d talked about it, dreamed about it. And then sort of all of a sudden, everything fell into place.”
Utilizing ingredients she purchased directly from farmers set up at the Cowtown Farmers Market (many of whom she still works with today), McCook began mapping out her menu, which would rotate seasonally. Recipes were steeped in her New Orleans roots but given contemporary whooshes.
Her opening night menu consisted of a roasted cauliflower soup with brie crostini; a meuniere with Louisiana soft shell shrimp, bacon, celery root slaw and preserved lemons; and, what would become her signature dish, a maque choux with Louisiana crawfish.
“Just thinking about that first menu, that first night, my heart is racing,” she laughs. “It’s all coming back to me now. I remember exactly where I was in the kitchen when the first ticket with the first order came through — the chi-chi-chi sound of the printer. Oh, man, stomach drop. From that point on, it was like, ‘Here we go, there’s no looking back now.’”
Perhaps a bit surprisingly, Fort Worth warmly embraced this new concept.
“I was a little surprised,” says King. “Well, I was and I wasn’t. I knew we had great food, but people are sometimes hesitant to try something new, especially when it comes to food. The thing you have to keep in mind is, we, as a city, were on the cusp of change. People were ready for something new.”
A decade ago, Fort Worth’s culinary scene began to grow significantly, both in terms of the number of restaurants opening and the diversity of the cuisines being served. Ellerbe helped initiate some of that change, but the restaurant was also instrumental in helping bring more attention to Magnolia. New restaurants had sprung up in the area — Nonna Tata, Lili’s Bistro — and more were coming in.
“The success of those restaurants was a big factor in our decision to open here,” King says. “It was an up-and-coming area but not so up-and-coming that it was out of our reach financially. I mean, we were young and dumb and broke and opening a restaurant.”
Accolades from near and far poured in, from diners and critics alike, creating a healthy buzz, not to mention a steady stream of customers. Then came a watershed moment: Bon Appetit named Ellerbe one of the top 10 best new restaurants in the country.
“I’d say that was our turning point,” King says. “That’s when we knew we were doing something right, something good. We showed that to our parents, who had been supportive but a little apprehensive about us opening a restaurant, and they were so proud of us. That was one thing that we really wanted — we didn’t want to disappoint our parents.”
King and McCook are celebrating the restaurant’s 10th anniversary by sprucing things up a bit. What is now a waiting area will turn into a lounge, with tables and chairs and small bites. “A nice little area where people can sit and visit and have a nice glass of wine,” King says. The patio area will get a nip/tuck as well and will move into more of a garden room-slash-dining room.
In addition, operating hours will be extended. Instead of closing after lunch, the restaurant will remain open for late lunchers and the early dinner crowd.
“We’ve been here 10 years now; it’s time for a little refresh,” King says. “We’ve been toying around with various ideas for the past couple years, and we figured this is a good time to hit reset and see where the future takes us.”
