Dai Due in Austin

Dai Due Pickles

Spend time with Jesse Griffiths at his live fire restaurant Dai Due in Austin and you want to stay there and help hunt, butcher, forage, pickle and bake.  His is a seamless culinary aesthetic that honors honest ingredients, cooks, the live fire of chuck wagon cookery, and the German, Mexican and Cajun roots of Central Texas. It’s all about big, rich, flavor. Kind of like Texas itself.  Jesse and Tamara Mayfield entered the food scene of Austin with a supper club that evolved into a farmer’s market stand and now the brick and mortar Dai Due which includes a butcher shop. His focus and support of local ingredients is legendary.  Local for Jesse means Texas.  It’s a big state with a coastline, yet the dry weather and heat can make sourcing a challenge.  Not surprisingly chiles are a big focus.

My traveling pals Jonathan Gold and Good Food producer Gillian Ferguson were starving (a situation that would soon remedy itself with too much barbeque) and looking forward to a late breakfast at the restaurant.  If I had more time in Austin and weren’t competing with hordes of SXSW attendees I would gladly have eaten there everyday.

Dai Due is the only the second  live fire restaurant cooking line I’ve seen in the US (the other being Camino in Berkeley).  At Dai Due the smoke and the tang of cast iron from the fires tended in the waist high brick cooking area informs the dishes.  Even the Sourdough Pancake, is a fantasy of gourmet chuckwagon cooking.  It’s a full one inch thick of perfectly risen sour dough batter baked in a lard slicked cast iron pan. The crumb manages to be simultaneously light and weighty and bound by deep golden crusts.  A pan cake fried in fat in cast iron.  What’s more cowboy than that? Fat is given pride of place here with the trifecta of schmaltz, lard and the rarely seen tallow right up front in the cold case next to the cuts of meat.  Whole steer are hanging in the walk-in so it’s a comfort that this chef uses even the extra beef fat (normally discarded) to create another ingredient.  But then Jesse Griffiths began to understand a deep relationship with the animals we eat very early.  His book Afield has quickly become the reference work about preparing and cooking American wild game and fish.  It may seem strange that a book about preparing hunted and wild caught foods could provide a through line of compassionate, sustainable cooking but that’s Jesse’s gift.  And the photographs are artful in their extreme clarity.

Share your thoughts

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.