EARLY DAYS AT HUDSON’S
We swung the doors at Hudson’s on the Bend Restaurant open on April 15, 1984 with no specific culinary direction, not Mexican food, not Italian food, not Cajun food etc. What we did know was that we wanted to cook what was available in our backyard in a white tablecloth, rustic, Texan atmosphere. It was years before the “farm to table” dining experience was popular, so in looking back I realize I was about 20 years ahead of the times in the industry so without trying to be “farm to table” we were doing it organically.
However, the birth of regional cuisine in American restaurants was starting to grow with Alice Waters developing Californian organic cuisine at Chez Panisse, Paul Prudhomme was developing Cajun New Orleans cuisine at K-Paul’s Louisiana Kitchen, Larry Forgione, the Godfather of American Cuisine, was developing American New England cuisine at An American Place Restaurant in New York. I observed this regional cuisine trend happening around the country and we did our part by undertaking Texas cuisine in the kitchen at Hudson’s on the Bend. Texas cuisine at the time was a mix of cowboy cooking, Mexican flavors and of course BBQ. This Texas cuisine menu plan was just a guideline, not a hard and fast rule. If a dish tasted great to us, was popular with the diners and was relatively easy to cook in our restaurant kitchen, we would see if we could give it a little extra Texas Southwestern spin and offer it verbally to the customers as a special of the night.
In the beginning days of our opening, our menu was very limited and was small enough that we wrote it all on the blackboard every day and then was verbally recited table side by the waiter. As our menu developed and outgrew the blackboard, we went all high tech and typed our menu daily using an IBM Selectric Typewriter which is a menu production strategy I stole from the Courtyard Restaurant. This was before computers, printers and copy machines were commonplace, so we then had to run our typed-up menu down the street to McBride’s Paper Clip to use their copier services to have them print off menus for the night. This process was important to the development of our cuisine as I would have a daily menu meeting with the always revolving kitchen staff as we had to have all of our ducks in a row in order to go to press for the evening service. One of our objectives was to encourage the kitchen staff to have a voice as to what we cooked and we would try damn near anything, but at the end of the day, sales and popularity of each dish determined if it remained on the menu. We needed an even spread between the cooking stations, you didn’t want to over load the grill station while sauté was looking for more action and vice versa so this was another factor that we considered when creating our menu.
We always tried to keep things interesting for the diners by offering something they wouldn’t find anywhere else. For example, the rattlesnake cakes came about because one of our cooks cooked a great crab cake and we thought long and hard, how do we put our Texas spin on it? Well what is more Texas than rattlesnake, so we used rattlesnake from Sweetwater, Texas instead of crab and then we added cilantro and Serrano peppers and there you have it we created a unique dish. Would it sell, only time would tell…and yes it did, it sold like hot cakes. Locals would entertain their west coast, east coast, midwestern, etc. friends by treating them at Hudson’s to a never before seen rattlesnake cake. Sometimes they wouldn’t tell their dining companions that they were eating snake and spring it on them after their last delicious bite. One of our waiters would add a little extra atmosphere to the dish and shake a full toothpick holder behind his back as he served the dish and it did indeed sound like a rattle snake.
The New York Times took interest in the dish and printed the recipe and amplified its popularity. That was a lovely unexpected surprise for us, we didn’t see that coming.
We opened in my typical “shoestring style”, we never spent money we didn’t have. In all honesty, this stringent spending style was implemented and emphatically regulated by our bookkeeper and friend Collin Nelson. He kept me aware of our cash flow on a daily basis. I had known Collin since my Lakeway days so we had a longstanding relationship and with that there was trust. This was very important for the growth of the restaurant because it allowed me to be creative with the cuisine and not spend any of my mental energy on the finances.
We opened the restaurant with very little luxuries, i.e. we had a dirt parking lot and we had no air conditioning in the kitchen. Collin would announce when we had made enough cash to buy these luxury items and we added those things as our cash flow allowed.
The heat in the kitchen was intense because not only did we not have air conditioning in the kitchen, we had a wood burning grill pouring heat into the kitchen. We tried several different ingenious ideas to beat the heat, I placed a sprinkler on the roof to try and cool the kitchen down. Another one of my sweat driven brainstorms that I tried was to install a 4’ factory fan to lower the temperature, it simultaneously worked and backfired. The fan was so powerful that it sucked the swinging kitchen waiter doors open and pulled all of the air-conditioned air out of the dining room. NOT GOOD. The diners were sweating more than the cooks so obviously, I deserted that plan. We later installed 8 tons of air conditioning on top of the kitchen. One of the side benefits of real air conditioning was I didn’t have to go into the walk-in cooler to find the cooks. It was also better for business for the servers not to be serving food with sweat pouring off of their faces.
Smoke and fire were the cornerstone of our flavor and we quickly burned a hole in the firebox of our freestanding smoker. Instead of replacing the smoker, we built a stone smoke house which we flavored our food with applewood, cherrywood, grapevines, etc. Our main fuel was pecan wood but you have to be careful with pecan wood because it can either be too green or it can dry out quickly and be pithy.
We also had a live fire burning nightly in the grill in the kitchen which required its own hood system to satisfy the fire codes. The wood burning grill made a huge flavor difference. It took practice and a lot of trial and error to be a proficient grill master. Every fire has its own personality and the size and intensity of the heat are always different. It creates a hot spot which is great for searing and then you finish cooking by pulling the meat back from the hot spot. I walked into Jeffrey’s Restaurant kitchen and saw that they had two wire shelves mounted above the grill for the food to finish cooking. What a great idea! I had Abel (our handyman) mount two wire shelves above our grill and from that day forward, what a difference that made in controlling the end result. We were able to impart more smoke flavor while the cooking process was completed. It made cooking on an open fire much more manageable.
My philosophy was “if you work hard you play hard” and I was certainly working hard so my drinking and drugging were starting to get out of hand in an attempt to reward myself. My standard routine was to take a 24 oz. glass Grey Poupon jar to the bar, fill it with ice, and then filled with gin, that’s right I said filled with gin and then a whisper of tonic with a finishing squeeze of half of a lime and on especially busy nights I would rinse and repeat. This went on for years until I started day drinking, gin for breakfast tells you and everyone around you there might be a problem.
Fortunately for us we did not need to advertise and further, I can’t imagine that Collin would have ever signed off on that hefty expense. Food writers for the magazines and newspapers were generous and came to us. Mike Levy the owner of Texas Monthly Magazine came into Hudson’s and requested to see me. My chef coat was drenched with sweat and kitchen dirt (I was working the grill) and with a fresh grill towel over my shoulder I marched into the cool dining room. Mike said lots of positive things, but the thing I remember most was when he said “I want to meet the person we are going to make famous”. Texas Monthly Magazine gave us positive reviews from the start and we always got glowing reviews from their food editor, Pat Sharpe. Kitty Crider at the Austin American Statesman was a big fan and did many complimentary articles. At some point I lost track of all the articles, but one of those authors called me a rubicund chef. This was not a word I was familiar with so I went to the dictionary and looked it up. The definition said rubicund was an unusual redness from the overindulgence of food and drink. How did they know? Elaine Louie, a food writer from the New York Times wanted to do an article about a smoked antelope leg stuffed with chorizo that we did. She had already purchased her return flight and I was given the impression that she wanted to watch the dish from start to finish but she was under time restraints and therefore this all needed to be done in 3 hours or less. Knowing the power of The New York Times, of course l agreed. All went well. We built a roaring fire in the smoke house and went to the kitchen and did the stuffing and searing and then placed it in the smoke house. After placing the antelope in the smokehouse, Elaine and I retired to the lobby to continue the interview. The kitchen crew continued to throw more fuel on the already hot smokehouse fire because I had strongly stressed to them the importance of a very hot smoke house so that we could get the antelope smoked in our short time frame. We were in the middle of our interview with Elaine’s back to the outside garden area and the smoke house when I noticed the kitchen crew running to the smokehouse with the 4-gallon mayonnaise buckets filled with water 💦. The roof of the smoke house was ablaze. It was all I could do not to alert Elaine that my smoke house was on fire. The crew retrieved the antelope and put it in a hot oven inside. I explained to Elaine that to meet her timeline we needed to finish inside. The antelope was done and ever so tasty. Elaine never knew about the fire and the article was a huge success. Whew!
Like all chefs I got ideas from other restaurants and replicated the flavors when I got home. The Orange Ginger BBQ sauce was from a restaurant in Dallas called Dakota. It is a unique flavor that we used on many things over the years. It complimented our Coca Cola baby back ribs. We marinated the ribs in coke syrup before we smoked them and served them atop Orange Ginger BBQ Sauce. This is a sauce that we bottled and sold.
Here is the recipe. If it is too thick for you thin it out with water.
Ingredients
4 slices of bacon, frozen then ground to hamburger size in the food processor, use the S blade
1/3 cup minced onion
2 tablespoon minced garlic
½ cup minced fresh ginger
2 tablespoon cracked black pepper
1/3 cup dark brown sugar
3 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
1/3 cup concentrated (5 to1) orange juice
4 tablespoon rice wine vinegar
1 tablespoon Cholula hot sauce
¾ cup catsup
1 teaspoon sea salt
Method
Cook bacon and drain fat or leave it in your choice. I leave it in for more flavor.
Add the onion, garlic, ginger, cracked pepper and sweat until the onions are clear.
Add the brown sugar, Worcestershire, OJ, Cholula, vinegar and bring to boil or until the sugar blends.
Add the catsup and sea salt.
Adjust salt to taste.
Serve it on beef, game or seafood. It’s also great on shrimp 🦐.