Jon Bonnell

WATERS RESTAURANT 301 Main Street, Fort Worth waterstexas.com

Jon Bonnell, the chef and owner of Waters Restaurant in Fort Worth, gives us his take on the best dining options and flavours of the region.

Your name keeps popping up when discussing great food in Fort Worth. As someone who has worked in the area for a while, what do you think are the quintessential flavours of Fort Worth?

I think the great flavours of Fort Worth begin with true and honest ingredients, bold and complex seasonings, and straightforward cooking techniques such as live-fire. In this city, restaurants that make it can last for many years. We don’t seem to do that well with the super-trendy movements here in Cowtown. If the flavours are true and honest, they will hold up over the test of time. We can get creative, and we can be bold, but cutting-edge isn’t typically our style. Fort Worth flavours will taste just as good five years from now as they do today. I think that our palate is a bit of a mix between the Southwest, Tex-Mex, Deep South, and even our Louisiana neighbours. We borrow flavours from all of our friends and put them together with ingredients all our own from the vast and diverse Texas food scene.

Where do you source most of your local ingredients from?

We have been on the look-out for new farms and ranches ever since I started sourcing local ingredients back in 2000. We use as many Texas products as I can find that are of high quality and distinct character. Today, one of the best resources is a group called farmtotabletx.com. They put together a fresh list every week and they deliver to our area twice a week. It’s like a co-op for small farms and ranches in Texas. Of course, we still go directly to many of the farms and ranches that we’ve used for years as well.

Since visiting Fort Worth four years ago there seems to have been an explosion of different styles of dining opening up, and new areas of the city keep appearing. Why do you think this is?

Our city is growing by leaps and bounds, and so is our culinary scene. I think I first noticed a Thai restaurant maybe six years ago. Today I can name at least seven. Everything from ethnic cuisine to local farm-totable options are popping up everywhere. Locals here love to support the independent restaurateurs, and have been fantastic about supporting the ‘mom and pop’ concepts over the chains.

What are a few must-try menu items at Waters Restaurant?

If you are an oyster lover, the ‘Dirty Dozen’ is a must. We bring in at least six different varieties of oyster every day, and the dirty dozen is a perfect sampling of a pair of each one. My favourite oyster sauce is what we call our ‘Southwestern Mignonette’. For lunch, I’m a sucker for the Crab Cake BLT or the Texas Crawfish Roll (think lobster roll, but with a Texas flair). At dinner, I love our Creole Arctic Char with Crawfish Ravigote. The Crab Cakes are also very hard to resist.

Apart from your own restaurant, what eateries would you recommend to visitors to Fort Worth?

My favorite dining spots in Fort Worth are Ellerbe Fine Foods, Grace, Fixture, Righteous Foods, Michaels Cuisine, and Reata Restaurant.