“I feel like I’ve been put through a blender!” 27-year-old Grady Spears told Texas Monthly in 1996, shortly after his Reata restaurant opened in Fort Worth and the already famous master of cowboy cuisine dished up exotic fare such as quail tostados and cabrito (kid goat) tacos to as many as 600 patrons a night.
Today, at 40, Spears has escaped the whirlwind and is right where he wants to be, with a modest restaurant and a devoted following, not far from his home in Fort Worth.
“I’ve just taken a step back,” says Spears, who opened Grady’s on Forest Park Boulevard in Fort Worth last March. “I like this small, intimate dining room and I like the one-on-one focus with the staff and with the customers.”
Grady’s is not far from the site of a long since shuttered eatery where Spears bussed tables at 18, while trying to break into business as a cattle buyer.
“My idea was that I didn’t need college,” explains Spears, who worked for a Fort Worth cattle broker while he was in high school. “I’d be a cattle buyer for the rest of my life like all the guys I looked up to.”
High ideals and limited funds didn’t bode well for Spears and cattle buying, but he never lost his love for the Western lifestyle. After a year spent in Houston managing a vegetarian restaurant for family friends, he landed in the Big Bend area of West Texas, where he would soon bring national acclaim to the Gage Hotel in Marathon, population 500.
“I had incredible resources from the farmers and ranchers, people who cared more about their product than any sales people in the world,” says Spears, rationalizing his success as a tenderfoot in the competitive food industry. “The cowboys came in and cooked meats for me; an old chuck wagon cook made all the breads for me every night; cowboys’ wives came in and waited on tables.
“Even today, if you eat a chicken fried steak here, it comes locally raised and locally butchered.”
By the time Spears opened the Reata in Fort Worth, he had received rave reviews from food and travel critics nationwide. “Like cabrito, just about everything on Reata’s menu sounds like something an old cowhand might cook up if he’d been lucky enough to possess Spear’s creative streak and network of purveyors,” wrote National Geographic Traveler.
“Luck” is a word the affable Spears often uses when discussing his career – that and loyalty, as it applies to staff, some of whom have been with him for nearly 20 years. He has also published eight lavishly illustrated cookbooks
“I really fell into something and was very lucky,” he adds. “I had a lot of people around me that were the real deals. I just got tagged the real deal and I couldn’t believe it. It’s kind of like having a horse. I found some people that believed in me and let me have full rein and run with it at an early age.”