TEXAS LIFESTYLE | HOT
For Monica Pope, food is the language
of family. The German-born chef grew up in southwest Houston with the bayou as her backyard, learning the art of cooking from her Czech grandmother, who sparked Pope’s love of food. As a teenager, Pope spent two summers “studying” with her in Kansas, learning about Czech food and family recipes. Nobody else in the family felt comfortable making the traditional dishes or taking over grandmother’s role, so it fell to Pope. The budding teenage chef told a friend that she was going to open a restaurant and change the way Houston eats. Indeed, she has. Her critically acclaimed restaurants — The Quilted Toque, t’afia, Beaver’s and Sparrow Bar + Cookshop — are among those that have set a new standard for dining in Houston. Pope is the only Texas woman named a Top 10 Best New Chef by Food & Wine magazine. She was a 2007 James Beard Award nominee, was named Best Chef of 2009 at the Houston Culinary Awards, and was a contestant on season two of the Bravo television show Top Chef Masters in 2010. Award-winning Chef Monica Pope opened her first restaurant in Houston in 1992.
Houston's
Photos by Deborah Smail
Monica Pope
What started in her grandmother’s kitchen went on to Prue Leith’s School of Food and Wine in London, where Pope earned her chef ’s title. She worked in Europe and San Francisco before returning home to Houston in 1992 to open her first restaurant, The Quilted Toque. “Most of my cooking career has not been about cooking,” Pope says. “Through food, I’ve always been searching for who I am, what I’m all about and what I’m supposed to do. My career has been about telling the stories behind the food.”
By Shelley Seale
local market and her restaurants, checking parties scheduled for the week, making food orders, texting instructions to her managers, answering emails and taking pictures. “Then I cook with people, and it’s awesome,” she says — clearly revealing the best part of her day. At Sparrow Bar + Cookshop, her newest restaurant, Pope creates daily menus from what is in season from local farmers and ranchers. “Ninety percent of the creative effort is already done by the farmer, cultivating and harvesting (at the right time) the food that grows well where you live.” Her digital cookbook, Eat Where Your Food Lives (available at www.ChefMonicaPope.com) aims to help the home cook with the remaining 10% effort that it takes to transform these raw ingredients into a memorable meal. She calls Houston a place of extreme opposites: a concrete jungle, a refinery coast and an air-conditioned oasis, all in one spot. At the same time, the city offers a unique, year-round growing season that produces a bounty of diverse food. For more than 13 years, she has worked to revive the true nature of Houston by supporting local farmers, ranchers and food producers, and helping found the popular Midtown Farmers Market. Pope is currently working on her first memoir entitled Eating Hope (and Other Things I’ve Had to Stomach), an insightful, poignant and humorous look at a woman’s place in the (restaurant) kitchen.
She calls her inventive cooking style “eat where your food lives.” “I’ve opened eight restaurants in 25 years. The focus has always been to change the way Houston eats — but I had to figure out what that change should be. My main challenge has always been managing the moving parts; and there are lots of moving parts in this business. Baz Luhrman talks about directing films and says it’s like ‘having 300 hands on a paintbrush.’ I can relate to that.” So what does a typical day in the life of Chef Monica Pope look like? She calls it a “clipboard life,” full of lists. She starts each day with a clean sheet, rewriting anything still remaining from the day before. Visits to the
Summer 2016 | texaslifestylemagazine.com 47