I Thought Fermentation Was a Tired Restaurant Trend, And Then I Ate At Petra and the Beast
This is Highly Recommend, a column dedicated to our very opinionated editors’ favorite things to eat, drink, and buy.
Petra and the Beast is a no-frills spot in a neighborhood of Dallas I had never heard of (called Old East Dallas) until I entered this place into Google Maps. Keep in mind: I am from Dallas. But it’s also like no other restaurant I’ve ever eaten at. Here, in this city of flashy Tex-Mex joints and big box chains, is a place where the main event is the inventive things in jars that sit idly on shelves lining the restaurants. They are concoctions sprung from the mind of chef/owner Misti Norris, who fell in love with fermentation as a kid—she had good family and friends who loved pickling and preserving all kinds of vegetables and seafood.
On a recent night at Petra and the Beast, there was one jar containing lilac bitters, another labeled “mustang sunflower soda,” and yet another housing differently colored carrots marinating in an herb-y brine. The results of these fermentation experiments are what give brightness and complexity to the restaurant’s burnt potato terrine, crispy chicken feet, and malfatti with pork ragout. The short chalkboard menu changes frequently, but it’s usually broken down into “Meatums,” or meats, “Noods” (you can figure that one out), and anything else that Norris happens to be excited about—and pretty much everything features some kind of fermented element. Here, Norris is testing the bounds of fermentation, with wildly flavorful consequences. Case in point: She told me that she recently preserved Texas potatoes with shio koji, garlic, snapper bone salt (yes, you can apparently make salt out of fish bones), and shrimp powder. “The result was a bottarga-ish texture, super smoky, fishy, dried truffle looking thing,” she says. Yeah, I’d eat that.
