SAN ANTONIO — If you asked someone from Tucson what is the Lone Star State’s ultimate foodie town, they’d likely pick Austin.
But when it was considering its second American Creative City of Gastronomy designation two years after making Tucson the first in late 2015, UNESCO looked south, 70 miles down Interstate 35, to San Antonio.
“We’ve got this really unique cuisine,” said Colleen Swain, director of the World Heritage Office in San Antonio that oversees the city’s UNESCO designations.
Yes, designations.
When it was awarded the City of Gastronomy nod on Oct. 31, 2017, it was two years into its UNESCO World Heritage Site designation acknowledging its historic Spanish colonial missions. Swain’s office is caretaker of both.
While Tucson’s UNESCO designation is becoming a tourism driver, San Antonio’s is seen as a complement to its booming tourism market that boasts 30 million annual visitors.
Arguably the largest driver is the Alamo, where Davy Crockett and James Bowie died fighting the Texas Revolution’s pivotal Battle of the Alamo in 1836. Adding the UNESCO gastronomy designation to the equation won’t necessarily move that needle much, Swain said, but it does add to the overall visitor experience.
“We are not really leveraging it to bring more visitors, but what we are doing is telling that story of our food,” she said.
Part of that Texas story is being told by a former Tucsonan.
Connecting the City of Gastronomy dots
Pullman Market has a fishmonger and whole-animal butcher shop, as well as a bakery and four signature restaurants, all run by former Tucsonan Kevin Fink and his partners.
There were lines of people greeting Kevin Fink and his partners on a pleasant Tuesday morning in April.
San Antonians were finally going to see what all the fuss had been about.
They had watched workers coming in and out for 18 months, transforming the old Samuels Glass Company headquarters on Newell Avenue into the behemoth Pullman Market.
Samuels Glass, which had been in that cavernous building since 1948, left for bigger digs in 2017 and its new owners, the local investment group Silver Ventures, had announced plans two years later to create more food-centric development. They were looking to complement their landmark Pearl entertainment hub, with its varied restaurants and artisan shops, hotels and apartments, two blocks away.
But throughout the pandemic, that building not far from the San Antonio River Walk stood idle.
Fink, who grew up in Tucson, and his Emmer & Rye Hospitality Group partners had a plan that fit Silver Ventures’ goal: a culinary market that would rely on local farmers, ranchers and artisans. It would have restaurants and a bar, a coffee shop and areas where the community could gather.
They had intended to begin work in 2021 but the pandemic pushed that back. When they were finally finished last spring, they had created the largest culinary market in the Southwest: 40,000 square feet of curated food and specialty items from 200 local vendors.
They tapped small area farms for fresh-picked colorful peppers, greens and fruits to stock a sprawling produce section. Local ranchers brought fish and meat for the store’s whole-animal butcher shop.
They handcraft artisanal cheeses and make use of the butcher shop scraps for handmade bone broth and pork lard.
Workers at the in-house bakery produce artisanal breads and decadent pastries, along with handcrafted fresh pasta; the tortilleria near the meat counter specializes in Texas’ preferred flour tortillas.
The behemoth Pullman Market sources most of its goods, from fresh produce and meat to artisan toiletries, from San Antonio makers, farmers and ranchers.
Locally-crafted toiletries and household goods are next to a sizeable wine and beer shop specializing in fine wines and regional and unique craft beers. Nearby, stacks of firewood frame the entrance to Fife & Farro, the wood-fired sourdough pizzeria that also serves heritage grain pastas.
It is one of Pullman’s four restaurants, all operated by Fink and his partners. The other restaurants include Mezquite, specializing in grilled meats and Sonoran-style Mexican food, and Nicosi, a decadent dessert bar helmed by Chef Tavel Bristol-Joseph, who had worked at Fink’s father’s Tucson restaurant Hacienda del Sol. Ten years ago, he followed Fink to Austin where they opened their first restaurant, the much-celebrated Emmer & Rye.
Earlier this month, the group opened the fourth Pullman restaurant, the upscale steakhouse Isidore.
Pullman Market also has five grab-and-go counters offering everything from burgers and ceviche to breakfast sandwiches and ice cream.
When you walk past the bakery at Pullman Market you might be tempted to grab a fresh pastry or loaf of artisanal bread.
Customers at Pullman’s restaurants taste Texas in the smoky rich barbacoa tacos made with Sonoran wheat tortillas or the dry-aged Wagyu-style ribeye served with beeswax potatoes. Bite into a peach picked that morning from a farm a few miles in the countryside and you taste the unbelievable newness of a Texas summer day.
“Food is really meant to kind of comfort people, but also show them and educate them about where they’re coming from and where they’re going,” Fink said.
The Pullman Market is the foodie paradise Fink had envisioned, a culinary destination that sends a message of sustainability, quality and building community that Fink first practiced at home in Tucson.
Taking lessons from Tucson to Texas
Former Tucsonan Kevin Fink answers a customer's question at Pullman Market in early May. The market is billed as the Southwest's largest culinary market.
Fink, who grew up in his family’s Hacienda del Sol restaurant in Tucson’s foothills, developed his food philosophy as a teen working in eateries in Italy before landing a staging role at Denmark’s Michelin-starred Noma.
He also worked at San Francisco’s legendary The French Laundry before coming home to Tucson to helm his family’s Italian restaurant Zona 78.
It was there that he became an early and ardent champion of farm-to-table, sustainability and all the other culinary buzz words driving today’s food culture. In the year before he left Tucson for Austin in 2013, he hosted a couple of “Farm to Fork” pop-up dinners at Zona 78 that convinced him he needed to leave in order to grow.
“I loved Tucson,” he said, “but it was a hard market for me at the time to do more elevated food.”
When he and wife/partner Alicynn were looking for a place to land, they wanted to “find a city that was going to be really similar” to Tucson, he said.
They found that in Austin.
Fink’s maiden restaurant, Emmer & Rye, offered him the chance to put Berkshire pork with blackened apple barbecue on the same menu as locally sourced Blackjack Point Oysters served with smoked trout roe and grilled watermelon and chili mignonette.
Since opening in 2015, Fink has been nominated twice for the James Beard Award for Best Chef Texas for his work at Emmer & Rye.
Emmer & Rye Hospitality Group has grown to six concepts in Austin including its newest, the Caribbean restaurant Canje inspired by Bristol-Joseph’s native Guyana.
Austin-based Emmer & Rye Hospitality Group is comprised of former Tucsonans including Tavel Bristol-Joseph, left, Alicynn Fink, back right, and Kevin Fink, front right. The management group also includes from left, Berty Richter and Rand Egbert, with Pullman Market Chief Financial Officer Tom Schnuck, center.
Even in those early Texas days, Fink had an eye on San Antonio. In 2022, he and his partners launched their modern Mediterranean grill Ladino at Pearl. They expanded their Pearl footprint with an outpost of their hearth-anchored grill house Hestia.
Pullman Market is technically part of Pearl, the sprawling 23-acre complex of shops, restaurants, bars and residences developed by Silver Ventures. Both ventures are just north of downtown and within walking distance of the popular San Antonio River Walk and its dozens of restaurants, shops and watering holes.
Defining Texas cuisine
San Antonio’s culinary diversity is on display all along the River Walk, 15 miles of paved pathways running alongside the San Antonio River and cutting a 5-mile swath through downtown. It is here that you will find more than 100 restaurants, from noted San Antonio chef Johnny Hernandez‘s Mexican-inspired burgers at Burgerteca to San Antonio barbecue fave The County Line.
It also connects to the Pearl, formerly home for more than 100 years to the Pearl Brewing Company.
Silver Ventures bought the property in 2002 and over the course of a dozen years, repurposed the old buildings into shops, condos and restaurants that celebrate San Antonio chefs whose diverse cuisines tell the story of the Alamo City.
The story in a lot of ways mirrors that of its sister City of Gastronomy, Tucson. Both share a lot of similarities, from the centuries-old heritage and traditions passed on by early Native Americans to influences from the shared borderlands between Mexico and the U.S.
San Antonio’s food culture also borrows influences from Spain, which arrived in the Spanish Colonial era to establish missions including the five — Mission Concepcion, Mission San Jose, Mission San Juan, Mission Espada, Mission San Antonio de Valero and Rancho de las Cabras — that are part of the city’s World Heritage Site designation; and Germans, who arrived in the rugged borderlands in the 1880s.
The Germans, in fact, are indirectly responsible for a staple in Texas’s signature Tex-Mex cuisine. German settlers to the area brought with them white flour, which proved more adaptable than corn for tortillas. Flour lasted all day whereas corn tortillas were best if eaten right away.
“Our cuisine is largely shaped by the rugged terroir that is around us,” said San Antonio native Hernandez, one of the city’s pre-eminent chefs and one of the architects of its City of Gastronomy application. “Parts of Texas look like a desert. The winters are harsh and the summers are harsher. … Our cuisine is shaped by that rugged terrain and that hard life on the cattle trails that Texas is known for. The cuisine has to be mobile.”
Hernandez, who like Fink grew up in his father’s restaurant, was classically trained at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York. He worked at the Mirage in Las Vegas and the Four Seasons in Santa Barbara before returning home to San Antonio in 1994 to launch his international-leaning True Flavors Catering. He also worked for a number of upscale San Antonio restaurants.
His father, who died when Hernandez was in his first semester at the Culinary Institute, had always told him, “I don’t want you cooking Mexican food,” Hernandez recalled.
“When you’re a kid, you listen out of respect,” he said, but life sometimes sends you down a different path.
Hernandez took that path a few years after launching his catering business. He started accompanying his mother to Mexico, where she did volunteer missionary work, and before he knew it he was spending summers in Central Mexico. That’s where he discovered the glory of interior Mexican food. It wasn’t the borderland Mexican he was used to in Texas, or the Tex-Mex introduced by Tejanos — Texans of Mexican descent.
Tejanos relied more on flour tortillas given corn’s short growing season and flour’s shelf-stability, grilled meats, yellow cheese and queso. Tex-Mex employs the cheese and chile sauce as a dressing for enchiladas, tamales and burritos, as well as a chip-dip. Breakfast burritos have long been a staple and ask almost anyone in Texas and they will tell you they are a birthright.
Through his trips to Mexico, Hernandez came to appreciate true Mexican food and turned his professional focus on the genre. In 2010, he launched La Gloria at Pearl, which focused on Mexican street food. He now has five locations statewide (two of them in San Antonio) as well as three locations of Burgerteca, two Fruteria tapas restaurants, a tortilleria, five La Gloria Margarita trucks that he launched during the pandemic and a pair of La Gloria food trucks.
But his crowning glory is a work in progress that ties in with San Antonio’s City of Gastronomy designation.
Restoring the past for a view of the future
Hernandez was tapped in 2017 to develop new restaurants and programming at Maverick Plaza in La Villita Historic Arts Village, a 300-plus-year-old enclave of historic buildings along the edge of the River Walk.
The City of San Antonio since 2017 has invested $5.6 million in renovations to Maverick Plaza and through a public/private partnership between the city and the San Antonio City of Gastronomy, has tasked Hernandez with bringing restaurants in.
San Antonio chef Johnny Hernandez is leading the San Antonio City of Gastronomy’s efforts to create a culinary destination at the historic Maverick Plaza at La Villita.
Maverick Plaza for centuries served as an artisan hub, with galleries and shops that nurtured the careers of artists. But more than that, it was a community gathering place.
Hernandez and his Grupo La Gloria has reportedly pledged $7.7 million to the project, which will bring three restaurants showcasing the city’s cuisine that includes Mexican, Spanish, German and French heritages. The plan, which he said could take years to build out, also includes creating an outdoor demonstration kitchen to focus on historic cooking traditions.
“I think it helps us amplify a lot of what I think is important that people understand … the piece of history that formed our cuisines,” he said. “If Spain had never arrived, if the Old World had not arrived, Mexican food would not be what it is.”
Swain said the UNESCO gastronomy designation along with Pearl, Pullman Market and Maverick Plaza puts the spotlight on San Antonio’s vibrant culinary scene and offers credibility to critics who see the cuisine as only Tex-Mex.
“We are the second largest city in Texas, seventh largest in the nation, but we are still not on a lot of people’s radars for food,” she said. “And they come and they are just blown away.”
“I think our cuisine has always been misunderstood or underappreciated and it has a little to do with the commercialization of Mexican food,” Hernandez added. “This is a validation that our cuisine is authentic and rich.”
Kevin Fink and his partners created the biggest culinary market in the Southwest in San Antonio, Texas, the second city to be named a UNESCO City of Gastronomy. The Pullman is one of the anchors of the designation.
On their first Saturday night, Fink said they served 1,500 diners between the two restaurants that opened in April.
“It’s just been nuts,” Fink said, sitting at a table in the Pullman one Friday in early May. “I’m looking at how San Antonio and Tucson are so similar. I’m looking at how they are taking their UNESCO Creative City of Gastronomy and turning them into more than just a designation. … And you can feel the energy has changed a lot. This was an amazing community before, but the trajectory of how it’s growing is really exciting.”
The Mission Garden Project is run by the non-profit, Friends of Tucson's Birthplace. Located west of downtown, it features Sonoran Desert-adapted fruit orchards and vegetable gardens interpreting 4,000 years of agriculture in Tucson. Video by: Mamta Popat / Arizona Daily Star