Ruben Navarro

My grandmother, Consuelo Navarro, made tamales every Christmas in a kitchen in San Antonio that was roughly the size of a modern walk-in closet. She started three days before Christmas and she did not stop until there were enough for the entire family, which was forty-two people by the time I was old enough to count. She used lard. She used real lard, from an actual pig, and when my cousin’s wife once suggested substituting vegetable shortening, my grandmother looked at her with the expression of a woman who has been personally insulted and said, “You can do that at your house.”

I tell you this because it explains everything about how I think about food. Good food is not about ingredients or technique or presentation. Good food is about whether the person who made it cared enough to make it right. My grandmother cared. The line cook at the Waffle House on I-35 outside Waco who makes your hash browns scattered, smothered, and covered at two in the morning, that person cares too. The difference between a restaurant that is worth your time and one that is not has almost nothing to do with the price and almost everything to do with whether someone in that kitchen is paying attention.

I grew up in San Antonio, went to the University of Texas at Austin, and spent my twenties not knowing what I wanted to do, which in retrospect was the most useful education I received. I worked construction. I tended bar for two years at a place on South Congress that no longer exists. I drove a delivery truck. I cooked at three different restaurants, none of them good, all of them instructive. I learned what a commercial kitchen smells like at one in the morning when the fryer oil needs changing and nobody wants to change it. This knowledge has been more useful to my criticism than anything I learned in college.

I started writing about food in 1992, almost by accident. A friend who edited a small Austin magazine asked me to review a new barbecue place that had opened on the east side. I wrote eight hundred words. He ran them. People wrote letters. I wrote another review, and another, and by 1994 I was the magazine’s food writer, which paid just enough to eat at the restaurants I was reviewing as long as I did not order dessert.

In 1998, Texas Monthly hired me as a contributing food writer. I spent fourteen years writing for them, covering restaurants across the state and eventually across the South. I reviewed fine dining and I reviewed taco trucks and I reviewed the Cracker Barrel on Highway 71 outside La Grange and I gave all of them the same respect, which is to say I evaluated whether they were doing what they were trying to do and whether they were doing it well. A Cracker Barrel that delivers exactly what a Cracker Barrel promises is a successful restaurant. A forty-dollar-a-plate place that serves you a beautiful plate of food with no flavor is a failure. I have never understood critics who cannot hold both of these ideas at the same time.

My wife, Elena, is a retired elementary school teacher from Corpus Christi who has eaten more restaurant meals with me than any human being should have to eat and who can tell you within thirty seconds of sitting down whether the hostess has been working a double shift. We have been married thirty-nine years. Our son, Daniel, is a physical therapist in Houston. Our daughter, Marisol, manages a restaurant in Austin, which makes family dinners simultaneously wonderful and professionally complicated.

I live in San Antonio, where I grew up. I eat out four or five times a week. I drive hours for a meal if someone tells me it is worth the drive, and half the time they are right, and the other half of the time the drive itself was worth it. I write about restaurants the way I think about them: as places where people feed other people, which is one of the oldest and most important things human beings do, and which deserves to be written about with generosity and honesty in equal measure.