Photo by Kathy Tran
It’s a Tuesday afternoon. Misti Norris is elbows-deep breaking down a pig in the kitchen of Petra and the Beast.
This particular pig is marked for aging. Depending on the cut, it’ll cure for two to three weeks before aging and drying for another eight or nine months. Norris puts aside the riblets to marinate for that Wednesday’s family meal.
Norris, a semi-self-taught butcher, has been breaking down pigs since her time at the now-shuttered New American restaurant FT33.
“I feel like there are certain things in your career that just clicked to you, and you have a mind for it,” she says. “And I felt like that was one of those things that just made sense in my mind.”
Almost every ounce of any pig will be used in some way, whether it appears as a potato salad lonza (cured meat obtained from the lower back of pigs) or chocolate lardo (salume made by curing strips of fatback). There’s stock to be made and bones to be bleached for restaurant décor.
“I would not say we’re zero waste,” she says. “I would say we’re low waste, for sure.”
Located in the former Lakewood Smokehouse space near Abrams and Gaston, this version of Petra and the Beast has green velvet booths, a long countertop for tasting and a full bar.
It’s a long way from the BYOB pop-up that launched in an old gas station in 2018. Norris, who lives within walking distance, hasn’t changed the founding principle of her restaurant — thoughtful food with a fine dining foundation. Her trademark emphasis on foraged, fermented, locally produced and sustainable is found everywhere from the food to the décor.
Everything is sourced from vendors within three hours of Dallas. Foraged items are picked by Norris far outside the city — obviously nowhere near White Rock Lake “for so many reasons.” Bread and pasta are made from scratch and every food item is processed in house. Even the skins of the onions are dried and pulverized into allium powder.
You’re not getting an extra dirty martini with blue cheese olives here. There are no olives at the bar. Norris hasn’t been able to source them locally for five years. Instead, fermented blueberries that mimic the flavor are used. No limes, either. And if something tastes like coconut, it’s most likely processed fig leaf, which there’s plenty of around here.
It’s probably the way farm-to-table should function.
“But I hate that term,” Norris says. “It’s been so overutilized to the point where it doesn’t mean anything anymore … But it takes a lot to actually follow that — to really do it.”
Petra and the Beast is quite different from the kitchens Norris trained in. She started working in a retirement home kitchen when she was 16 years old.
“At that point, I was just trying to work in a kitchen and get experience because nobody else wanted to hire me,” she says.
After a very brief stint at Rockfish as “a terrible server,” she worked at Spike, which was located at Mockingbird Station before closing. Around the same time, Norris enrolled in culinary school but dropped out in her second semester. She felt that learning on the job from experienced line cooks and chefs was a better fit.
A pivotal moment in her career was when she started working at Anthony Bombaci’s version of Nana at the Hilton Anatole.
“[It] was probably the most important kitchen job that I had,” she says. “It was the first restaurant that I worked at that really pushed me and made it possible for me to see food outside the box. Anthony was just so extremely creative.”
The critic-favorite white tablecloth restaurant was in a hotel, but not a hotel restaurant, if that makes any sense. Decorated by pieces from Trammell and Margaret Crow’s famed Asian art collection and views of Dallas, the 28-year-old restaurant had a string of revered chefs at the helm. Bombaci’s menu featured items such as scallops with celery root, green olives and capers, or slow-roasted duck with beets, oranges, tangerine and mahon cheese.
“[He was] not hard to work with,” she says. “But he just pushed because he wanted you to be better. Things had to be right.”
Nana was replaced with steakhouse Ser in 2012. Before the restaurant closed, Bombaci told Matt McCallister he needed to hire Norris. McCallister – cooked with Stephen Pyles, James Beard-nominated, Homewood — was opening his first solo restaurant FT33 in the Design District at 31 years old. Norris started as a line cook before becoming the sous chef within a year.
“This is where it gets kind of weird because it was a quick jump,” she says.
Her next stop was the executive chef job at Small Brewpub in Oak Cliff.
“That’s like when we first started getting attention for ‘Oh, full sustainability’ and all that stuff,” she says. “I finally had the freedom to do the food I really wanted to do.”
Photo by Kathy Tran
She took a break from the Dallas dining scene and did some consulting work in New York. While hosting tasting and pairing pop-ups for a liquor brand up and down the East Coast, Norris started thinking about owning her own place.
But banks wouldn’t give her a loan, and she didn’t have much money in the bank. Then she got a check for $10,000 for an event she worked.
She went to LiftFund, which specialized in funding small businesses and got another $10,000. She used about $5,000 of the money to cover her living expenses.
$15,000.
That’s what it took to open her restaurant. Petra comes from “petrichor,” the smell of the first rain after a dry, hot spell, and “beast” is, well, the butchering part.
“I would never suggest anyone open a restaurant the way I did,” she says.
The original Petra was in a 1932 filling station in Old East Dallas. The revolving, curated menu was on chalkboard, and food was served on paper boats. Plus, she didn’t have a dishwasher.
“It was not necessarily what we wanted to do, but there were a lot of decisions made out of pure necessity,” she says. “We started doing a tasting. Every week, we buy like another table, or we buy chairs, so we just kept building as we had the money.”
People started talking about the charcuterie and all of the things Norris managed to ferment or forage in a restaurant that didn’t charge more than $15 for an item. Food & Wine listed her on their “Best New Chef” list, and she was a semifinalist for a James Beard award, both in 2019 — within a year of opening.
It wasn’t a place for champagne and caviar.
“People started showing up in like ballgowns. And I am like, ‘Whoa, this is super chill,’” she says. “It was thought-out food but very casual. You don’t need to be intimidated to come.”
Though her restaurant is certainly photogenic and there’s care to plating, she doesn’t quite care for the frills. Norris went to a tasting menu at Canlis, a 70-year-old fine dining establishment in Seattle, in a hoodie and sneakers. One of her favorite things to eat in the city is Cold Beer Co’s chili cheese dog or The Heights’ pork chop or wedge salad. Her favorite food she remembers making as a child with her younger brother was toasted white bread with an American single melted in the microwave. Her favorite food her MawMaw made was soft scrambled eggs.
Lafayette, Beaumont, Port Neches, New Iberia. She’s Dallas-born and Houston-bred, but her family is from all over Louisiana. Food is just part of the culture. Her grandmother had a garden with fresh cantaloupe, tomatoes and chickens in her backyard. MawMaw taught her how to pickle. Sundays in her father’s house were for chores. But it was also for playing blues on 90.1, and making roast, rice and gravy.
“Those memories and that feeling – all the good ones are surrounded by food or associated with food, so that was a big part of why I really wanted to start cooking,” Norris says. “So that I can almost have that power to share that with other people and maybe make other people have those same memories.”
Her father, a master plumber who loved food, would occasionally trade jobs at restaurants for food so that Norris and her brother could broaden their palettes.
“His goal was always for us to not be close-minded,” she says.
Yes, she loved cheese toast, but she was also eating chicken liver mousse when she was young.
Perhaps it’s why, on occasion, chicken liver mousse makes it onto the 38-year-old Norris’ ever-evolving menu. Incidentally, a family with a child who loves chicken liver mousse have become her regulars.
“And I love that so much,” she says.
The menu isn’t really seasonal. Texas produce has many sub-seasons, and the Petra team adjusts the menu with rhyme and reason, but not with a specific rhythm. There’s a good chance an item you ate two weeks ago isn’t available the next time you dine.
Everything under the “Noods” category is under $28, from the chèvre caramelli pasta dish featuring eggplant three ways – buttered shoyu eggplant, eggplant skin licorice and fermented eggplant – to the farfaella with smoked corn vermouth crème, summer tomato jam and saffron pickled corn. And yes, the saffron is from Texas.
Brunch, a new addition to the menu, features gnocchi French toast with Texas honey smoked ham, whipped ricotta and dill pollen. There’s sausage, egg and cheese on the menu, but it’s coming with blazama, a Turkish flat bread, arugula, and smoked garlic and chive emulsion. The eggs are soft scrambled, but it’s not MawMaw’s recipe – she died before Norris figured out how to make them the way her grandmother did.
Everything but the charcuterie is priced under the $30 benchmark.
“I just always want things to be accessible,” Norris says. “ And for people to try something new and that purely comes from growing up the way I did.”
The restaurant is only open for dinner Wednesday-Sunday and brunch on weekends – seven services total. The food cost is low, but it’s more labor intensive. There’s no plans to add lunch.
“My team works so much as it is, I wouldn’t put that on them,” she says.
Norris’ greatest splurges are on her staff – paying them more and figuring out ways to take care of them. Buying large quantities of ingredients, like 140 pounds of blueberries, is another splurge.
“We’re doing well, which [I am] super-grateful, but I think that has a lot to do with the neighborhood,” Norris says. “We’ve had nothing but really great clientele and really great guests, and the neighborhood is amazing.”
You can wear shorts and flip-flops. Norris doesn’t care.
Just have an open mind. And come taste the chicken liver mousse.
Petra and the Beast, 1901 Abrams Rd, 214.484.2326, petraandthebeast.com
