”Dallas' most highly rated restaurant is a highly personal project starring acclaimed chef Misti Norris that earns awards left and right, including multiple Tastemaker Award nominations. Norris is known for her enlightened take on cooking, using the whole animal, pickling, and uber-crafted dishes.”
Misti Norris’ landmark moved this summer from its original digs in a 90-year-old gas station to a shopping plaza in Lakewood. Yes, this meant Petra lost its BYOB status and cozy, DIY dining room. But the larger kitchen crew can serve bigger crowds and use new toys, including a rotisserie smoker. The co*cktail program makes just as much use of foraged, wild, or fermented ingredients as the food service, and eclectic, affordable wine bottles perfectly match Norris’ food.
When Misti Norris decided to move her restaurant, Petra and the Beast, from its original location in a renovated gas station in East Dallas to the home of a former barbecue spot in Lakewood, she not only increased the size of her dining room significantly. She also gained a much bigger kitchen and two large smokers that were left behind. And rumor has it that something else got left behind, too.
The rebirth of this nose-to-tail restaurant in a larger space affords chef Misti Norris a bigger audience for her imaginative, elaborately composed dishes. Melding fermented, sweet, salty, earthy, and umami flavors, Norris’s creations could surprise and delight even jaded diners.
That smell of rainfall on dry earth—you know that smell—has a name: petrichor. It’s the smell of spring in Texas when the soil is giving garlic mustard and daylilies and wild onions. It’s a smell that so captivates chef Misti Norris that she named her Dallas restaurant for it, modeled her philosophies after the word’s poetic spirit.
Petra and the Beastis 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.
Misti Norris is a James Beard-nominated chef and was one of Food & Wine's Best New Chefs of 2019. She's also the owner and executive chef of Petra and the Beast, where she has put forth her "farm, forage, fermentation, fire" philosophy to great effect. Her other ongoing project is Stepchild, which is the first entry into Attalie, The Exchange's rotating chef concept, bringing her fresh spin on French Acadian cuisine. Her use of local ingredients prepared and presented in a unique, fresh manner shines at both locations.
I’m going to step out on a limb and say that most folks out there don’t start salivating when they think of a fish in a jar, flesh breaking down, fermenting with koji and other unknown ingredients evolving daily towards its final destination of becoming a sauce. And perhaps the thought of raw meat hanging in a hidden fridge for months on end doesn’t make you immediately reach for a fork and knife. But if you’ve ever had Misti Norris’s food, it’s no secret that with the proper care and attention, these methods produce some of the deepest, most interesting and satisfying flavors you could imagine. Now, not just anyone can pull off these techniques.
