“I fantasized about it,” Perini says. “I wanted to cater the White House
so bad.” So badly, in fact, that during an unrelated prior trip to D.C. he went to the White House to conduct a bit of research. “I ‘stepped off’ the gates just to measure and see if I could fit my wagon and stuff inside,” Perini laughs. Years earlier, while working at a jewelry store in Dallas, Perini and his boss heard the awful news of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination as it happened — the store TVs blared in the showroom and sirens wailed outside.
“My boss thought there’d be looting,” Perini says. “We had to take all the expensive jewelry and put it in the safe. I was taking stuff out of the window and started seeing people running down the street.” When he stepped out the door to see what the melee was about, a block down the street, at the Texas Theatre, “the police were taking someone out of the theatre and putting him in a police car.”
Perini didn’t know at the time he’d witnessed the capture of Lee Harvey Oswald. But along with everyone else, he felt the weight of that
It’s not easy owning a restaurant miles from the nearest relevant highway. But in 1995, things started to click. Perini and his staff were invited to cook at the James Beard House, the culinary equivalent of playing Carnegie Hall. And while it’s an impressive honor, it was also a significant undertaking — costing Perini about $10,000 to pull off. To justify the expenditure, he sent some tenderloin to magazines and newspapers in the area. The reviews were over the moon. In fact, the New York Times asked for seconds (a request Perini initially thought was a scam). Perini had no idea at the time, but the paper was actually running a contest to determine its mail order gift of 1995.
Out of 2,000 entries, Perini’s Mesquite Smoked Peppered Beef Tenderloin was declared the winner. The problem was Perini didn’t have a mail order company or a 1-800 number in place, small details that caused brief moments of terror.
But Perini figured it out, and to this day the Perini Ranch Steakhouse ships out about 19,000 tenderloins every year. At $120 per steak, that’s a far
WHERE’S THE BEEF? Bringing his signature chuck wagons to the White House presented one poten- tial problem: would the wagons fit through the gates? Perini himself measured the entrance so he and his cowboys could cook for the leader of the free world.
terrible day. “Everybody was in shock,” he says. “The city of Dallas got the blame. And the city was just crying.” Eventually Perini moved away
from the city and got his start in the ranching business, taking over for his father, who passed away in 1965. He started cooking on an old chuck wagon the ranch had on hand, and eventually
catered for cowboys on nearby ranches. One of those nearby ranches was the 45,000-acre Lambshead Ranch
in Albany, run by his dear friend Watt Matthews. “Watt was my mentor,” Perini told Texas Monthly in 2015. “He graduated from Princeton. He had more girlfriends than I had. He loved rare meat and bourbon whiskey, and had never been married. I thought, ‘This is my man. This was the pinnacle of pinnacles.’”
Watt also had some harsh truths for a struggling Perini, who was trying his best to raise cattle. “He told me, ‘Tom, you could do more for the cattle industry by cooking beef than by raising it,’” Perini recalls. Just like that, Perini Ranch Steakhouse was born in 1983. And it still took 12 tough years — some of which ended with Perini borrowing money from his supportive mother to make payroll — to gain significant traction.
38 AUTHENTIC TEXAS
cry from having to borrow money from your mom. So several years later, there he was, in the White House kitchen,
prepping a meal for the leader of the free world and nearly every other major player in American politics.
Though Perini was positive his chuck wagons would fit in the gates, there were a few bumps along the road. Like almost coming to blows over what to serve.
Three months before the party, Perini went to Washington to meet with the White House chefs and work out the details. “There wasn’t a table, but we were seated in a big circle,” Perini says. “I told them we were going to have green chile hominy, southern green beans, beef tenderloin and bread pudding. And the head chef said, ‘You’re in Washington, and you have to cook chicken.’ I told him, ‘I’m sorry, but I’m not serving chick- en.’” The room got real quiet. “I said, ‘When you’re serving a Texas chuck wagon meal, you serve beef. If you want another meat, I’ll do catfish.’” The menu talk eventually made its way to the President, and Perini won out. The ‘Texas menu’ was set. After decades of honing his craft, years of developing relationships and months of planning, Perini was about to realize his dream of catering at the White House.
“The night before, I was so nervous I didn’t sleep well,” Perini remem-
bers. “I woke up early and watched TV while [my wife] Lisa got dressed.” But something didn’t feel right. Then, a breaking news bulletin appeared on
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