NOT A CHEF, but a popular chuckwagon-style cook, Tom Perini has filled bellies a long way from his stomping grounds in Buffalo Gap, near Abilene. Perini has cooked for President George W. Bush in both Washington and at Bush’s Crawford ranch, and he recently returned from Russia, where he has fed that country’s leader as well.

President Said To Be Partial
To Perini’s Chuckwagon Fare

BUFFALO GAP, Texas — There probably aren’t many chuckwagon cooks who can say they’ve cooked for the President of the United States, let alone been a guest at the White House, and much less slept in the Lincoln bedroom, but Buffalo Gap’s favored son Tom Perini has.

It seems that President George W. Bush has a hankering for Perini’s way of preparing a traditional Texas feast. At the top of the menu is a good steak. Perini started catering for Bush when he was Governor of Texas.

Perini has not only cooked for the President on several occasions, he has also cooked for the President of Russia and numerous other dignitaries. His chuckwagon cooking has been tasted and marveled about by people from all over the U.S. as well as several foreign countries.

The Buffalo Gap native has been perfecting his art of chuckwagon cooking since the mid-1970s, but he’s been cooking all his life. As a youngster, he and his friends would come to the ranch to spend the weekend. His friends would play poker and Tom would cook. Consequently, he never learned to play poker but he sure can cook.

Perhaps the best thing about Tom Perini is that with him beef is king. He is one of the best spokespersons the beef industry has, and that’s thanks in large part to his lifelong friend and mentor, the late legendary rancher Watt Matthews of Lambshead Ranch in Albany. Matthews told Perini that he could do more for the cattle industry by cooking beef than by raising it.

"I really believe in going home with the person who took me to the dance, and the beef industry took me to the dance," Perini remarks.

Perini has worked hand in hand with the Texas Beef Council almost since the inception of the checkoff program in the mid-1980s. He is proud of his association with the beef industry and he’s never afraid to say so. He has promoted the beef industry through several national television appearances, including the CBS "Early Show" twice and ABC’s "Good Morning America" once. He also has been on the Food Network channel twice and has appeared on PBS.

Perini has cooked on numerous occasions for actors Robert Duvall and Fess Parker. He’s catered for literally thousands and thousands at various events, industry-related or otherwise, all across the country.

"I’m just a chuckwagon cook. I’d never call myself a chef," Perini says. "A chef has all the proper schooling. A chef has been taught all these different methods of cooking. They’re trained, and I learned from experience."

His motto is stick to the comfort foods, that being food that tastes good, looks good and is recognizable.

"Many chefs nowadays are spending so much time just trying to come up with a name for a particular dish, and everything is positioned at a 45 degree angle. You don’t know what it is or how you’re supposed to eat it," Perini remarks.

When Perini caters, it’s a true Texas affair using an authentic chuckwagon, mesquite fire, big black pots and men and women on the serving lines who understand the ranching heritage and in many cases live that heritage in their every day lives.

"I like to take the good-looking cowboys with me, those who know how to wear a cowboy hat. You wouldn’t believe how the tipping of a hat or a ‘Yes, ma’am’ affects these people," Perini comments. "The boots, the jeans, the hat and the accent — the ladies just melt. I’ve had people fall in love with the cowboys on the line."

His method of cooking is worlds away from that of the "tin-foil" caterer.

"The guests see the pit and see and smell the smoke. They watch the meat being cut and the various dishes being prepared in the big black pots. The sight and the smell give us an automatic leg up," Perini says. "It’s what we call the ‘sizzle’ in a restaurant, when your plate is first placed in front of you."

To be a good chuckwagon cook, Perini notes, isn’t really something that can be taught in a classroom setting.

"You have to have a feel for it. You have to understand the flavors," he points out. "When doing a beef dish, I pull that beef flavor out. I do a lot with seasoning, but it’s important that you start off with a good piece of beef."

His chicken fried steak, for example, is made from rib-eye or tenderloin trimmings.

"Chicken fried steak is kind of funny, because many restaurants have it tenderized. That tenderized steak has a different bite. Others use frozen patties, and the batter does funny things when it’s fried.

"We use good beef and pound it ourselves."
The chuckwagon, which all but died out with the advent of pickups and horse trailers, has come back into its own, Perini says. When he first started cooking with the chuckwagon back in 1975, only a handful or so were in use. Today, chuckwagons and chuckwagon cooks can be found all over the state.

In the old days, the chuckwagon was a true home away from home, Perini notes. "I’ll meet you at the wagon," was a common colloquialism that everyone understood.

A chuckwagon would normally feed 12 men.

"It wasn’t necessarily good food," Perini remarks. "There was lots of fried salt belly and hardtack biscuits, and desert was molasses on that same biscuit.

"There wasn’t any refrigeration, so they carried lots of dried beef. If you were on the trails, your business was to deliver beef, not to eat it," Perini notes. A high-headed cow might end up in the pot once in a while, or if they had a calf that couldn’t travel they might butcher it.

"Son-of-a-gun stew was one of the first things they made because it was made with all the entrails and they ate them first because they spoiled first."

One of the toughest challenges a camp cook had to deal with, Perini says, was the wind.

"It affects the fire and how hot it gets," he explains.

Because they cooked with fire, all the pots were made of cast iron. One or two pots had several uses.

"I’ve worn out my elbows carrying those heavy pots."

When the trail drives became a thing of the past, the ranches built cook shacks. There was always a well nearby. They kept the beef cool by lowering it into the well.

Not long afterward came refrigeration, and Perini says that’s when dishes like cobblers came into being because they now had a way to store perishable items like milk and eggs.

There was also a garden next to every cook shack. This spawned the growth of spices and sauces. They canned what they couldn’t use up. One of the first canned products was tomatoes.

Today a cowboy’s preferred menu is a bit different from the days of the old trail drives. His food of choice, Perini says, would likely be chicken fried steak, some type of potato, biscuits and a cobbler.

Perini has never taken his success lightly. In fact, for him, it’s been a humbling experience. The growth of his business in recent years has been phenomenal, but that growth certainly didn’t happen overnight.

Perini was more or less raised in and around the ranching industry. His father was a geologist by trade who came to Texas from Colorado in the 1920s. He purchased the ranch at Buffalo Gap, where Perini Steak House now sits, in 1952.

Tom’s mother was a native of Chicago, and an artist by trade. Tom’s father met her while she was in Texas doing an exhibition. They fell in love and she gave up her career to stay in Texas. They married in 1936.

The family lived in Abilene, but Tom spent much of his free time at the ranch in Buffalo Gap. The last few years of his high school education were spent at a military school in San Antonio.

"I was living on the edge and I crossed the edge a couple of times," Perini admits.

"One evening my father came in to talk to me about my report card. He said, ‘I notice by your report card that you can’t speak English or Spanish.’ It went downhill from there."

Perini’s dad died in 1965. Tom was in Fort Worth at the time, still trying to find himself. His mother asked him to come home to take care of the ranching operation, and Tom obliged.

The ranch at Buffalo Gap was only about a section, so he leased considerably more country and got into the cattle business on a larger scale.

Tom had been around ranching and ranchers all his life. His dad was a good friend of Watt Matthews, and after his father died, Watt became Tom’s mentor.

"I loved the lifestyle," Tom says. "I loved the work, but I learned right quick that it was a hard way to make a living."

There were many who still took their chuckwagons out, and Perini was no different. He found that he really enjoyed the cooking more than he did the cowboying, so it more or less became his permanent job on the outfit.

Over time Tom gradually worked into a catering business using his chuckwagon. He was asked to cater the 100^th anniversary party for Swenson Land and Cattle Co. The Pitchfork’s 100^th celebration followed and Tom went there. Watt Matthews asked him to cater for 800 or so of his closest friends at his annual Fandangle Sampler party, and that became a regular event for Tom and his crew.

Perini learned at an early age that his friend had a preference for rare beef.

"I can remember eating at the cook shack at Lambshead one afternoon. They were having steaks and I remember my father saying to me that the steak would be rare and if I didn’t chew it up really well, I would choke.

"Since then, I’ve always eaten rare beef."

Watt not only mentored the young Perini in his ranching career, he mentored him in his cooking career as well. It was clear to Matthews that Tom had a calling, and that calling in his opinion was not to run a ranch but rather to share his knowledge of the beef industry through his cooking.

In 1983, Perini decided to follow his friend’s advice. He left the ranching business so he could dedicate all his time to his catering business. He also converted the old hay barn on the ranch into a steakhouse capable of seating 40 people.

"I honestly didn’t know what I was doing," Perini remarks. "There’s a big difference, I learned, between catering with a chuckwagon and running a restaurant. It’s easy to figure necessary supplies and staff for a catered event, but a restaurant is a whole other ballgame. You’re in a cash flow situation with weekly payroll and insurance and so many other things that I’d never experienced with the chuckwagon."

The first years were tough. Buffalo Gap had never been a destination point. In fact, the small town with its 400-some residents barely even made the map, but Tom was determined to turn his restaurant into a destination restaurant.

He had one small problem. He enjoyed his bourbon a little too much, and that was interfering with his ability to run his business. He managed to hold it together for 10 years or so, but the restaurant never made any money.

In 1995 Perini had a sobering experience in a lot of ways. He realized that he had to do something different if he was ever really going to make his business work. He quit drinking and almost immediately things began looking up for this chuckwagon cook.

His first real break came that year when he got a call from the James Beard House in New York City. James Beard is recognized as the Father of American Gastronomy. After Beard’s death in 1985, Julia Childs had the idea to preserve his home in New York City. She commissioned help from the late Peter Kump, a former student of Beard’s and the founder of the Institute of Culinary Education.

Now nearly every night of the week, famous chefs from all over the country get the opportunity to cook in Beard’s kitchen and share their culinary talents with the public. The invited chefs are not paid for their service, but the publicity and the name recognition they receive once they’ve cooked there is tremendous. It’s definitely an honor, and these chefs are considered to be in something of an elite group.

To this day Perini really doesn’t know how the James Beard House heard about him. When they first called, he was sure they had him mixed up with some famous Italian chef. There was no mix-up.

"I told them that I would be wearing a different kind of white hat than they were accustomed to," Perini says. "They were okay with that.

"Talk about the country boy going to the city," Perini says. "I can remember that first time we were cooking in the kitchen there. I kept hearing the intercom say, ‘Chef, line one. Chef, line one.’ I never paid any mind to it, just kept right on cooking. Finally someone told me that I was the chef and should answer the line."

Prior to his debut at the Beard House, a friend suggested that he try to get some pre-event publicity. Perini decided to send samples of his mesquite-smoked peppered beef tenderloin to some of the major media outlets in New York City. He mailed 20 in total.

He got a call from Parade Magazine for a story and another call from Food and Wine, but to get the story for that publication he had to first buy the $10,000 ad. Perini passed on that one but he did an interview with Parade.

Soon afterward, the New York Times called requesting another tenderloin.

"I thought for sure that they were playing a trick on this country boy, but I sent another tenderloin anyway."

Meanwhile, he completed his first cooking experience at the Beard House. The five course meal of Texas cuisine included some of his favorite dishes, like beef tenderloin, calf fries, ribs and jalapeno bites.

Explaining what calf fries are to little ladies in New York City, Perini admits, was something of a delicate issue.

"They were popping them in their mouths until they found out what they were," Perini says. "One lady thought I said cat fries."

All in all, the event went off without a hitch and was a grand success.

Soon after he got the first call from the James Beard House, Perini received a request to cook for George W. Bush, who was then serving as the Texas governor. Things were definitely looking up for this chuckwagon cook. That event, too, was a success.

By this time, Perini had forgotten all about the second tenderloin he’d mailed off to the New York Times. That is, until October, when he got a call from a "facts checker" for the New York Times. The caller wouldn’t tell Perini what was going on, but he wanted to know how he spelled his name and then asked if he had an 800 number.

"Remember now, I’m in Buffalo Gap, Texas. We’d just graduated from strings and tin cans. He told me to get an 800 number and to call him back as soon as the number was available."

He did as they requested, even though Perini still had no clue what was going on. Early that next day, calls requesting an order for his mesquite-smoked peppered beef tenderloin began coming in from all over the country.

Turns out his tenderloin had been picked by the New York Times as the best mail order gift for 1995.

"The first time I sent the tenderloin, this contest was just beginning and the receptionist who received the package just assumed that it was for the contest," Perini explains. That sample tenderloin won its division. The second one, the one that I just about didn’t send, was for the second round of the contest."

The phone calls were overwhelming and Perini almost immediately had a supply problem on his hands. He also knew nothing about the regulations that went with shipping product out of state.

He got it all worked out, though, thanks to help from Dankworth Packing in Abilene, and between October and December alone Perini sold 500 peppered beef tenderloins.

"Now the beef industry had a high-end beef product that could compete with all of the companies who sold hams as a gift item," Tom remarks.

It wasn’t long before he received a phone call from Neiman Marcus. They wanted to offer the product in their catalog. The product is also now available through William Sonoma’s catalog.

Next came a call from Northwest Airlines. One of their food tasters had gotten ahold of the product and they wanted to try it. Today Perini’s peppered beef tenderloin is served to Northwest Airline’s business and first class passengers on their trans-Atlantic flights.

Things were really beginning to fall into place for Perini. His catering business was becoming well known, and his mail order business outgrew him before he even knew what happened. All of these things helped with name recognition, and soon enough Perini Ranch Steakhouse became that true destination restaurant.

"I remember the first time this couple came in carrying a Texas Highways magazine. I was on the cover of it. They walked in, opened the magazine up and asked, ‘Is this the place?’"

That same year, 1997, Texas Monthly called Perini’s steakhouse the "Best Steakhouse for Real Texas Food."

"What I found was that once you’re published they tell you real quick if it’s not as good as it says it is in Texas Monthly," Perini remarks. "Consistency is so critical in all parts of our business. We’re constantly tasting and checking for quality and working with our help to make sure they haven’t changed something or eliminated something."

Meanwhile, Perini continued to do more and more work for then-Gov. Bush. And between 1995 and 1999, Perini was invited back to the James Beard House on several occasions. During this time period, he also became more involved with the Texas Restaurant Association, serving as their president in 1999.

In the summer of 1998 he catered a Texas-themed fundraiser for the National Arboretum in Washington, D.C. It was the first time he hauled his chuckwagons clear across the country. Afterwards, while Perini was relaxing by the wagon, a fellow stopped to visit. He asked Tom if he’d ever thought about doing a cookbook. The man left him his card, but Tom didn’t bother to look at it until he returned to his hotel room later that evening. Turns out he was president of Time Life Publishing.

That was the start of Perini’s now famous and well distributed Texas Cowboy Cooking, now in its third printing.

Actor Robert Duvall writes in the foreword, "There’s no pretense to Tom’s food, just a lot of flavor. I wish I’d had Tom along when I was filming Lonesome Dove, because his is the kind of food my character Augustus McCrae ate on the cattle drive — wholesome, authentic, delicious food that can be cooked in one pot or over an open fire."

Perini says the hardest part of putting the cookbook together was figuring out actual measurements for each of his recipes.

"I do a lot of my cooking by touch and taste — a handful here, a sprinkle there, touching to see if the meat is done. I never really used measuring cups or thermometers," Perini says.

The book isn’t just a cookbook. It’s filled with cowboy lore, great photography and a few short biographies of some of the great historical ranches across the Lone Star state.

He invited a handful of these ranches from different parts of the state to contribute a recipe or two for his book.

"I felt it was important to cover all geographic parts of the state, because you get different kinds of foods depending on where you are in the state," Perini comments. "If, for example, you’re close to New Mexico you get a lot of hominy and green chilis, whereas on the border you’ll get more traditional Mexican food.

"We included a ranch from the Gulf Coast who had a large crab wharf. In Texas they raise cattle, but we also like to have oysters and crabs and shrimp with our steaks. So the recipes from the Gulf Coast are more of the southern praline type deserts and fish.
"We had to include a few recipes that I didn’t want to, like a recipe for making homemade mayonnaise, because they told me nothing could be store-bought. Everything had to be homemade. I hope no one ever asks me how to make mayonnaise," he remarks.

The first printing called for 25,000 copies. In nine months they were gone. Since then, Perini has formed his own publishing company, Comanche Moon Publishing. To date, some 37,000 copies of the cookbook have been sold.

"The really good thing about this book is that it is timeless," Perini notes. "Everything in here is simple comfort food. It’s chicken fried steak and meatloaf."

Most of the recipes, he says, are just good staple ranch recipes. Some of the recipes have a little twist of his own. For example, there’s his sought-after Perini Zucchini and the Mesquite-A-Rita and the Perini Martini. His signature recipe, bread pudding with whiskey sauce, is made with sourdough bread and pecans, not raisins, and it’s topped off with good Jack Daniel’s whiskey.

Two years ago, Perini expanded his restaurant. He now can seat 100 guests inside and the patio area will seat another 80 or so.

The menu is mostly beef. He does offer pork ribs, and on Sunday afternoon he offers his one chicken dish, a fried chicken buffet. He also offers catfish, but he doesn’t feel guilty about that because he says it isn’t a threat to the beef industry.

Last year Perini and his crew were asked by the President to cater the Congressional picnic. On their first trip to Washington to discuss plans for the picnic, Tom and wife Lisa were invited to be guests of the President. They had dinner with President and Mrs. Bush in their private dining room and then were escorted to their sleeping quarters, which was the Lincoln bedroom.

"We didn’t know we were to stay in the Lincoln bedroom until we got there," Tom recalls. "It was a tremendous rush to walk into that room."

The picnic was set for September 11. Perini and his crew returned to Washington on the 9^th of September to make preparations. They had two chuckwagons, 160 picnic tables, mesquite wood and enough food to feed 1400 people. They were to serve all the president’s favorites — tenderloin and catfish.

On Monday they cooked all day in the White House kitchen, making bread puddings, salads and hominy. On the morning of the 11th, Perini was scheduled to do numerous interviews with the news media on the White House lawn.

That, of course, never happened. Perini and his crew were staying four blocks from the White House. Some of them had already walked over to the White House, and as they were checking in at the back gate, people were running out.

"I had CNN on, and at 8:45 a.m. I hollered to Lisa that something had happened to the World Trade Center. At 9:15 the second plane hit, and we knew that there was a real problem.

"The third plane flew down the Potomac, circled and hit the Pentagon. The news reports kept saying that there was still one more plane coming in, but then we found out it had crashed."

"All of a sudden there are F-16s circling overhead. We were seven stories up and all we could see were people exiting buildings. Right across the street was the Washington Post and there were trucks blockading the underground parking."

About 10 a.m. Perini was able to get his group together.

"When we arrived in D.C. I had told my crew not to touch the mini-bars in their room. If they wanted some nuts at 2.am., they were to go across the street.

"Now I told my group to take their cowboy hats off, put on some tennis shoes. I didn’t want these cowboys sticking out at a time like this. I told them to get an overnight bag and clean out their mini-bars. We made a plan to meet at a certain park if something else happened.

"We had 20 people and one truck, and there were no rent cars, no trains, certainly no airplanes getting out. Lisa and both my daughters were there with me."

Within a day or so they were able to get part of the crew out in the van. On the 12^th the White House called to tell Tom that he had to get his equipment off the White House lawn because they were having a hard time landing the presidential helicopter. The next day they went over and loaded their equipment.

"I’m on the White House lawn with about five other cowboys, and all of a sudden I hear this loud whistle and someone hollering my name.

"It’s the President. He comes over, puts his arm on my shoulder and says, ‘Tom, Laura and I want you to know how sorry I am that we’re not getting to do your party."

We talked a few minutes, and then he said he had to go because the President of France was on the line.

"That simple gesture showed me the kind of compassion this man has."

All the food that had been prepared for the picnic was served to the Secret Service and rescue workers.

The rest of the crew got out the next week. Perini and the same crew went back to the White House on June 5 to cater the Congressional picnic. This one went off without a hitch.

Last October Perini received another call from the White House requesting that he cater the Bush-Putin summit in Crawford.

"I didn’t know how these Russians would like medium rare steak and catfish, but they ate everything," Tom says.

Putin actually came out to the chuckwagon with an interpreter and talked with Tom and his crew.

"We talked about the chuckwagon and the trail drives and then he told me that this was the best beef he’d ever eaten."

The next day there was a scheduled press conference in Waco with some school children.

"Halfway through, a little girl in the back of the room asks, ‘Tell me how you liked your Texas barbecue.’ There was that minute of fear. All I could think about was how important this answer was to my career, and President Putin says that he can’t believe that hands out on a ranch could fix such a wonderful meal, and President Bush finishes by saying, ‘Only in Texas.’

"I’m going to send that little girl to college," Perini says.

Educating consumers on particular cuts of meat, how to select them, how to cook them, etc. is something he does almost every day, whether he’s catering to a large group or doing an interview.

"I had one lady call up and request prime steaks for an event, but she wanted those prime steaks to be lean. I explained to her why that would be a bit of a problem.

"That’s just one example of how little consumers know about our product. Most housewives buy beef based on color. They think the bright red steaks are the best. Me, I want something with a little bit of age to it, but the consumer is geared to think about freshness."

Perhaps one of the best examples of the positive impact Perini’s involvement with the beef industry has had on consumers around the world can be seen in Japan. In 1991 the Texas Beef Council asked Perini to take his chuckwagon to Japan for the purpose of introducing U.S. beef into the Japanese market.

"We shipped a chuckwagon and a 12-foot barbecue pit, 5000 pounds of mesquite wood, tent poles, pots and steaks, and the cowboys flew over.

"It took 21 days to get the supplies to Japan. All the beef came out of the Texas Panhandle — choice ribeyes. It was aged seven days by the time I got it and another 21 days on the boat, and it was another five or six days before we served it, so we had good aged beef," Perini notes.

"We would pull up in front of grocery stores, unroll the chuckwagon and fire up the mesquite wood. We had a band with us called Charlie Natagonie and the Cannonballs. They were a Japanese band, but they looked more cowboy than we did.

"The Japanese housewives would come by for a sample. The comments were about how much flavor the beef had and how tender it was. They were used to grass-fed beef from Australia, and it was frozen, not fresh.

"When we left, they put U.S. beef in 29 stores in southern Japan. It was a major accomplishment. Today Japan is our largest export market."

This past year they traveled to Poland with the Texas Beef Council and the U.S. Meat Export Federation. Their mission this time to teach how them how to cook briskets the Texas way.

The team worked with one of the largest processing plants there. The plant employed 850 people and processed cattle and hogs, but the cattle being processed, Perini says, were old dairy cattle.

"The quality of beef was just not there," he notes. "They were making a product that was kind of like corned beef."

They worked one on one with them for six to eight days, talking to them about preparation, cooking time and temperature. They were using a marinade, and Perini convinced them to switch to a dry rub.

"They started turning out a pretty good product and we found out later that the plant entered the new product category at a large food show in Warsaw and the Texas style brisket won first prize for best new product."

From there they traveled to Warsaw.

"These guys were cutting ribeye steaks only a half-inch thick and then they were cooking them to death," Perini says. "We got them to cut them an inch thick, to try a dry rub, and to lower the temperature on the grill."

In early September Perini and some of his crew traveled to Russia to meet with Putin’s chef at the Kremlin. Their hope is to begin selling U.S. beef to the Kremlin.

"I have seen what the Beef Council does with the industry’s checkoff dollars. What they do for the beef industry is unbelievable. The loss of the checkoff program would severely cripple the beef industry."

Today Tom and wife Lisa are a bit overwhelmed with how fast their business has grown. There simply aren’t enough weekends in the year, Lisa says, to accommodate every person who calls asking them to cater an event. They’ve had to cancel an event or two when the President has called, but other than that they stick to every obligation they make.

Lisa says it takes a good three months worth of planning and discussing and coordinating for one event and then a full week of physically preparing the food.

"We’re experiencing some growing pains," Tom admits, "but it’s because we understand the importance of maintaining our quality reputation. We can’t cut back now or do something a different way just because it’s easier."

The couple has more big plans for the future. They would like to eventually have an inn at Buffalo Gap — a high quality inn, nice but still "ranchy", Lisa says, a place where guests can run away for the weekend, walk over to their restaurant and enjoy a nice dinner and then go back and sit on the porch and enjoy a nice bottle of wine.
There are still improvements they’d like to make to the restaurant, but the one decision they have made is that they will not franchise their restaurant.

It’s also a given that Perini will never stray from his roots. No matter if he’s cooking for the President or for some ranch party, he’ll always be that chuckwagon cook, the chef who likes to serve up a good piece of rare beef in his white cowboy hat. That’s the Perini way.