The Story of Dai Due

I think it was the trip to Italy that did it.

Up to that point, Jesse Griffiths had spent years working in American restaurants. But to hear him tell it, the three-week immersion in Venice, followed by travel to places beyond, stirred something in him.

“I started to get very interested in what it meant to have a local food culture,” he told me.

Go to southwest France, northern Mexico, Japan, Vietnam, Mongolia, you name it.

“They're gonna have a cuisine that's totally rooted in what they have available,” he said. “I kind of became obsessed with the idea of what it looked like to cook just with ingredients from Texas.”

That obsession drove him, and in the fall of 2006, he spent $230 on some plates and cups, a few Texas quail, some crisp in-season butternut squash, and various other odds and ends, then brought them all to the private garden of a home on the east side, generously offered up by the owners for the evening.

There, he carefully transformed the ingredients into the first-ever Dai Due dinner.

Thirteen people ventured out that night, sharing conversation, bottles of wine from home, and the beautiful foods that Jesse served them.

The name was a head nod to that time in Italy – taken from an old proverb that says, “Dai due regni di natura, piglia il cibo con misura.” From the two kingdoms of nature, choose food with care.

That idea became his focus.

At first glance, most people wouldn’t accuse Texas of being an agricultural Eden.

This is tough country. Comanche country. Where nomadic horse cultures were more prone to hunting wild bison, than they were to sedentary agriculture.

Even today, it’s no easy place to grow.

And yet, Texas leads the nation with more than a hundred and twenty-five million acres of farm and ranch land according to the most recent census. And for those whose spirit is drawn to this challenging place, the land provides.

Apples and cherries up in the pan handle. Lemons, and limes, and melons, and mangoes down in the valley. Out east, there are acres of blueberry farms, and to the west, we have one of the country’s largest wine-growing regions.

There’s beef, and grain, and fish from the gulf, and lots and lots of wild game, including several exotics you might not guess were here.

These were the palette that Griffiths began painting with.

Like the food he was serving, Dai Due itself grew slowly. Organically.

“With the profits from dinner one, we bought bowls,” he told me. “And then we were able to serve soup at dinner two.”

A butcher by training, Jesse supplemented his income in those early days by setting up shop at the farmer’s market, where he brought the same principles to play.

“We were the first business in Texas to cook hot food, rather than bringing pre-made,” he said. “We had a tent set up with grills, and we’d cook things as well as offer charcuterie and sausage, and brined chickens and pickles, and pimento cheese – all kinds of stuff. We sold whatever we could.”

That’s also where he met Loncito Cartwright, the man who would teach him how to hunt.

Now, anyone familiar with Jesse’s work today – and specifically, with the three wild game cookbooks he’s written so far – might be surprised to learn he wasn’t a life-long hunter. But it’s true.

An avid outdoorsman, he loves any reason to be outside, and will be the first to admit that berry picking is just as satisfying as anything else. But fishing had been his main fixation early on.

“I loved it,” he said. “As soon as I turned sixteen I was out the door, either getting into some sort of trouble, or getting in trouble and fishing at the same time.

“But I didn’t grow up around any kind of hunting, so I had to come to that later in life.”

Loncito was a landowner who sold lamb at the market alongside some of the best limes Jesse had ever tasted.

“They were little,” he told me. “About the size of a quarter. They were bright yellow, and smelled like flowers.”

He reminisced with the joy that every great chef has for quality ingredients.

“It was insane,” he said, “Like a treat. I would just have one of those squeezed into a glass of water.”

The two hit it off, and their time hunting Cartwright’s ranch grew into a long-time friendship that persists to this day.

His experience as a butcher gave him a unique perspective on hunting from day one, and he soon began incorporating wild game into the meals he was making.

“I think it’s a very valid source of food,” he told me. “Like, if you're talking about a local food economy in Texas.

“Maybe not in upstate New York. But hunting and wild game is definitely a player here. It's definitely part of the conversation. And so I felt that that really needed to be involved in the way that we sourced our food and the conversations we had.”

This is what really put Dai Due on the map.

People started to come from all over to experience food in a way they never had before.

One week it might be venison sausage with smoked boar belly, quail confit and new potatoes, another week, it could be fresh-caught Almaco Jack with apples, radishes, rye toast, and butter – all made with ingredients sourced right here in Texas.

It wasn’t just the food people were connecting with either.

He once told The Austin American-Statesman that his favorite thing to serve was a whole grilled red snapper.

“All I’ve done is gutted it,” he said. “There’s no better way to get to know a stranger than to have to figure it out.”

And the dinners grew, and grew.

Keep in mind, this is at a time when selling tickets was nowhere near as easy as it is today.

“In the beginning, you mailed us a check,” he told me, laughing.

To create buzz and drive sales, Dai Due was early to email marketing, and ran a newsletter as far back as the earliest days.

A long-time reader, Jesse took inspiration from author-chefs like Alice Waters and Paul Bertoli, as well as outdoorsmen and hunters. His all-time favorite writer is a fly-fisher named John Gierach.

Every week, he’d channel them to the food they were buying in preparation for the next dinner. He wrote about what was in season, where it was grown, and the people who grew or cared for it.

“We would tell this little story,” he said. “And then, it's like, Do you want to come to this?”

This love for storytelling has also helped him and his team overcome other challenges over the years.

Because they only use ingredients sourced here in Texas, they’re subject to the ups and downs of any given season.

One month, they might be designing a menu around a bumper crop of apples they didn’t expect to get. The next, they might be explaining why a frost two years ago means you can’t have lemons in your drink.

Jesse once cooked for seven months straight without any onions at all.

Explaining all this to expectant diners might have seemed daunting, but his connection to the audience, and ability to write pulled them through. More than that, it got people excited about what they were doing.

As interest grew, he found that people didn’t just want to eat wild game. They wanted to learn how to hunt and cook it themselves.

So he started The New School of Traditional Cookery, with a focus on teaching people how to use local foods to the fullest.

A few times each year, he and a group of experienced cooks and hunters took a handful of students down to their partner ranch in southern Texas.

There, they’d spend days hunting for white tail, hogs, ducks, doves, and other small game, explaining everything from stalking to skinning, and showing students how to butcher, cook, and make the most of everything they killed.

He taught smaller classes around town too, recorded a video series with the Texas Parks & Wildlife, and started writing the books he’s now so well-known for.

He became perhaps best-known for his position on wild hogs.

If you’re new to Texas, you’ve probably at least heard about the wild hog problem. They’re invasive, destructive, and multiply like rabbits.

What you might not know is that they’re also delicious.

A lot of people think you can’t eat them. But Griffiths has dedicated years of his life (and hundreds of pages of ink) to righting the record on these tasty invaders.

Arm roasts, marinated Cuban style in sour orange and elephant garlic, slow-roasted and served atop gold rice and dried limas. Hog tenderloins and hearts, skewered on mesquite and cooked over hot coals in the open air. Wild boar Italian sausage with charred tomato sauce, creamy polenta, and basil.

The list goes on.

By 2013, Dai Due was hosting three dinners per month, in addition to the classes and farmers markets throughout the week.

They had a rotating cast of farms around the city that hosted them – Rain Lily, and Boggy Creek, and the old Springdale Farm, to name a few – and each dinner was seating eighty guests.

The menus had also grown.

A write-up from the Statesman, for example, mentioned a seven-course meal including smoked catfish terrine topped with American bowfin caviar, grilled blue runner with dill cream and potato leek salad, mangrove snapper on the half shell with peppers, onions, and oregano, and more.

A typical dinner day would be twenty hours or more of work.

Jesse’d start the day early, traveling around to farmers markets to pick up fresh ingredients for the dinner, then man his own tent and sell through the morning, then off to the farm to set up, prep, cook, and host, and before the night was done, he had to pack it all in again.

Weather was a huge risk factor.

“If you got rained out on a Saturday, your farmers market got rained out and your dinner got rained out,” he said. “You still have to pay for all the food and a week's worth of labor for everybody, and you just sit there and eat it.

They needed walls and a roof, and in 2014, that’s exactly what they got, opening the restaurant down on Manor road that they still call home today.

It was a major change, going from a bootstrapped operation bankrolled with $230, to suddenly raising $1.5m+ and having to deal with contractors, lawyers, and the city.

“All out to seemingly get you,” Jesse laughed. “Actually, not seemingly.”

They caught a lucky break, opening in the fall, which is kind of a high time for restaurants in Austin. That carried them through to the spring of 2015.

But then, the summer lull caught them off-guard, and things got really grim as crowds fled Austin for the summer.

“We were about to not make payroll,” he told me. “We probably had two weeks to go before we were out. This was late-August too, so the cavalry was not on its way.”

Then, Bon Appettit came out with its list of Best New American Restaurants and Dai Due was number six.

“That happened, and the restaurant just blew up,” he said, “and we were able to get our footing back under and then live on from there.”

This year, Dai Due celebrated ten years in that location, and in that time, Jesse and his team have won multiple accolades, including a James Beard Award for his book on wild hog cooking, and he’s appeared on everything from Netflix to the Joe Rogan Experience.

Even with the press, it was a journey to make it work.

“We made every mistake,” he told me. “We made, every management mistake. We made, every staffing mistake.”

“Even the food, I think, sometimes really sucked,” he laughed. “That's my fault.”

The real wins started to come when he focused on how to hire well, build great teams, and retain staff.

Dai Due works hard to pay its staff best-in-class wages. Not an easy way to turn a profit in the thin-margin world of restaurants, but he thinks it’s worth it.

“That’s a slow roll,” he told me. “It took 10 years of going down this trail to financial viability based on, you know, very human decisions that we made – that we wanted to treat staff equitably, and we wanted to do good, and we wanted to support our community and all these different ways.

“It takes a long time for that to pay off, but I’m very proud that it has.”

One benefit of building like this is that you’re able to win over talent like Janie Ramirez, the executive chef now in charge of running the day-to-day.

Jesse has nothing but glowing things to say about her.

“Janie came on as a prep cook,” he told me. “One of her first days, I was kind of watching her work – I don’t know if we’d even been introduced yet – and I called her over and I was like… Either you have to work slower or I’m about to fire somebody else, because you are definitely doing the work of like two or three people.”

Over time, she worked her way up – first as Sous Chef, then as Chef de Cuisine.

Right before the pandemic, Griffiths briefly opened a taqueria on Congress Ave. With his attention split between two locations, the time was right to make Janie Executive Chef, and she’s been leading the team ever since.

“I'm very proud that Janie is a better cook than I am,” he said. “I’m very proud that she's so organized and such a great leader, and I'm very proud of how well we work together.

“She's currently in Canada on vacation right now, you know, and the restaurant’s still fine because she's so good.”

These days, Jesse has turned much more of his attention to the storytelling that has always made Dai Due so different.

He continues to teach classes, and host special events to promote the local food scene. And his latest book, The Turkey Book, follows his journey through a year of turkey hunting in four iconic locations around the US.

It opens with a story of a now familiar character – that of his long-time friend and mentor, Loncito Cartwright.

Turns out, he and Jesse have continued to hunt his land together ever since those early days nearly two decades ago.

They’ve spent almost as much time slowly cultivating the turkey population there too, first by controlling predators, then by moving brush to creating the ideal habitat for landings, fly-ups, and feedings. And finally, by merely leaving them alone.

It’s the perfect approch for the kind of man whose food is focused on not meddling with it. One that’s rooted in respect for nature, and its two kingdoms of plants and animals.

The kind of thing you might expect to see from an older, wiser food culture.

Italy, perhaps.

Follow him on Instagram to stay up to date on his work, and snag a copy of The Turkey Book ahead of the holiday. You can get it online, or pick it up next time you’re down at the restaurant. It’s on the shelves up front, next to the poultry seasoning.