Rick Bayless Reflects on His Career on the Occasion of a New PBS Special with Ming Tsai

Cooking with Legends: Ming Tsai & Rick Bayless premieres on WTTW February 28 at 10:00 am and 3:30 pm and will be available to stream via the PBS app.
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In the new PBS special Cooking with Legends: Ming Tsai & Rick Bayless, which premieres on WTTW February 28 at 10:00 am and 3:30 pm and will be available to stream via the PBS app, the two chefs and longtime PBS hosts get together in Bayless’ Chicago home to share foundational recipes like the hickory-smoked ribs served at the Bayless family’s barbecue restaurant, Ming’s scallion pancakes, and steak tacos similar to one of the most popular early menu items at Bayless’ first restaurant on his own, Frontera Grill. 

Opened in 1987, Frontera Grill is now older than The Hickory House, the restaurant Bayless’ family ran for 37 years in Oklahoma City. While Frontera’s steak tacos helped appease less adventurous eaters, from the beginning Bayless and his wife Deann served regional specialties with which many Americans were unfamiliar. “The very first table that came into our restaurant sat down, opened the menu, closed the menu, got up, and said, ‘This isn’t Mexican food. You’ll be out of business in six months,’” Bayless recalls. 

The Baylesses went on to open the fine dining Topolobampo and other restaurants while continuing to write cookbooks and making 12 seasons of a PBS show, Mexico: One Plate at a Time, acquiring accolades for all of their outputs over the decades.

We spoke to Bayless about his career, his early days in TV, his background in barbecue, and more.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

How does it feel to be called a “Legend?”

I’m a little uncomfortable with the “legend…”

How did you meet Ming?

He was in Chicago shooting something for Food Network. He came to Frontera and I met him then, and then our paths crossed a lot after that, and we did things together. Then he went on to PBS and he had a show that he often invited other chefs to be part of, and so I was on his show a bunch. We've spent a lot of time together through the years.

Why did you want to make TV shows in the first place?

I actually started off in the education side of things, not in the restaurant chef thing. I grew up in a restaurant and I actually didn't want to inherit my parents' restaurant, as much as I loved it. I knew it was not the right thing for me. I went the academic route, and when I was in graduate school working on a PhD in anthropology and linguistics, that was when it finally hit me like a ton of bricks that – as much as I love thinking about how a culture expresses itself in its language – I was just as interested in how a culture expresses itself in food. Mexican culture is the one that I knew the best and really loved and wanted to promote. 

I spent five years working on my first cookbook. I was very, very lucky that I was offered a well-paying part-time job that I could work for six or eight weeks and then be off for three months. During that five-year period, I lived all over Mexico. I went to every single state in the Mexican Republic, and I cooked with local cooks, and I did a sort of cataloging of everything that was in the markets, and what the small family restaurants were serving. Then we opened Frontera, and I spent the next 10 years doing nothing but that and Topolobampo.

Did you ever have an interest in turning your studies towards barbecue, since you grew up with it?

It's a kind of interesting thing, my relationship to barbecue. While I respect it and love it, it's not in my soul the way Mexican food is. I still make it all the time and love it at home, but it’s not right for me to do it professionally.   

Do you still enjoy learning about new dishes and their histories?

Yes, that is my whole life! Before I left for work this morning, I was reading this new Ethiopian cookbook and planning a meal because I've never made injera, the flat bread, and I've always wanted to make it. On Monday nights, I cook a family meal for my wife and I, and son and daughter-in-law, and their two kids. I change what we're focusing on every week because I like exploring other cuisines and so soon it's going to be Ethiopian! 

The wonderful thing about food is that every culture expresses itself uniquely in its food. If you scratch past the surface of it, man, you can learn so much stuff. It's really fascinating to me how, when people give you the context for the dish, suddenly when you make it, it tastes different – because you know who's made it, what the history of the dish is, and when they serve it. 

I have had the wonderful opportunity to spend some time in India cooking with people and getting to know that side of the world as well. I had family who lived in Thailand for a long time, so I've had the wonderful opportunity to visit Thailand a number of times, and I love making Thai food. I'm very eclectic personally and very focused professionally. 

Why did you want to make a PBS show in the first place?

When Julia Child came on to PBS, which was not called PBS then, in 1963, I was 10 years old. I went to the store and I bought a tablet, and I sat in front of our little black-and-white television, and I wrote down everything that she did. I would go to the kitchen and make stuff. For my 11th birthday, my only request for a birthday present was Mastering the Art of French Cooking, so that I could have the volume in front of me and I could watch how she was doing it on paper. I grew up in a family of cooks, and the narrow focus was sort of Southern cooking and barbecue. She opened doors for me I couldn't even imagine could be opened. She taught me about precision, and the heritage of fine dining, and all of that, which was just words in my head, but it was something that I dreamt about being part of. 

Then, when I was finishing up graduate school, I had the opportunity to do a series of 26 shows for public television. They were all shot in a studio and they were all shot live to tape, because we had no way at all to stop or edit anything. So I had 22 minutes to get three dishes on the table, and I couldn't stop talking for the 22 minutes. We shot one show a day, I had one assistant, we had to do all of our own shopping, we had to do all of our own prep work. My assistant and I would wash all the dishes in a slop sink, and then we would make all the lists for the next day and go to the grocery store. It was hard, but it was really, really great training. 

Once we got really established in our restaurants and my second book came out, that meant that I wanted to do something else on television, and we started Mexico: One Plate at a Time. I wanted to use the format of: I'm gonna take you to a place in Mexico, I'm going to introduce you to the people that make this, tell you their stories, and then we will take you back to my kitchen at home, and I'll show you how you can make this dish. It was all about the viewer being given the opportunity and the tools to make the dishes so that they could taste the food from this place. I think once you eat the food from a place or a person, then you have a different relationship to it. It was my way of trying to break down some of the barriers between these two countries.  

Decades later, in a changed culinary world, are there still things you wish people knew more about in terms of Mexican food?

We are way, way, way further down the road, but I will tell you that the distinction between Mexican-American and Mexican food is still very blurry to most people, and they still oftentimes think that it's really stupid we don't have nachos on our menu. We have to be true to our mission, which is to shine a light on the regional cooks of Mexico.  

There’s so much more real Mexican food – meaning regional Mexican food – here in Chicago especially than a lot of different places. I am most proud of being a forerunner in serving fine-dining Mexican food, because the success of our restaurant not doing Mexican-American food gave courage to a whole lot of young chefs. Now there are so many young Mexican chefs that don't even remember when there were no chef-owned restaurants in Mexico City and stuff like that. It's a very different world.

Do you get tired of talking about legacy?

As long as you don't call it legacy, I'm fine! I am still working. I’m still doing my thing. That legacy, legend stuff is so tiresome to me because it's somebody that's puffed up and is resting on their laurels. I'm not that person. I'm still working on every menu for all of our restaurants. And I think that we still have so much to learn and so much to share.