A Food Tour of Dallas

The spread in Kent Rathbun's kitchen

Lucky me! This morning I got to have breakfast with one of Dallas's most lauded chefs, Kent Rathbun, at his family's personal, 19th-floor home inside the Heights at Park Lane. It's the first stop of many I'll be making this weekend during a food tour of the city organized by Texas Toast Culinary Tours. After feasting on Kent's freshly prepared buffet of Moet mimosas and breakfast tacos (scrambled eggs, pork stew, three types of salsa, cotija cheese, and seranno chile-infused sour cream), we sat around on the Rathbuns' sprawling terrace and chatted about his role in the upcoming Super Bowl. Being Dallas's culinary representative for the Taste of the NFL for the past ten years, he's of course highly involved with Super Bowl XLIV's event, taking place right here in DFW. Some of the country's best chefs will get together to prepare an unwieldy feast to raise money for the North Texas Food Bank and the Tarrant Area Food Bank. (At $600 a head, that shouldn't take too long.) Chef Rathbun also talked about his upcoming tailgate cookoff in New York - he'll be traveling there with Fort Worth chef Tim Love when the Cowgirls play the Giants on November 14 to go head-to-head on the grill with celebrity chef Bobby Flay.

Chef Rathbun, on his balcony

The group enjoying an al fresco breakfast

From there, the tour took me on an escorted jaunt through the new Whole Foods on Park Lane, where executive chef Sam Dickey treated us to a sampling of raw food and fresh-squeezed juice from the store's impressive raw food bar. A brownie dipped in pureed cashew cream wholly proved that there's really no need for an oven when preparing "baked" goods. And I could almost feel the last remnants of my cold magically dissipating with every sip of carrot-cucumber-apple juice. Yum Yum.

Raw food at Whole Foods, Park Lane

Heirloom tomatoes at Whole Foods, Park Lane

Apple season at Whole Foods, Park Lane

The wall of beer at Whole Foods, Park Lane