Dotty Griffith, RIP

We have heavy hearts. We learned this week that Dotty Griffith, the trailblazing Texas food journalist, Daily Texan Hall of Fame honoree, cookbook author, and longtime restaurant critic at The Dallas Morning News, has passed. Pancreatic cancer claimed Dotty on Sept. 13. She died while surrounded by her dear family in her East Dallas home. She was 71.

According to her Dallas Morning News obituary, “Griffith was born to Edward M. and Dorothy Koch Griffith in 1949 in Terrell, Texas. She is preceded in death by her parents. She is survived by her son, Kelly Griffith Stephenson and his wife, Jessica (Jess) Gilles of San Antonio and their son, Griffith Philip Stephenson; daughter, Caitlin Stephenson Porto of Kansas City and her husband, Tom Porto, and granddaughters Isabelle Mary Porto and Genevieve Lee Porto; as well as Tom Stephenson and Sally Giddens Stephenson and their son, Jack, of Dallas.“

Her last food writing stint was a weekly restaurant and food column for the Katy Trail Weekly, where CandysDirt.com is also a contributor. I had no idea that Dotty, a woman of many talents, was also an adjunct professor and taught a class in food writing at the Mayborn School of Journalism at the University of North Texas for five years. The notable Les Dames d’Escoffier, an organization of women dedicated to fine food and wine, recently named a journalism scholarship for UNT students in her honor.

You may also recall that Dotty was also an active contributor to CandysDirt.com.

Dotty was a fifth-generation Texan.

And she was a trailblazing journalist “who took recipes out of newspaper ‘womens’ sections’ and integrated them into serious discussions of cuisines and restaurant trends. Yet she was more than a food journalist. She was as comfortable talking about how to field-dress a deer as she was synthesizing complex political policy. All delivered with her signature rapier wit.”

I remember those newspaper “womens’ sections” from my childhood all too well. By the time I graduated from Columbia, women had blazed a trail out of that trope. Dotty would too, turning food reporting into a revolution. Food sections were shifting from homemaker-oriented “what to make for dinner” stories to sophisticated, broad coverage of restaurants, chefs, dining, international cuisine, healthy eating, and even food as art.

Dotty started as a general assignment reporter at The Dallas Morning News in 1972 after graduating from the University of Texas at Austin, where she held many roles at the school’s newspaper, The Daily Texan.

Her longtime friend and DMN editor Terrie Burke said, “When I asked her why she moved to food, she said, ‘I discovered that more people eat than vote.’”

“Dotty was a key culinary influencer. A food critic with a compassionate heart. She genuinely cared about chefs and restaurant owners, coaching and telling them “hard truths” to help them improve their game,” says Dallas PR executive Andrea Alcorn. Dotty was a bridesmaid in Andrea’s wedding. “She walked the walk, participating in hundreds of community events to help the restaurant industry. She was a knowledgeable, skilled chef herself with a true passion for food. As a friend, she was fiercely loyal and could make any worry disappear with her quick wit.”

Truth. I met Dotty at one of her many cookbook events in around 2015, five years after I founded this site. We chatted over an excellent wine and to-die-for enchiladas. I bought a copy of her book, flipping through the pages and pages of food porn.

You know, I said, this is really like what we do on CandysDirt.com: We basically share food porn for houses.

Then we both looked at each other.

“Hey, if you can write beautiful prose about food, I bet you could kill it with real estate!” I said.

And so, the author of 12 cookbooks and a prolific freelance writer for publications such as The New York Times and Southern Living Magazine, the first director of communications for the ACLU of Texas, became a House Porn writer for CandysDirt.com. I was beyond honored and thrilled.

Just take that wicked dry sense of humor, I told her, and lay it on real estate. Slather it on real thick.

And be honest: you are the critic, I told her. Tell us what you think.

My idea was to have a great internationally renowned food critic weigh in on kitchens as a real estate critic. This from the pretty blonde petite gal who I once asked, how the hell do you keep so trim?

“Dotty had that great Texas dry sense of humor,” says Dallas chef Dean Fearing, a longtime friend and cookbook collaborator.

She didn’t play favorites, even though she was friends with everybody, he says, and she held chefs accountable in a tough restaurant town.

“I can’t always say that when she reviewed me at the Mansion [restaurant] that I always loved her reviews,” Fearing says. “She bounced me around, and I needed to be bounced around. At that time I was a lot on the road and not in the restaurant. It wasn’t up to par. And it was because of her that I truly said, ‘If I’m going to be a chef at the Mansion, I need to stay at the Mansion.’

“She really helped me come back to planet Earth and do what I need to be doing — being a chef and not being a big chef star.”

Food And Dirt

Dotty’s legacy in food journalism is her role in the birth of modern Texas and Southwest cuisine, which was led by Fearing and chefs Stephan Pyles of Dallas and Robert Del Grande of Houston. Her legacy to us, however, is her fabulous spirit, great sense of humor, incredible intelligence and adaptability: Once we showed her how to use our CMS it was a piece of cake.

I remember her telling me she wanted to keep up with all the changes in journalism, including the huge jump to digital. We were of a similar generation, having started on typewriters and ending on laptops named after a fruit.

Because really, in all the world there is nothing but dirt and food.

“Dotty steered Dallas into the modern food world,” Fearing says. During the early ‘80s, Dallas was mostly French, Italian and continental restaurants, and “you really had to be a rebel,” he adds. “I like the fact that she supported us and what we were doing [with Southwest cuisine]. It’s easy not to support if you didn’t get it or didn’t like it or didn’t think it was necessary. … Dotty helped create a standing for Texas food, supporting that and making sure we stayed with it.”

Her influence during her time on the James Beard Foundation Restaurant Awards Committee did a lot to establish Texas as a serious food region. She also was the author of cookbooks such as Wild About Chili, 1985; Celebrating Barbecue, 2010; The Texas Holiday Cookbook, 1997 and 2013, and The Ultimate Tortilla Press Cookbook, 2018.