But it’s his Reata Restaurants that most people think
of when they hear the Micallef name. He opened his first
Reata 23 years ago in Alpine and another in Fort Worth
22 years ago.
He loves how his restaurants have become the back
drop for the happy times of so many lives.
“We have a pretty good record on the people who
have gotten engaged here,” Micallef said. “I’ve been all
over the world and people come up to me and say, ’We
got engaged there,’ or ‘We went to Reata for our first
date.’”
While restaurants come and go and people quickly
grow bored with many of the concepts that were once
considered exciting, Reata’s luster seems to be timeless.
“It continues to grow every year,” he said.
Micallef makes no bones about it. He didn’t really set
out to open the ultimate, classic Texas Eatery.
“I named it after the fictional ranch in the novel
Giant,” Micallef said.
Reata’s chicken-fried steak is raved about by Texas
cuisine aficionados and lauded as supreme. That’s quite
an accomplishment for a Texas restaurateur, who isn’t
exactly a native Texan.
“The first week we opened, I saw a party of six older
ladies come in and they all looked like they knew how to
cook chicken-fried steak,” Micallef said. “I thought, ‘Oh
boy! I’m in trouble.’”
But, when they were about to leave they stopped
Micallef to say how much they loved their lunch and
especially their chicken-frieds.
“I was so happy,” Micallef said.
Reata is actually the direct result of Micallef’s
Texaness.
Micallef longed to be a rancher (what’s a Texan
without a spread? Right?) so by the early ‘90s he started
looking to buy a “little land.” At first, he bought about
10,000 acres in Alpine, the CF Ranch. He purchased
a few more parcels of property along the way until he
ended up with 156,000 acres. He’s since scaled it down
a bit and has about 20,000.
The more time Micallef spent at his ranch in Alpine,
the closer he came to a startling conclusion:
“There was no place out there,” Micallef said.
So, in classic Micallef fashion, he opened a restau-
rant — and what a restaurant it was! He called it Reata.
Opened for business in 1995, it was housed in a charm-
ing old ranch house (still is). From the beginning, the
food was spectacular.
One of Micallef’s Fort Worth friends in the bank-
ing business came down to spend a week at the ranch.
They ate a number of times at Reata. The friend was
impressed and relentless about how Fort Worth needed
a Reata in Downtown. Micallef kept telling him that
he “was not in the restaurant business. I just wanted to
have some place to eat.” By the end of his friend’s stay,
Micallef had stopped protesting and began to marvel at
the possibilities of a downtown Fort Worth Reata.
“When I started using the name Reata, no one was
Now Serving Two Locations
•Small Animal
•Large Animal
•Boarding
•Grooming
Ryan E. Cate, DVM
[email protected]
1421 FM 1189 Ste. 4 | Brock, TX 76087
(817) 599-8085
Mon-Thur: 7:30am–6pm | Fri: 7:30am–5pm
819 Santa Fe Drive | Weatherford, TX 76086
(817) 594-0216 | Metro: (817) 596-8808
Mon-Fri: 8am–5:30pm | Sat: 8am–12pm
• Emergency calls after hours •
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