Chef Dean Fearing is JCTC 2009 Alumnus of the Year

Jefferson Community and Technical College named Chef Dean Fearing, owner of Fearings’ Restaurant in Dallas, Texas, its 2009 Alumnus of the Year.

Chef Dean Fearing, son of an innkeeper, was born in Ashland, Kentucky. He came to Louisville to pursue a degree in Culinary Arts at Jefferson Community and Technical College. Though he had experience working in the kitchen of his dad’s Holiday Inn, Chef said that in Jefferson’s culinary arts lab, he was exposed to “sights he’d never seen before and smells he had never smelled before,” and he knew Culinary Arts was the right career for him.

Equally important, while at the college he met his mentor, Chef Harvey Colgin, who encouraged him to attend the Culinary Institute of America after graduating from Jefferson. He later went on to a distinguished 20-plus year career at the famed Mansion on Turtle Creek in Texas, where he cooked for U.S. Presidents and the Queen of England. Google his name and you’ll find more than 26,000 listings from his TV appearances to magazine articles to his cookbooks and recipes to his many, many awards.

In August 2007, Fearing opened Fearing’s Restaurant at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Dallas. It was named “Restaurant of the Year” and “Table of the Year” by Esquire Magazine shortly after opening and then received continued praise from The New York Times, Newsweek, Texas Monthly, Food and Wine, among others, and a James Beard Foundation nomination for Best New Restaurant.

Dean Fearing can be seen these days in Fearing’s wearing a crisp white chef’s coat with colorful boot embroidery, blue jeans and brightly-hued, custom-tooled Lucchese cowboy boots.   When not in the kitchen, he is often found strumming his vintage Fender Telecaster guitar, one of an impressive collection, with his all-chef alternative country band.

Click here for a video about Chef Fearing