Bryan Caswell says the Gulf redfish fishery is in the best shape he’s seen in his career, thick enough that he can’t avoid catching them when he’s actually trying to target trout. It’s the kind of good news that never makes it past the people who fish. He’s spent two decades working to change that, ever since he pioneered a bycatch program at Reef that put underused Gulf species, sheepshead, triple tail, cobia, on the menu instead of the trash pile. Over 90 species passed through that restaurant before it closed. The program is now close to standard practice across the industry he helped shape it in.
That instinct for taking what’s overlooked and making it work traces back to where he actually learned to cook. In the early 2000s, working under Jean-Georges Vongerichten, he watched a kitchen run without a single raised voice, organized, documented, quiet, a sharp contrast to the screaming Spanish kitchen where he’d trained years earlier. He still runs his kitchens closer to that model than the one that trained him first.
He’s opened seventeen restaurants since, roughly half his own, and picked up a rule along the way from an unlikely source: years spent running R&D inside Pappas Restaurants, one of the most systemized, vertically integrated restaurant groups in the country. The rule he still uses on every menu: count the moves it takes to plate a dish. Eight moves at 300 covers a night, and the kitchen breaks.
Now he’s back in Houston with Latuli, his first restaurant of his own since Reef closed after fourteen years. He’s honest that closing it never felt clean, and that figuring out who actually calls when things fall apart taught him more than any opening ever did. It’s not the headline of his story. It’s the part that makes the rest of it worth trusting.
Guest
Bryan Casswell Instagram @wholefish
Latuli Houston
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