Misti Norris
Chef/Owner, Petra and the Beast | Dallas
December 2021
Sundays at Misti Norris’s house were meant for chores. But at the end of the day, her dad would switch on a blues record and cook a pot of rice and beans. When her Cajun maw maw came to visit her in Houston from Port Arthur, she’d make boudin bowls and dirty rice—and every time Norris took a bite, she was reminded how good food was capable of being. Since then, she has been determined to replicate those memories through cooking.
When Norris moved to Dallas as a teenager, she took on her first kitchen job at a Cedar Hill retirement home. Norris spent the next decade working at top restaurants around the Dallas-Fort Worth area. She spent five years under Rising Stars alum Chef Anthony Bombaci at Nana, followed by French restaurant Bijoux, then she strengthened her already-burgeoning fermentation skills as sous chef at FT33. In 2014, she ran her first kitchen at Small Brewpub, but left two years later to start planning a concept of her own. Petra and the Beast opened in 2018 with a focus on whole animal butchery and local ingredients. Since its inception, Norris has mastered the skill of packing complicated, experimental techniques into unpretentious, approachable, and affordable dishes. Think hand-rolled cavatelli tossed in a Szechuan-stewed pecan ragú and charcuterie boards filled with slices of koji-inoculated bresaola and summer pepper sofrito scrapple.
