This flashy new Southlake hotel has a showbiz chef from a Texas restaurant legacy
Chef Jenna Kinard is back in the kitchen opening a new hotel, but not the one she thought.
Kinard is set to open Jellico’s in the huge new Westin Dallas Southlake hotel restaurant next month. The former actor and model is returning as the featured chef after a four-year side trip into TV shows, special events and an abbreviated tour at another luxury hotel.
Months before the coronavirus pandemic, Kinard was supposed to become the chef at the blockbuster new Hotel Drover in the Fort Worth Stockyards.
When the pandemic slowed construction and opening, the Drover started over with a different staff.
So instead, Kinard earned the lead role at Jellico’s, the New American restaurant in the Westin, 1200 Texas 114 East, north of Southlake Town Square.
“A lot has changed very fast,” said Kinard, joining a lineup of Southlake chefs that also includes Dallas’ Dean Fearing, consultant for Sky Creek Kitchen in the Delta hotel.
It’s a giant leap from the days when Southlake’s leading hotel restaurant was Copeland’s of New Orleans at the Hilton. (That restaurant just reopened, by the way.)
Kinard described the Jellico’s menu as “elevated modern American fare.” The restaurant will open with a fall menu offering dishes such as chicken with a pumpkin risotto or a weekend brunch with fried chicken-and-doughnuts instead of waffles.
Kinard earned her frying fame as a two-time guest on Georgia chef Paula Deen’s cooking show. With that came eternal notoriety in the National Enquirer under the headline, “Paula Deen Saved My Life — Declares Anorexic Beauty Queen!”
Obviously, Kinard is not the typical hotel chef.
She came from Hempstead, between Bryan and Houston, where she won a statewide teen pageant. She went on to work in acting and modeling, and started cooking for crews on the set.
She was formerly chef at the now-closed Max’s Wine Dive in Fort Worth.
Her Texas cooking heritage comes through her Czech immigrant great-grandparents from the Kopecky and Repka families, owners of a cafe in the south Texas town of George West.
Her grandmother waited tables for 40 years at Bud Bigelow’s in Houston, a steakhouse famous for throwing out billionaire Howard Hughes when he refused to comply with the dress code and wear a jacket.
“She never missed cooking a homemade meal for her family every single night,” Kinard said.
Kinard says cooking “is not all that I am, but it’s a major part.”
“The relations that I get to build with people, and the stories they tell — the conversations are what really inspire me,” she said.
The 261-room hotel and conference center will have 34,000 square feet for meetings. The Westin is “such a beautiful property,” she said.
It’s scheduled to open by November; 817-873-1900, facebook.com/westinsouthlake.
This story was originally published September 29, 2021 at 5:45 AM.
