Delicious Mischief, the popular food and wine radio program now approaching a quarter-century on the air, is expanding into the San Antonio market next Friday Jan. 10. The second-largest city in Texas, San Antonio joins Houston, Dallas, Austin and Far West Texas in airing the show, hosted by veteran journalist and author John DeMers.
In San Antonio, each week’s Delicious Mischief will be heard Friday evenings at 8 on News Talk 930 KLUP. The program is a presentation of Spec’s Wines, Spirits & Finer Foods, which now has seven stores in the San Antonio area, including two in New Braunfels and one in Kerrville.
“I have been a huge fan of San Antonio since moving Delicious Mischief to Texas more than twelve years ago,” says DeMers. “I love the feeling of the city, the colors and the excitement, blending the cool Hill Country vibe of Austin with the authentic Tex-Mex flavors of the South Texas plains. San Antonio is great at interpreting and presenting what’s real about itself for the 26 million who visit each year. As a New Orleans native, I respect that delicate balance.”
The culinary history of San Antonio goes back to the “chili queens,” Mexican ladies who moved around the city’s earliest public markets hawking a stew of chopped beef, gravy and spices – thus gifting all Texans with one of the state’s two or three most iconic dishes. Many count the birth of modern, touristic San Antonio as being the HemisFair of 1968, yet its modern restaurant history began with British-born chef Bruce Auden at Biga on the Banks and the later national recognition given SA native Andrew Weissman.
“Growing up Jewish in a Tex-Mex City that puts meat and dairy on the same plate every 2.7 seconds, Andrew had many reasons to ponder the surprises at the heart of the American Dream,” offers DeMers, who profiled Weissman in his book Lone Star Chefs. “The fact that his French restaurant was called le reve and his Italian restaurant is called il sogno, both meaning The Dream, is certainly no accident.”
Delicious Mischief is an hour-long interview program, featuring many of the best chefs Texas has to offer, along with visits to their talented counterparts in New York, San Francisco, Chicago and beyond. A recent series of broadcasts featured the foods and wines of Greece, from Athens, the Peloponnese and the islands of Crete and Santorini. Still, Texas is homebase to the show, especially when it’s time to consume barbecue or cheese enchiladas with large glasses of sweet tea.
DeMers has been a news reporter and editor for three daily newspapers and the wire service United Press International, which appointed him its Food Editor. In addition to the Delicious Mischief radio program, he is the author of 52 published books on a wide variety of topics, the latest being Cordua: Foods of the Americas and Highways to the World: The Engineer, the Teacher and the Dangerous 20st Century. In fiction, he has published four crime novels starting with Marfa Shadows, which launched a series set in Far West Texas and featuring his culinary hero Chef Brett. DeMers lives in Houston and Marfa.
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