Heritage East’s current take on okra is unlike any other okra dish we’ve tried in recent memory. The pods are split lengthwise and bear blackened char marks from a grill. McWhorter sautés rabe and garlic scapes to add to the okra, then dresses the dish with an herb puree and a buttermilk dressing that adds a creamy acidity. You can taste the smokiness in the okra alongside its subtle sweetness, both working flawlessly with the acidic bite of the dressing.
The okra, and nearly everything else on Heritage East’s menu, is rooted in recipes from McWhorter’s childhood in nearby Athens. McWhorter’s life had taken him nearly around the world before returning to East Texas six years ago, but until recently, the true origins of his East Texas cooking were still unknown to him.
A Well-Traveled Chef Returns Home
Before he turned 40, McWhorter had already lived a life of adventure. He played in a rock band in California, served in both the Army and the Navy, and was a retired firefighter. Most recently, he had been a “high-threat security contractor” working for the State Department in Iraq. Lucrative as military contracting was, he walked away to pursue his passion: cooking.“We grew okra, tomatoes, four different kinds of peas and beans, and we just cooked what we grew,” McWhorter says of his youth, when his love of cooking began. He recalls learning to make roux with his grandmother in a cast-iron skillet on a propane stove. “My family, we weren’t well off. We did canning, pickling, all that stuff. A lot of our cooking wasn’t meat-heavy, it was vegetables and cornbread.”
Twelve years ago, McWhorter returned stateside to learn the ins and outs of restaurant kitchens via several jobs in the Hill Country north of San Antonio. With a few years of experience under his belt, he returned to East Texas as executive chef of a small restaurant in Jefferson. When ownership closed the restaurant and rented the space to new owners, McWhorter headed to Dallas, landing the executive sous-chef role at SER Steakhouse in the Hilton Anatole. But when the opportunity arose to work for chef Matt McAllister at the legendary FT33, McWhorter jumped at the chance.
“I learned so much from Matt; he’s just a magician. And working alongside people like Joel [Orsini] and Kerry [Moffett] and Jessica Alanzo, those people were absolute monsters of talent,” McWhorter recalls.
From FT33, McWhorter moved to Macellaio just before its opening to work with Lucia owner David Uygur. Citing a desire for a small-town lifestyle and an opportunity to open a restaurant of his own, McWhorter left Macellaio and moved to Tyler with his wife in 2018. In August 2019, he opened Culture ETX in a historic building that used to house a pizza shop, and before that, a Subway.
“I’ll never forget the first day we opened, August 12th, I had $92 left in the checking account,” McWhorter says of opening his own restaurant. “Ninety-two. I’ll never forget that number. But we made it. We never missed a payroll. It was a hell of a grind.”
McWhorter’s vision behind Culture ETX was to bring global flavors to Tyler, based on cuisine McWhorter had been exposed to across years of working all over the world, while meeting the locals in the middle with dishes they could still relate to.
McWhorter won the last Cochon 555 competition in 2020, and also made an appearance on the Food Network’s Chopped, raising both his and his new restaurant’s profile. The restaurant battled through the COVID pandemic along with everyone else and emerged on the other side stronger for it. Culture ETX evolved into a lauded local find. After two years of being BYOB, McWhorter finally obtained an alcoholic beverage license in 2021 and opened a speakeasy, The Plaid Rabbit, in 2022 when an apartment that abutted the restaurant became available.
But after five years, McWhorter wanted to challenge himself and his team to do more. He decided to pivot and truly lean into the local cuisine of East Texas, but with an upscale flair. The Plaid Rabbit would remain, as it had quickly become one of the most unique bars in East Texas. In the fall of 2024, McWhorter remodeled the interior of Culture ETX, revamped the menu, and relaunched it as Heritage East at Culture ETX.
On Tyler's Square, A Culinary Gem
Heritage East is truly a gem that blends upscale techniques with an approachable vibe, similar to the way Cry Wolf used to do in East Dallas (the irony that Cry Wolf also occupied a former Subway restaurant isn’t lost on McWhorter). The Cry Wolf similarities abound; Heritage East’s open kitchen occupies half the dining room, with seats for 30 or so guests in the other half. A giant wood-fired pizza oven remains from the previous tenant, which McWhorter says is simply too cost-prohibitive to remove. McWhorter’s varied taste in music, ranging from classic rock to alternative to hip-hop, plays overhead, but never to the detriment of conversation. A small waitstaff handles service with big-city polish and small-town friendliness. And the food is, quite simply, spectacular.We came to town on a recent Saturday evening, on the heels of Heritage East winning a 2025 Award of Excellence from Wine Spectator magazine for one of the best wine programs in the world. We let McWhorter and his sommelier James Horton walk us through bites and sips across the menu in advance of a tasting menu that will launch at Heritage East later this fall. The flavors of East Texas take center stage from the first mouthful, whether it’s the jalapeño cornbread, duck-fat fried crab cake hushpuppies, or chilled “deer camp” venison rillettes served with homemade crackers.
Move into entrees, and McWhorter’s skills shine in iconic dishes that swing for the fences. There’s a classic chicken fried steak, beef sourced locally to McWhorter’s specs, encased in a peppery and crispy batter, and topped with a sumptuous horseradish gravy. Gulf-caught redfish arrives in a pecan-sweet potato crust with perfectly flaky fish beneath, paired with a charred cabbage slaw and a spicy gumbo base. And of course, there's Heritage East's magnificent okra.
With each dish we tried, Horton poured a small taste of a wine that accentuated the best parts of the food, or launched into completely different flavors altogether. You could order your own wines by the glass or the bottle, but missing out on Horton’s expertise in selecting a wine paired perfectly with your meal is a mistake you shouldn't make.
As full as we were at the end of our meal, we couldn’t resist a few bites of McWhorter’s chocolate mousse, which he made famous on his Chopped appearance years ago. Maldon salt and lemon zest sparkle above the rich chocolate and pistachios.
Tyler residents clearly adore everything about Heritage East; every table was full most of the evening, and a steady stream of well-dressed guests slipped down the hallway into the Plaid Rabbit for smaller bites and impressive cocktails. The Plaid Rabbit is a dark and moody space that can best be described as eclectic steampunk chic meets old Hollywood film noir. It’s a lovely spot for a post-meal cocktail.
A Road Trip And A Revelation
McWhorter always believed that East Texas could support a restaurant that offered an elegant take on local cuisine. There are people like himself who left East Texas to move to Dallas and other major cities before moving back home to their families, who would still crave a restaurant experience like they had in the big city. And while many of the dishes he creates today draw inspiration from his parents' or grandparents’ recipes, it wasn’t until recently that McWhorter took a deep look into the region’s history. And what he learned has changed how he views his restaurant’s role in East Texas’ culture.“Travel Texas teamed up with Visit Tyler, and they were organizing a trip to Atlanta to showcase Texas food. They picked five cities, and Tyler was one of them, where they asked the cities to bring their best chef to do something that’s representative of your area,” McWhorter begins. “So Diann Bayes (from Visit Tyler) reached out, and we decided to drive to Atlanta.” McWhorter had the idea to brainstorm how he would define what East Texas food really was during the 10-hour drive.
“To me, East Texas is the most isolated, secretive place in all of Texas,” McWhorter says. “Once you hit these piny woods, it’s a place where nobody goes. They blaze through to Shreveport or they blow back through to Dallas.”
While Bayes drove the pair across Interstate 20, McWhorter was on his iPad, digging into the history of the region. McWhorter is a seventh-generation East Texan and knew that his own family came to the region from Tennessee when Texas was still a part of Mexico. And McWhorter recalled from his work in the area a decade ago that Jefferson had been the second largest port city in Texas in the 19th century, and the most inland port in the western United States. All manner of goods from the Eastern U.S. came into the area on paddle-wheelers before being dispersed through the area.
McWhorter read about Colonel Thomas B. Erwin of Alabama, who moved his family to the area in 1850 and built a large plantation near current-day Mt. Sylvan. Erwin was a slave owner, and his slaves cleared the land for the first major road into Tyler, the newly established county seat of Smith County, to support Erwin’s business interests. With the road in place, Erwin built one of the first buildings on Tyler’s downtown square, a two-story brick building at 116 and 118 Walnut Street, which was later renamed Erwin Street in his honor.
“I dropped my iPad on the floorboard of the car,” McWhorter says. Heritage East is on the downtown square in Tyler, at 118 Erwin Street, in a two-story brick building. “Both of us had chills driving down the road. And if I hadn’t been invited on that trip, I never would have dug into it like I did.”
McWhorter learned that, in addition to the goods and materials that came into the port at Jefferson, those ships also brought thousands of slaves as Southern families moved west into Texas. By 1860, Smith County listed a population of 8,408 white residents and a staggering 4,982 enslaved people.
After reading about the similarities of Carolina’s Low Country cuisine (which was developed in part from early African slaves) and his own East Texas recipes, McWhorter made the connection that much of what he thought was “his” family’s style of cooking could be traced back to being grown and cooked by the slaves brought to the area.
“I thought, “So why didn’t I know this? Why is this not common knowledge?” McWhorter says. The answers likely rest in Tyler’s checkered history with the end of slavery. McWhorter learned that even though the Brown v. Board of Education’s ruling to desegregate was handed down in 1954, Tyler didn’t fall in step until 1970. And Thurgood Marshall argued cases at the federal courthouse in Tyler in the 1950s (just a block away from Heritage East's location), but had to be bused out of town in the evening because he wasn’t allowed lodging in the city.
McWhorter adores that Tyler is a different city today, and his own staff at Heritage East is a reflection of the area’s growing diversity. The Plaid Rabbit hosts events for Tyler Area Gays, and sponsors events on the square to support the growing LGBTQ community. But he remains astounded that, at 52 years of age and over a decade spent in kitchens, he only recently learned the truth about his region’s culinary history. Sharing that knowledge is something McWhorter is ready to do, as he feels a responsibility to drive out pockets of hate and division that still occasionally rear their ugly head in his restaurant today.
“How do we bring this to the forefront?” McWhorter asks. “Not in an appropriative manner, but in a respectful manner, and where we have this discussion?”
It’s a rhetorical question, because McWhorter knows the answer. The answer is to celebrate that history through the food on the menu at Heritage East.
“That’s where we want to go with this,” McWhorter says. “We're really introducing people to this food, because nobody knows the truth about it.”
McWhorter was awed to learn how much history happened just outside his restaurant's door. He has gladly accepted the newly learned truths about his food along the way. If recognition and healing are a journey, he's happy to have it start at his table.
“Tyler has turned into kind of a cool town, and I’m happy that we’re a part of that.”
Heritage East at Culture ETX, 118 West Erwin Street, Tyler, 903-787-5300, www.heritagetyler.com
