Tim Love Is Giving Fort Worth’s Best Chefs a Chance to Cook Rattlesnake

Have you ever eaten rattlesnake? It’s premium meat, says Fort Worth chef Tim Love, who has had it on his menu at Lonesome Dove for over a decade. And no, he tells Eater Dallas, it doesn’t taste like chicken.

For those interested in how to prepare a rattlesnake, Love conceived of — and is hosting — the Rattle Battle on September 24. “I was approached by the Texas Rattlers, our Fort Worth professional bull riding team, who wanted me to do some sort of food event during what they call their Rattler Days,” Love says. After giving it some thought, the obvious idea came to him: have the top chefs in Fort Worth cook rattlesnake.

For those who weren’t able to attend the inaugural fest last year, the idea is to take rattlesnake and cook it into a fine dining dish, competing against 16 other chefs. Love sourced the meat from a rattlesnake farm in Arizona, where it is raised, and says the fest bought up everything on the market last year. “It’s a tough meat, similar to alligator. It’s a neutral meat, but it doesn’t taste like chicken — it’s a little chewier but plain, like chicken,” Love says. “You have to make it something.”

Love says some of his favorite dishes from the previous year included a snake in a bao bun and another in which the snake was cleaned, soaked in buttermilk and corn, fried, then served with grits.

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Antonio Votta, the chef of Bricks & Horses at Bowie House who relocated from Las Vegas to Fort Worth, is one of the chefs returning to the competition for a second year. He, understandably, wants to keep the details of his dish under wraps, but he did tell Eater Dallas that it would be an elevated presentation of rattlesnake. After giving it a lot of thought, he says, Votta decided to cure and confit the meat, although that will not be the final presentation, and serve it in a dish with fats and acids. He also alludes to using a fryer.

Also among the chefs are Zach Lewis of tapas spot Atico, whose time studying at Le Cordon Bleu absolutely did not prepare him for this; Patrick Ru of local favorite Chinese spot Teddy Wongs; Jeffrey Thompson of the incredibly popular Heim Barbecue; Rodrigo Cárdenas of the James Beard-recognized Mexican restaurant Don Artemio; Trevor Sales of food truck Brix Barbecue; and many more, including chefs from the various restaurants owned by Love. The diversity of chefs, Love says, gives the community a chance to come out and see what they can do.

Lonesome Dove

“I think all of Tim Love’s chefs are going to come with their game faces on and that they probably have handled the product. Those are the secret assassins,” Votta says. “If anything, they’ve learned from one of the best to work with it.

Love says he’s ordered meat for the chefs to work with for roughly a week ahead of the competition so they can test their ideas and get a grip on cooking snake. “I’m happy to give advice,” Love says. “But everyone is pretty prideful.”

Rattle Battle is on Thursday, September 26, from 5 to 7 p.m. Tickets are available now.