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In a tribute to his hometown, San Antonio, the chef Quealy Watson cooks a Tex-Mex barbecue with Asian flavors and gathers friends to celebrate the season. There is a moment during the preparation of any proper feast when the person in charge of the cooking starts to sweat, worried that everything is not going to be all right. For Quealy Watson, that moment came in the afternoon, a few hours before his guests were due to arrive. He was standing in the yard of a stately brick Victorian home in the King William neighborhood of San Antonio, at the edge of the San Antonio River, looking down at a heavy offset smoker in which he was roasting two ducks under a spray of spices and salt. Watson is the 33-year-old chef and owner of Hot Joy, a popular restaurant in San Antonio that combines the flavors of Texas and Mexico with those of the Asian diaspora across South Texas and east into Louisiana, where he was born. He is an accomplished cook, secure in his skills and confident in his vision of how his food should taste. So what was he worried about? The ducks before him were doing just fine, burbling a little in their foil wrapping as fat was rendered from their skin. It wasn’t a complicated party. The idea was the same one that draws together so many of us in the weeks between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Eve: to celebrate friendship and good cheer, take one last chance to raise a glass together before starting a new year afresh. He was just cooking for friends — local artists and designers, hoteliers, fellow cooks — and doing so in the home of friends, to boot: a San Antonio real estate executive named Marshall Davidson Jr. and his wife, Josephine Negley Gill Davidson. Watson had married his own wife, Jennifer Dobbertin, right here on their lawn. But people cooking big feasts do not just think of what’s in front of them. They take a larger, longer view. Inside the house, in an oven, lay a young goat that Watson had smoked in the morning, then wrapped in foil under a scattering of avocado leaves: cabrito, a specialty of South Texas. His hands were shaking a little, just thinking about it. Because the last time he’d checked, the meat had not reached that collapsing state where it begins to qualify as good barbecue. The expression on his face seemed to indicate that maybe it wouldn’t be ready until after the guests had gone home. He wanted to go check on the goat. He knew that opening the oven to do so would only make things worse. So he just stared down, his eyes unfocused, thinking. Mesquite smoke rose in tendrils from the chimney and drifted north, toward the Alamo. ‘‘Let’s go check on the salsas,’’ he said, finally, rousing himself. ‘‘We can get those tortillas warming too. And see about the pie.’’ Preparations for the meal began the day before, out at the ruins of the old Hot Wells resort south of the city center, where an artist named Justin Parr has taken up residence and built an extensive garden near the capped sulfur spring. Watson picked serrano and jalapeño peppers there, dozens of tiny, sweet Texas cherry tomatoes, sprigs of Malabar spinach. Sirens wailed in the urban distance, which seemed very far away. It was just a short drive, though, to La Michoacana, a Mexican strip-mall market with outlets across San Antonio. Watson bought avocados and bottles of Big Red, the supersweet Texas soda, and packet after packet of Mexican herbs and spices. To his basket he added dried avocado leaves, to impart a faint anise flavor to the goat; cumin and coriander; dried guajillo peppers; bags of tomatillos; dozens and dozens of limes. Ten recipes from Sam Sifton's meal with the chef Quealy Watson. Next stop: Hung Phong Oriental Market, which a local Vietnamese family opened in the early 1980s, after arriving in San Antonio as refugees and taking up residence in a home rented for them by St. David’s Episcopal Church. Watson is a regular at the store, and he was greeted warmly as he bought fish sauce and pickled green peppercorns, lemongrass, palm sugar, the Vietnamese herb known as rau ram, shrimp paste, Japanese Kewpie mayonnaise and a box of fermented Burmese tea leaves. A bird flew lazily through the store as Watson shopped and nearly crashed into a large selection of paper lanterns, electric candles and stacks of joss paper, the fake money and ephemera used for burnt offerings to the dead in some Asian religious practices. ‘‘There’s a lot of cool, sacrilegious stuff you can do with those things,’’ Watson said, in passing. Dobbertin, whose mother is Chinese, laughed. ‘‘Look at Hot Joy,’’ she said. The restaurant’s walls are decorated with the paper. Her mother, she said, does not like to sit near it. Hot Joy was quiet that evening — the Spurs were playing, which kills business in every corner of the city. Watson checked in with his cooks, the manager, the bartender, a few patrons, then grabbed his goat and the ducks from the walk-in refrigerator and took them home. He examined his notebook, small and black and crumpled. It held not just his plans for the coming feast but all his recipe ideas, back to the ones he sketched out for the opening of Hot Joy last year. The shopping list was basically complete. There were only chips and tortillas to pick up from Sanitary Tortilla in the morning — flour and corn — and cases of Lone Star beer. Back at the house on the river, the Davidson children were gathering pecans that had fallen from the trees that surround their lawn, for pie. The next day, Dobbertin and Josie Davidson, as she is known, would prepare the table and mix up the drinks. All Watson would need to do was cook. San Antonio sounds straight from our friend John Spong of Texas Monthly.
