Capital Spice

If you watched Bravo’s debut season of Top Chef: Just Desserts last year, you learned that pastry chefs can be just as competitive (and just as cutting) as their meat-and-potatoes counterparts.  To some, the pressure on pastry chefs is even greater, as most of their creations require perfect recall of ingredient ratios, temperatures and cooking times.  If a souffle doesn’t come together, it’s a lot harder for them to pivot and turn it into another dessert on the fly.

With all that in mind, Bravo is offering up a tasty treat: a second helping of Just Desserts!  Season Two debuts tomorrow night, and the competition has expanded from twelve chefs to fourteen.  We were excited to see that DC would be represented once again, this time by CityZen’s Matthew Petersen.

Petersen has been at CityZen for a little over a year now, and he’s been earning praise for his blending of classic techniques with creative twists.  We caught up with him over email as he was getting ready for his next big thing: a three-course “Simply Dessert” tasting menu ($25) that will change weekly on Thursdays – conveniently the day after each episode of Top Chef: Just Desserts airs.

Questions and answers are reprinted in their entirety without any editing or revision:

Capital Spice: Thanks for taking the time to chat with us, Chef.  Let’s start with the basics: What inspired you to compete?
Matthew Petersen: I decided that it would be a great opportunity so I decided to apply.

CS: You studied baking and pastry in culinary school – what drew you to them?
MP: I always knew, from about the age of 15, that I wanted to work in a kitchen making pastry of some sort.  I didn’t know then that I would end up in mostly fine dining restaurants working with some great chefs.  At an early age I was surrounded by great, simple, homemade pastry.

CS: CityZen is well-known for the creativity of its menu, from appetizers to desserts.  What is it like working in that kind of environment?
MP: I love working with [Chef] Eric [Ziebold] at CityZen.  The constant rotation of the menu pushes my creativity more than any other restaurant I have been at.  I would say that I thrive in this kind of environment where you are pushed to your limits in every capacity.  It is a grueling effort sometimes but the rewards are great.

What it’s like to follow a Beard Award-nominated chef and more after the jump. (more…)

If there was one common complaint about Hank’s Oyster Bar, Chef Jamie Leeds’ “urban beach food” venue, it was that there just wasn’t enough room.  Regulars and first-timers alike would often find the small space, located in a Q Street townhouse near Dupont Circle, filled to capacity (capacity being 65 or so) from happy hour to closing time.  Six years later, Hank’s is all growed up.

Yesterday evening marked the opening of Hank’s new Lounge, next door to (and incorporating) the original space.  With this welcome expansion, Hank’s has effectively doubled its indoor seating capacity.  An outdoor patio allows for another 40 diners, which means they’ll be doing a whole lot of additional shucking at the raw bar.

Fortunately, they’ve expanded that, too.  The bar that used to serve Hank’s has been stripped of its beer taps and will now serve as the raw bar.  The best part?  They’ve kept the bar seating there, giving a lucky few a ringside seat to watch the shuckers work their magic.

More on the new layout, including some nautically inspired new rooms and a look at some new food items (can you say “never-before-seen oyster variety?”) after the jump. (more…)

We have to hand it to Prince of Petworth.  There we were, on our way to take a sneak peek at Rogue 24 in Blagden Alley off of 9th Street, NW, and we get an email from a friend pointing us to PoP’s post announcing the opening of SUNdeVICH in a nearby-but-different alley off of 9th Street, NW.  We had no idea they were even close to opening, but thanks to PoP we were able to drop in just as SUNdeVICH opened its doors.  We went in anticipating bold flavors, and we weren’t disappointed.

Of course, first we had to find the place.  Walking up to N Street from Rogue 24, we could see the alley we were looking for through a parking lot, but to get there we had to head out to 9th and then cut back in.  It being their first day, SUNdeVICH didn’t even have a sign in the window yet.  We might still be wandering around the alley if we hadn’t seen someone enter the corner garage through a sliding glass door.  This was the place!

We had read about their intention to provide “a wide range of bold flavors,” representing cuisines from across the globe, which immediately sets them up to encounter two potentially fatal challenges: a “jack of all trades, master of none” approach that sacrifices expertise for diversity of flavors; and a menu so scattered that it becomes a minefield of bad combinations.  So we decided to try a sandwich and a side to check out the flavors – both on their own and in tandem.  Two gallon-sized containers of pickles at the cash register caught our eye, so we had them throw in a whole pickle to round out the meal.  What we found was surprising.

Will we be going back to get our passports stamped with other flavors soon?  Find out after the jump.

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