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…)

Quick!  Name the top five restaurants in DC.  And I mean in DC…not just inside the Beltway (Sorry, Restaurant Eve…we still love you, we promise!).

Got ‘em?  Good.  Now take a look at your list.  There’s a pretty good chance that most of them can be found in Northwest, clustered around Penn Quarter, Georgetown, and maybe Dupont or Logan Circle.

But there’s likely to be one outlier, all by itself in Southwest.  Maybe you’ve heard of it…a little place in the Mandarin Oriental called CityZen.  There it is, front and center at #4 on Washingtonian’s Top 100 list for 2009 (and at #2 the year before).  And there it is in Tom Sietsema’s Fall Dining Guide in the Washington Post last year.  There’s Executive Chef Eric Ziebold, winning the James Beard Foundation’s award for Best Chef, Mid-Atlantic last year – he’s also a Food & Wine Magazine Best New Chef from 2005.  After Citronelle, Ben’s Chili Bowl - and possibly Minibar – this is probably the DC restaurant most known to non-Washingtonians.

We finally experienced CityZen for ourselves this weekend, as Elizabeth brought me to celebrate my birthday.   Right away, we were impressed.  After walking in the front door, we were immediately greeted and ushered past the bar and lounge into the main dining room.  With the high, vaulted ceilings, the oversized chandeliers, and the lighting fixtures along the walls that looked like enormous tablelamps, it was easy to imagine ourselves in a giant’s castle.

Our waitress immediately arrived to take our drink orders, but we definitely wanted to take the time to read through the numerous offerings before commiting to something right off the bat.  So we took a few minutes to review the wine and cocktail lists before settling on a sparkling wine (Elizabeth) and a big California Zinfandel (me) to start off.  That just left us to decide what to eat.

At CityZen, they take the concept of the chef’s tasting menu to its natural conclusion: each menu is hand-signed by Chef Ziebold, indicating that he has, in fact, approved the six-course menu that is being offered to you.  We had never seen anything quite like that, and if we hadn’t already been planning on the tasting menu we would almost certainly have been drawn to it as a result.

So what did the chef recommend?  And how was everything?  More descriptions and photos after the jump! (more…)