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Articles
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| D.C. transplant Eric Ziebold has been named America's Best New Chef |
VOICE writes, "BY MARION LEVY
D.C. transplant Eric Ziebold has been named America's Best New Chef by Food & Wine Magazine and listed as one of five chefs to be watched by Bon Appetit. Cityzen, the restaurant that he opened in the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in 2004, has been called one of the "Hottest Restaurants in the World" (again, Food & Wine) and named "America's Best New Restaurant" by Esquire Magazine. It has earned a five-diamond rating by AAA, and four stars in the Mobil Travel Guide.
And yet nothing, it seems, can crack this Midwesterner's humble persona. "Why did you pick me to interview?" Ziebold asks, and his curiosity seems sincere."
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The Mandarin chose Ziebold to open its restaurant after crossing Alan Wong and Jean-George Vongerichten off the list. "They were looking for someone who was trained doing something a little luxurious and something exciting, and I think that's where Eric came in," said manager Mark Politzer.
Ziebold, then chef de cuisine at the acclaimed French Laundry in Napa Valley, was fishing for a position in Washington.
"And the first thing I said was, you know, I understand you guys are the Mandarin Oriental, but if you're looking for someone to do Asian food, I'm the wrong guy," said Ziebold. His approach to creating the menu at Cityzen avoids Asian-themed food (the hotel's Café MoZU serves that), and Ziebold says the balance implied by the word Zen is just a part of cooking.
"You know, I'm American, so I would use different terminology than Zen," he said, "[but] our food's really balanced anyway ... . From a dining standpoint, and a creating-a-dish standpoint, you're always thinking about it; maybe not in that exact verbiage, but you're always thinking about how to make the dish work and incorporate different flavors and textures and cooking techniques and ingredients into the scope of the menu."
Ziebold grew up in Ames, Iowa, where his mother was a teacher and his father is in charge of postal services at Iowa State University. Dinner was an important event. "You know, dinner was at six o'clock, and I mean six o'clock," he said. "I don't mean 6:02 and I don't mean 5:57; it was six o'clock. And God help you if you were late, because there wasn't an excuse that was going to be good enough."
He says his family had typical Midwestern meals, but despite the iceberg lettuce and the "plethora of bottled dressings" that made up the first course, the importance of the meals, together with his first job at 16 -- as a "dishwasher-slash-prep cook" -- helped form an early interest in cooking.
Ziebold went to the University of Northern Iowa after high school, where he studied finance for two years. "Finally at one point I said, you know, this is silly; cooking is what I really want to do, that's what I want to go into." He dropped out of the university and went to the Culinary Institute of America.
Ziebold says he spent one Thanksgiving visiting friends in D.C. before he graduated, and he loved the city. A teacher arranged his first job out of culinary school, at Jeff Buben's Vidalia. "It was a great experience," said Ziebold. "It was a hard place to work. I mean, it was a busy restaurant; the kitchen was hot. ... But Jeff is really incredibly passionate about cooking and food, and food [ran] the gamut.
"Jeff would be just as excited talking about a four-star meal as he would talking about the barbeque place that he was at last night," he continued. And, he said, Buben understood the importance of doing something well, no matter what it was, which resonated with Ziebold's "very strong work ethic." "He was really a great person to work for," he said.
At Cityzen, Ziebold and his staff create a new menu every four to six weeks. "I would make the argument that our guests have control of the menu also," he said. "At some point, you need to accept that as a chef, yeah, there's the artistic, creative side of what you want to do, but if that's not what anybody wants to eat, it doesn't really matter what you want to do ... . They have the ultimate vote."
Ziebold pulls from a wide range of inspiration for new dishes, from staff meals to flea markets. "I like history, and I like taking something that had a purpose and a moment and an importance at a place in time, and take that unique object and say, OK, how does it fit into our personality and what we're doing today," he said.
He has come up with new recipes based on particular antiques, including his signature Parker House rolls, which he created around an old, leather cigar box found in an antique shop in Georgetown. He has created dishes specifically to use silver ladles found while traveling Thailand and old soup tureens found at a flea market in Arlington. ("I wanted to do something ladled tableside," he said, which turned out to be Cityzen's take on couscous, with roasted lamb and lamb jus ladled on top.)
Ziebold says he would like to open his own restaurant someday -- "at some point, all people like me want to do their own thing" -- but he says that's not going to happen tomorrow. Ziebold lives in Arlington but sees himself moving downtown in the next two to three years. "I think Washington is a very unique city, and I think it's a very special city, and I don't think you find too many with that dynamic," he said. "And although sometimes it's a very sleepy, very Americana town, at other times, it's incredibly, incredibly culturally diverse."
Ziebold says growing up in Iowa has only enhanced his appreciation of Washington. "I think sometimes it's so easy to get caught up in the rigors of everyday life that you lose track of it. And when you don't grow up seeing that every day, I think it's easier for it to make an impact on you ... .
"I think if you were to grow up in Manhattan or Washington or Philadelphia or San Francisco, I think you would take a lot of what that city has to offer for granted. Whereas I went over to Dumbarton Oaks a couple of weeks ago, and I mean, it's absolutely amazing. And when you think about the fact that this is in the middle of Washington, D.C., it's just mind-boggling to me that you could have a property like that, with gardens like that, manicured like that, in the middle of the hustle and bustle of the city. And I think that's absolutely amazing."
Cityzen (202-787-6006; cityzen.com) is located at 1330 Maryland Ave. SW. The six-course chef's tasting menu costs $105, the six-course vegetarian tasting menu is $90 and the three-course menu is $75.
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Posted on Sep 07, 2007 12:31pm.
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