Three Stars

By Steve Hull and Susan Barrett

Bethesda Magazine asked over 50 area chefs who they think is the best among them. When the votes were counted, three chefs—Jeff Heineman at Grapeseed, Damian Salvatore at Persimmon and Jeff Black at Black Restaurant Group—were the clear winners. Here are their stories.

JEFF HEINEMAN
Matching fine wines with great food is a winning combination for Grapeseed chef

As a young adult, Jeff Heineman’s future seemed certain to involve sports. An All-Met football player at Seneca Valley High School in Darnestown, Heineman then was a football-playing economics major at William and Mary, and, after graduation, went to New Zealand to play rugby for a year. But slowly, two other passions evolved: fine wine and food.

Chosen by his peers as the best chef in the Bethesda area, Heineman, founder and executive chef at Grapeseed, has made his mark by combining great food with great wine. On Grapeseed’s menu, Heineman selects the wine that he thinks best complements each entree. It has become a winning combination.

Heineman serves “good wine paired with fun and interesting food,” says Damian Salvatore, executive chef at Persimmon, who finished second in the voting for best chef. Adds Kevin Scott, owner and executive chef at New Orleans Bistro: “Grapeseed has an original eclectic menu with great flavor combinations.”

Born in Queens, Heineman grew up in Rockland County, N.Y., until age 11, when his father, an FBI agent, was transferred to Washington. The family settled in Darnestown. Heineman says he developed his love and appreciation of wine as a young adult working at The Wine Rack, a now-defunct Gaithersburg wine store. “Every member of my family, other than my father, worked at The Wine Rack at one time or another,” he says. “Pretty much the day after your 18th birthday you went to work there. It was like a rite of passage. My mother was the manager for the better part of 20 years. No one even drank wine in our family until we started working there. Mom started with…rosé and now it’s, ‘What high-end cabernet can I have when I’m [at Grapeseed]?’ I definitely got interested [in wine] there.”

Heineman’s appreciation of fine food developed more slowly. He says there are “absolutely not” any other chefs in his family. “Mom cooks okay…sometimes. She’s ‘old school’: well-done pork and overcooked squash. We fight about the squash every holiday. She’ll show up with a bucket of squash as big as a bathtub. It all deflates. I tell her, ‘You’re killing it.’” (Says Betty Heineman: “It’s a little intimidating cooking with him…but I’m still his mom.”)

Heineman got interested in food while cooking for three roommates his junior and senior years at William and Mary. “My roommates were hungry and I was willing to experiment with food,” he says. “They paid the money and I did the work.” Heineman says he cooked mostly “red-sauce Italian” and stir-fry, the latter with recipes from the Wok with Yan spiral-bound cookbook.

Heineman, who just turned 40 and works six days a week, says his rugby-playing days are over: “The knees and shoulders…too much fatness going on.”

The following, in his own words, is Heineman’s story:

The path to Grapeseed
Out of college, I worked in the front of the house in restaurants. I was noticing the guys in the kitchen have a lot more fun and don’t have to put up with grumbling customers. There’s more camaraderie in the kitchen.

When I got back from New Zealand, I went to L’Academie de Cuisine in Bethesda. One day Francois [Dionot, the school’s owner] asks for a show of hands of anybody who wants to work for his buddy in southwest France and I was like “All right.” So now I’m off in France working in a restaurant—for free—and living in an attic. It was a fantastic experience, but at some point, you know, you’re living in an attic! A windowless room up in the eaves. I was there for eight months.

I came back from France and a friend of mine was working at Kinkead’s so I went down and talked to the sous-chef, J.G....It worked out perfectly—he had lived in France, 20 miles from where I had lived and he played rugby. Even if I hadn’t known how to cook anything—I lived in France and played rugby—I got the job in Kinkead’s knowing I was going to be off Tuesday and Thursday nights and Saturday mornings to play rugby with J.G. It was sort of a recruiting thing. I was there about a year and a half, and then at Cashion’s Eat Place for one year. Then some guys I knew from school wanted to open a restaurant in Arlington, so we opened the Roadside Grill.

That place was…half bar, with bands down in the basement with burgers and chicken wings, and half fine-dining upstairs. It’s a strange dichotomy that’s hard to pull off. After awhile, I got really tired of cooking burgers and chicken wings. I didn’t live in an attic in France...for this!

At that place we had done wine dinners and that’s what I liked—matching up foods and wines. One of my partners said he might want to buy me out. We came to a price and I used that money to open this place.

I knew from working at The Wine Rack that there were no real wine bars in Montgomery County...I thought it might be a good time to do it, have a big wine list. No one even had 20 bottles of wine on the wine list. It was to be a unique product. I wanted to be in an affluent area in a demographic where people were past the beer stage and getting into the wine stage. We opened April 7, 2000. There are seven other investors, attorneys, friends from college, my parents. I’m the only one who works here. Mom comes in and critiques.

His influences
There’s no one big influence, more a conglomeration. Bob Kinkead and Ann Cashion were two chefs I learned a lot from. They’re pretty much polar opposites. Bob is more about the result. Ann is all concerned about the method. I’ve taken what I like out of both.

How he matches wine and food
I try to get the wine first. You can manipulate the food easier than the wine. The wine’s already done. I try to match a wine with a protein. I match a sweet wine, for example, with something spicy. I ask myself, “What country do I feel like being in?” I don’t do any fusion stuff within each dish—mixing German and Thai ingredients in one dish. I pick a country and try to use things indigenous to that country and that flavor and stay in it. Sometimes you get an idea and it sticks in your head. Like…little Parmesan fritters—I want to work them into an entree somehow. They’re crunchy on the outside and like soufflés on the inside, and a little bit spicy. I love them. Lately I tinker with stuff just before dinner gets going. There’s usually downtime between 4 and 5:30.

How he knows if a new dish is well received
I keep an eye on the plates coming back, especially when something’s new, to see what hasn’t been eaten. I ask the servers. I don’t do it by looking at the computer to see what’s sold. When I come up with a good dish, I know it. If it tastes good, it tastes good. If you come up with a dish that you know is good and it doesn’t sell well at first, you leave it on. People will catch on eventually.

What he does best
I can come up with dishes that hit on each part of your mouth—the different taste buds—that are not too spiky on one part of your tongue. I’m good at the fine-tuning.

What he needs to improve
I need to do a better job making dishes come out on the plate exactly the way they’re in my head. Probably because things have more height in my mind; they tend to come out flatter on the plate. Keeping all the paperwork together is the overwhelming part. You try to figure it out as you go along and hope you don’t mess up too bad. I love cooking, but that’s the time that gets sucked away as you get more and more busy, more staff, more problems.

When Grapeseed turned profitable
[Grapeseed] turned profitable in the middle of 2004. It took more than four years. We would have been profitable in 2002, but we had some issues. That’s when the effects of 9/11 hit out here. Then the other side of Bethesda opened up and suddenly everybody was over there. And then the sniper broke out in October 2002. And when the University of Maryland basketball team won the national championship, that cost us $15,000 or so. The games were on TV three consecutive weekends. It’s kind of hard to budget for things like that.

Long hours
I’m here six days a week. I come in every morning to do book work and come up with ideas. We’re short right now so I’ll be on the line between four and five nights. I’m not on the line Friday and Saturday nights, but I’m here ’cause I’ve got to help out. We keep one person free Friday and Saturday nights. You’re going to get needed somewhere. I’ve learned that when you have enough staff, you better take your time off because when you’re short-staffed, I’m the one that does the shift.

I know Jeff [Black] is not sitting there working sauté every night. It’s not the most efficient place for him to be. You need the oversight. It’s more important that you’re there to keep an eye on everything. You’re the captain, you know? It’s the chef’s job to come up with the dishes and then make sure they’re being done the way he wants them to be done.

What he likes to do on his night off
I always go out to eat Thursdays. I’m very unlikely to cook at home. Either I’ll go to a friend’s restaurant or a place that’s new that I want to check out or, more likely, go to some out-of-the-way place, especially ethnic. It’s less expensive and, if you’re not afraid to get some bad meals, that’s a good way to go. The food’s exciting—not in a finished way—but these people think about food differently than we do. It’s not about filet mignon for them.

I’ll tell my girlfriend or my sister, “Here are your countries.” They choose the country and I choose the restaurant.

His favorite ethnic restaurants

• Chinese: Hollywood East, Wheaton
• Cuban: Cuban Corner, Rockville
• Indian: Udupi Palace, Langley Park
• Italian: What’s the point? I can cook it at home.
• The Italian around here—I know there’s the higher end stuff—but spaghetti with red sauce, I’m going to spend $12 for that?
• Peruvian: Chicken on the Run, Bethesda; I can’t get enough
  of that Peruvian chicken.
• Salvadoran: Samantha’s, Silver Spring
• Sushi: Niwano Hana, Rockville; They do creative sushi that
  isn’t stupid. It’s a chance to get something different.
• Thai: They’re all the same.
• Vietnamese: Taste of Saigon, Rockville

His favorite wines
Sleepy Hollow Pinot Noir from Savannah-Channelle
Bonny Doon Syrah
Seghesio Zinfandel
Goldeneye Pinot Noir

His favorite kind of music
Anything the guys on the line aren’t listening to.

What he does to relax
I don’t do squat. Not enough golf. I guess that’s why I’m not relaxed.

The Bethesda-area restaurant scene
It’s more casual than downtown (D.C.). There are no big, opulent dining rooms out here. I think it’s overrated in terms of quality. On any given day, how many of the restaurants jump out at you as a place you’d really like to go to? Too many of them have a lack of creativity going on. We have so many Italian places and they’re all cookie-cutter; they have essentially the same menu.

What he thinks of Damian Salvatore
Damian has done a really good job expanding and adapting his business. He started with something small and not as fancy, and he’s refined it over time. I like the things he brings to the table. His food is clean, not cluttered.

What he thinks of Jeff Black
I wish I had half of what Jeff has, businesswise. He’s got it figured out. The food at all his places is always tasty. He’s got more of a mass kind of a thing [at his restaurants]; it can’t always be as detail oriented.

What he would eat if he knew it was his last meal on earth
Roasted chicken

DAMIAN SALVATORE
Born and raised locally, Salvatore knew early on that he wanted to open a restaurant close to home

When Damian Salvatore and his wife, Stephanie, started looking for a place to open a restaurant in 1998, it wasn’t surprising they chose Bethesda. A lifelong area resident, Salvatore has never wandered far from home. “I’m ashamed to say I’ve never been west of Kentucky,” he says.

Born and raised in Chevy Chase, Salvatore lived (with his parents, three brothers and three sisters) in a “big white house” on the corner of Williams Lane and Brookville Road. “When I was growing up, our house was the one house in the neighborhood for the wayward kids,” he says. “Kids with problems at home, kids in trouble would come to the house and my mom would nurture them and feed them.”

As a student at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School, Salvatore says he “was into the usual things—cars, girls. I always had a job. I was really into architecture, so at 15 I got a job with an architectural firm as the blueprint guy. I sat in that little room and sucked up ammonia all day.”

After graduating from B-CC in 1983, Salvatore attended the University of Maryland for a year, but college wasn’t for him. “I learned how to play horseshoes really well, learned all about beer bongs,” he says. “I was just too young, not emotionally ready for it.” Salvatore got his first restaurant job at age 13, washing dishes at the Brook Farm Inn of Magic, two blocks from his home (in the building that now houses La Ferme). He met Stephanie at age 26, when they were both working at the Dancing Crab in Washington. They have been married for 12 years and live in Garrett Park with their three children, Scott, age 8, Kevin, 6, and Lily, 2 1/2.

Here, in his own words, is Salvatore’s story.

How he got the restaurant “bug”
I was really into baking bread with my mom. She baked bread every other day. I didn’t have store-bought bread until I was about 14 years old. She made everything—pasta, chicken stock, mayonnaise. She’s a very good cook. After she broke her collarbone, she’d still make bread, but watching her do it was excruciating. It was so painful for her. Since then, just the sight of kneading dough gives me the willies. I’m a real mamma’s boy. I think every boy is a mamma’s boy at heart.

Everybody gravitates to food service jobs when they’re young. You kind of get bit by the bug. When I was 18, I was working at The Dancing Crab and it was a high-energy place and we’d go out and party afterward. The whole package was fun. Right around then I knew I was going to stay in the biz.

I worked my way up at The Dancing Crab until I was running the kitchen. Then [the owners] opened Tony & Joe’s [in Georgetown], so I went down there and ran that kitchen for them, with no formal training. After they opened the pasta place in the harbor and I ran that kitchen for them, I realized I was hitting a plateau. I wasn’t learning anything. So I went to L’Academie [de Cuisine in Bethesda]. After L’Academie I went to Jean Louis, then Kinkead’s, then Tahoga in Georgetown.

Kinkead’s has great food, but it was grueling. The place is huge. At Persimmon on a weeknight, we do 120 dinners. They do 120 of one dish. As far as running the kitchen like a machine, [owner Bob] Kinkead had it wired tight. For creativity, not many people think like Jean Louis. He’s in the outer stratosphere.

Inspiration to open own restaurant
I got the [idea] when I was at Kinkead’s. You know, you start to get opinionated. You learn as much about what you don’t want to do as what you want to do. That was where I really learned the business of it—what it would take to make it work. The actual as opposed to the theoretical.

We really didn’t have any money to start, but I was going to beg or borrow my way into something if I found it. I come from a really artistic family, so I wanted to do a small, casual, funky restaurant that would feature local musicians for the background music, local artists on the walls. I didn’t know about royalties then! The art [at Persimmon] is mostly Stephanie’s mom’s originals.

The day we signed the lease Stephanie had a doctor’s appointment and found out she was pregnant. Our manager quit two weeks before the due date.

When we opened in ’98 there wasn’t anything like this in Bethesda.

We started Persimmon with $80,000. We had some saved and borrowed the rest from family. I did most of the work [building out the restaurant] myself and Stephanie came to me one day and said, “We’ve got to open or we have to sell the restaurant because we have $42 left in the bank.” So we opened. We didn’t announce. One day we just propped the door open and said, “Okay, we’re serving.”

We’ve lived on the cash flow ever since.

When we opened, it was Stephanie on the floor, me in the kitchen, one other cook and a dishwasher.

Before Phyllis Richman [of the Washington Post] reviewed us, we were doing maybe 35 covers [meals] a night. After the review, we went to 140 overnight. And we had two waiters. These guys were making $600 a night! I thought, “I’m selling the restaurant and becoming a waiter here!”

Why the name Persimmon
We knew we wanted something catchy that people [would] remember, but it should have something to do with food. We didn’t have any ethnic bent, so I didn’t want to pick anything that would make you think Italian or French. It was a process of elimination. The problem is, we’re having a hard time getting persimmons into the menu. You buy a tray, they all ripen at different rates.

How often he changes the menu
Not as often as I should. We’ve got a good thing going and I don’t want to lose it. It’s fear of failure. Everything changes somewhat seasonally and we have specials, but we have three dishes that never change. You try to change them, but people want them.

How he comes up with new ideas
I try to read a lot and eat out a lot. Up until recently, we went out once a week. Now it’s every two weeks. We try to hit every new restaurant that opens up. I want to see what somebody’s doing that’s different. When there’s a big buzz about a new restaurant, I want to check it out. I’m an avid cookbook reader. I look for plating and interesting combinations. I don’t read the recipes. My favorite is The French Laundry Cookbook [by Thomas Keller].

What he’s best at
I’m a good people person. I’m not a screamer. I’ve become good friends with many vendors. They come to our staff party. It’s much easier to work with them if you’re friends.

Embarrassing moment
My first night as poissonnier (fish preparer) at Jean Louis—we did a cold Dover sole and they would fillet it at the table. They changed and decided to do it in the kitchen. Sales quadrupled. Now that the servers didn’t have to do the tableside, they’d sell it. Demand went way up. Jean Louis was there (he wasn’t always in the kitchen) and I’m swimming in this fish. He’s screaming at the top of his lungs, I’m stressing ’cause I’m still an extern. I’m trying to fit in and not have anybody notice me. We had a ‘kitchen table’…where [customers are] dining in the kitchen. It was terrible.

The restaurant lifestyle
When I was young [working in restaurants] I had my nose to the grindstone. I didn’t know I was supposed to take a vacation. I didn’t take a vacation for 10 years. Maybe I took a long weekend.

I’m here six days a week [and] on the busy nights. It depends upon the situation. In the beginning we ate all our meals at Persimmon...

If we [he and Stephanie] can survive working together and living in the little house we live in, we’ll make it.

My youngest son is in school now and I try to be home to study with him. I’m spread thin. It’s hard to be a good dad and a good chef at the same time.

His kitchen at home
It’s miniscule. You can’t get to the basement when the refrigerator door is open. At home Stephanie does all the cooking. Except Saturday and Sunday morning, I do waffles or pancakes.

Bethesda restaurants
There’s a lot here…but not a lot of good. There are a lot of “Mom and Pop”-Italian-red-sauce places. It’s more to fill the void than to fill the curiosity. I think it’s changing, though. Morton’s and Ruth’s Chris will tell you that. That type of dining you can usually find only in the city.

Where he and Stephanie eat out
I like Black Market [the new restaurant in Garrett Park opened by Jeff and Barbara Black]. It’s a cool place. You don’t go there for the ultra-fine dining experience, but for a neighborhood joint, you can’t beat it. Same with Addie’s.

Where his kids like to eat
They like P.F. Chang’s, Mamma Lucia’s and Persimmon. They like coming here because they think it’s cool that I cook them hamburgers at Persimmon. Their favorite meal at Persimmon is mushroom and blue cheese ravioli. It must be because they help me make it. They can’t get enough of it. I don’t tell them it has truffles in it. If they knew, they wouldn’t go near it.

What he thinks of Jeff Heineman
He’s a quirky, cool guy. He’s really whimsical. He’s got clever food. He doesn’t take himself too seriously. He does food that I like to eat.

What he thinks of Jeff Black
Jeff Black is like my nemesis [laughing]! Stephanie and I looked at the place where Addie’s is now and thought, “This would be great for a restaurant.” I was young; I didn’t have that killer business instinct. I didn’t know if I’d be offending somebody if I went in and asked if they wanted to sell. So we just talked about it and one day there was a sign for Addie’s coming.

Then we made a bid on the space where Black Market is. This is before they renovated it. We went up to the owner and offered to buy it. She wasn’t interested in selling. Then when they were ready to renovate they came back to us to see if we were interested. We said “Sure,” but they never got back to us. Three months later, it’s sold to the Black’s!... The guy is like one step ahead of me all the time.

JEFF BLACK
Being a good businessman is as important as being a good chef

Jeff Black is the king of the Bethesda area restaurant scene. Black and his wife, Barbara, own four acclaimed restaurants, Black’s Bar and Kitchen in Bethesda, Addie’s in Rockville, Black Market in Garrett Park and BlackSalt Restaurant and Fish Market in the Palisades section of Washington. And they have ambitions for more restaurants. Black, 42, is unique among our top chefs in that he’s as much an entrepreneur and business person as he is a chef. Black is executive chef at all four of his restaurants, but is cooking day-to-day only at BlackSalt.

Black is legendary in Bethesda restaurant circles for his ambition, imaginative cooking, hard work, demands on his staff and vendors, and temper. “I’m pretty pushy. I have a reputation [although] the rumor mill has made it out to be bigger than it is,” he says. “I’m a ball buster, a loud mouth.

“I expect a lot from people,” he adds. “People tend to do really short stints with me—or very long.”

Last year Jeff and Barbara, who met when they were students at the Culinary Institute of America, opened Black Market and BlackSalt—almost simultaneously—and spent nearly $2.8 million in the process. The strain of developing and then operating two new restaurants has taken its toll. “Starting restaurants…is a young man’s sport. The two sous-chefs and I worked 180 hours over the two weeks around Valentine’s Day—I’m 42 years old.”

Born in Houston in 1963, Black started working in restaurants at age 13. After a brief stint in college—and an even briefer stint cold-calling for an investment firm—Black realized that the restaurant life was for him.

Here, in his own words, is Black’s story:

How he got interested in cooking
I was one of five kids with two working parents. If you wanted to eat, you cooked. It was pretty simple.

When I was really young, I spent my afternoons with my grandmother, Addie Emerson. For just stick-to-your-ribs Southern cooking, she was the best darn cook I’ve ever seen. Biscuits that melt in your mouth, ham, turkey, greens. I learned from her the joy of cooking and cooking well.

I got my first job in a restaurant at age 13. It was in a quintessential Italian family restaurant called Aldo’s. A friend of mine was going on a job interview at the restaurant and I went along. My friend was very verbose. I was very shy. I just stood in the back. It was a first generation Italian family. He’s running his mouth and talking and she cuts him off and says, ‘I don’t want you; I want you. You talk too much. You don’t talk.’ I got hired without trying.

I was a utility person. I washed the dishes. I passed the tomato sauce. Cleared dishes. I worked really hard.

Here I was a kid in Texas. I’d never heard of spaghetti with anything but tomato sauce. And here they are making spaghetti carbonara, which I thought was the greatest thing on the face of the earth. It made me realize that there’s more to food than macaroni and cheese and canned soup. I had a blue-collar upbringing. There wasn’t a lot of dining out or fancy anything.

After high school, I interviewed with the GM of Pappas Seafood House and Oyster Bar in Houston. He didn’t like me so he didn’t hire me. I went back and interviewed with his assistant, who hired me without telling the GM. The restaurant needed a bartender and they asked me if I would do it. I was 18 years old and I didn’t know what a Bloody Mary was, but now I’m a bartender!

In the fall, all my friends went off to college, but I stayed because my sister, Marsha, had cancer. I was giving blood so my sister could get my white blood platelets.

My sister passed when I was still 18. It was pretty hard. It was a lot of growing up quick. My attitude after she died was ‘I’m living for the day because you could be gone tomorrow.’ I went a little off the deep end for a while. I was a pretty bad young man living the restaurant life. I learned a lot.

I next went to work for a Cajun-Creole restaurant. I was the jack-of-all-trades—I filled in when the chef was off, tended bar, worked the floor. I was 21 years old making over $50,000 a year. I was working sadistic hours and I got completely burned out. I quit cold turkey, sold my car and went to Paris to visit my girlfriend. I stayed as long as my money lasted. She came back, and I stayed another five or six weeks. It was a great experience. I was living a vagrant’s life. I knew the less I spent the longer I could stay. Sometimes I would sleep on trains to save money. Wake up in a different city, figure out where I was and see what the sights were, then get on another train.

When I got back I had a new perspective. I was going to get out of the restaurant business, give up the silly dream of owning a restaurant and get a traditional job. I got back—flat broke of course—and started calling friends looking for a ‘legit’ job. I jumped in whole-hog to a job at an investment firm. I’m sitting in this room cold-calling with a guy walking around screaming in my ear not to say this or that, or that you’re stupid. I’d never been so miserable in my life and all I could think about was how much that tie was choking my neck. So I went to lunch one day, threw my tie out the window and never went back. That’s when I made the commitment to the restaurant business.

I went back into the business and worked multiple jobs—I needed to get my resources back up. I thought I was going to be learning, but I was mostly doing things the chef didn’t like to do. I wasn’t learning technique. So, at the age of 27, I went to Culinary Institute of America. What I needed was exactly what CIA gave me—I needed the structure, the technique—I needed the straight scoop.

After graduation, I told everybody, ‘I’m going to step outside the school and see which way the wind’s blowing.’ I thought maybe I’d take a job at the Four Seasons in Nevis. Barb was from Washington, so I came down to spend a weekend. I dropped quite a few résumés around, but the only chef who took the time to talk to me was Bob Kinkead at Twenty-One Federal. I liked what he had to say and he made me an offer. It was a hugely talented kitchen. Just a great experience.

The decision to open Addie’s—in Rockville
The reason I started Addie’s in Rockville was because I was working in D.C. at the time and Marion Barry was mayor. All the people eating in the restaurants downtown were from the suburbs. I thought, ‘Why not bring the restaurants to them?’ Bob Kinkead told me I was nuts. Everybody told me it was too small and the market wouldn’t support a place with food like Addie’s.

A few years ago we toyed with the idea of moving Addie’s to the space [in downtown Bethesda] where Mon Ami Gabi is.

The Addie’s lease is up in a year and a half. If the landlord doesn’t renew the lease, we’ll find a new location. It would be hard because we’d have to find a unique property to recreate the unique character of Addie’s. It just won’t work in a strip mall.

Two restaurants at the same time
I’ll never start two restaurants at the same time again. When I heard about the space in Garrett Park becoming available, I turned it down. I was already starting BlackSalt. I told Barb about it, three to four weeks go by, and she says, ‘It’s ludicrous to do two restaurants in one year, but could we possibly pull it off?’ I told her if you want to be in Garrett Park, this is your one opportunity in your lifetime.

A chef—and restaurateur
I’m as much a restaurateur as I am a chef. That’s what I love to do. There are a lot of guys who can cook great food, but you need to engineer a great customer experience. Barb does desserts and bookkeeping. I bring the aggressive, get-it-done attitude, she brings the cautionary, pay-the-bills-on-time. I’ll eventually go back to an administrative role, running the company. I have 11 concepts [for new restaurants] in my computer. I won’t do them all before I die, but I’ll do some of them. I was planning a Latin concept and then Saba opened. About a third of my concepts are ethnic based. I’m also thinking about lower price point and casual concepts, which chefs usually frown on.

How he maintains the standards
A t Black’s, Addie’s and Black Market, while focusing on BlackSalt
The reality of any restaurant is once the systems are in place and you build a culture committed to improvement, that impact lives on. I spend a lot of time teaching my people.

The chefs [at Black’s, Addie’s and Black Market] run the stores [restaurants]. Seasonally, when they do menu changes, we talk about it. The ultimate decisions I put in their hands—as long as those decisions stay within the scope of the restaurant. Very rarely do I come back to them and say, ‘That dish has got to go.’ It happens occasionally. I do random things to keep an eye on things. I come in the middle of the night; I talk to my vendors; I do spot checks. I’ll just show up after the restaurant’s closed and go through the boxes in the refrigerator and storeroom to check freshness, see how the food’s being handled.

Finding time to be with his family
I’ve built in things that allow me to spend time with my family. [He and Barbara have two sons, Simon, 6, and Oliver, 5.] We’re a very family-friendly company; I insist on it. I don’t indulge in any hobbies that take me away from my house. I don’t play golf. I don’t go fishing. We’re taking five days off at spring break. We’re telling everybody that we’re going away, but we’re not. That way people won’t call. This business is notoriously hard on marriages. Being in the business together [with Barbara] is easier from an understanding point of view, but more difficult from a logistical point of view. We both need to work at similar times. Restaurants are busy when kids are free.

The Bethesda restaurant scene
There are a multitude of mediocre restaurants in Bethesda. That’s because the cost of entry is so low. A small-time landlord just wants a tenant. It’s not like Federal Realty who’s trying to script their space. I see a lot of people who shouldn’t be in the business. I think the market is saturated. We need more directed retail space. There needs to be other draws besides restaurants in Woodmont Triangle. Bookstores, theaters, events—not just ‘I’m going to eat and leave.’

His favorite ethnic restaurants

• Chinese: Seven Seas, Rockville
• Thai: Sala Thai, Bethesda
• French: La Miche, Bethesda