jonathan krinn

I have big dreams for this restaurant. One and a half years is not a very long time to be in business, so I still consider this place very new. I am building a chef's table in the kitchen this summer, hopefully to be ready by the fall. There will be lots of truffles on the menu in the winter and more wine dinners starting in the fall. There are also a couple surprises I have up the chef's jacket sleeve.

Quite frankly, sometimes a chef is not a good person to ask about restaurant recommendations, because we don't get out much. We can tell you the best meals we've had in this area after mifnight. On the subject of pastry and how it goes in harmony with the savory side, I learned a lot working at Grammercy Tavern. Claudia Flemming, the award winning pastry chef, made a point of matching her style of desserts with the savory food of Tom Collichio. It made the meals a GT flow very well. Sometimes savory and pastry seem like they from different restaurants. Its just a product of two different artistic minds working under the same roof. Ideally, a meal at these caliber of restaurants should not feel like a fragmented story. It should flow from beginning to end. In that sense, Michel Richard has a distinct advantage because of his backround as a pastry chef. But more smart chefs are including pastry in their training now.

I feel like cooking is sort of like acting, and working in New York I know a lot of actor wanna be's. Not every aspiring chef chooses to go to cooking school. Its not like, say, medicine, where you cannot practice your craft if you do not have the necessary diplomas. Cooking is a purely entreprenurial art/business. But cooking school introduces you to the language and the skills you will need to survive in the kitchen. There are actors that didn't go to acting school that make it, but there are many more that are successful that learned valuable skills in acting school. Same with cooking (Thomas Keller is the best example of a chef who made it without going to school). The hard thing to accept for students out of cooking school is that after spending all that money to go to school, you don't make much money at all until you have a very high level of skill. No matter what school you go to, that skill only comes with years of experience at the right places. You must have a pretty specific goal to get you through those years of training. When I worked with Rocco (2000, 2001) he was in the kitchen all the time. It was the most forward thinking and technically stimulating food I had ever cooked. He had worked for Gray Kunz (Lespinasse) for three years, and Lespinasse had just closed. Lespinasse was the holy grail for cooks in New York, so Rocco was the next best you could have. Very intense perfectionist who taught me how to cook at a high level for 100 - 250 guests per night. He always liked to "hang"with the right people, so it doesn't surprise me that he parlayed that into a tv show. But I still keep in touch with all the old Union Pacific "peeps" and I know he is not happy with the results. Hindsite is 20/20 I guess.

my partner is a big art collector (not that he collects big pieces of art, but that he collects a lot of art!). The Burgher and the "Jellyfish" (from a Milanese artist Jacabo Fuginni) are part of his collection.

New Zealand Ostrich Tenderloin with red cabbage saurkraut and porcini spaetzle. Ostrich is super tender and has a great flavor similar to venison.

I was actually looking for a "destination" location. Most of the Michelin starred chateaus where I worked in France were really off the beaten path. I am not comparing myself to them, but I think it is fun to have to travel a bit to go to a restaurant of this caliber. I would consider this area the "bizburbs." There is too much business going on around here to consider it the suburbs. People here are great eaters! They enjoy trying different products and love the changing menus. I do think the area is underserved. We will see what happens in the future. I hope my restaurant helps others get the same idea. The more the merrier.

Great question on a subject into which I put a lot of thought. Restaurants are entertainment, so the more fun/delicious things any chef can think of, the more people will talk about their restaurant. Bread is the first thing that guests eat and judge. Every restaurant serves it, so I am very lucky that Dad brings creativity and quality to that part of the meal. Since I knew that guests would talk about the bread at the beginning of the meal, I looked for something that they would talk about at the end of the meal. The cotton candy is fun because you have to use your hands, which you usually don't do in a fine dining restaurant. Its just something that everyone knows, but hasn't seen used in this environment. The idea could have backfired, but, love it or hate it, I knew guests would talk about it. I thought I could take care of the middle parts of the meal and I wanted to accentuate the very beginning and the very end of the meal. I love pastry, but I think it is the hardest part of the meal, because when guests look at the dessert menu, they are usually not very hungry anymore. The desserts better be intriguing and delicious to be worth it. I trained in pastry everywhere I worked because I wanted my savory food and pastry to have the same style. I use well known American combinations as well as French combinations and techniques. I want guests to look at the dessert menu and say, "I can't leave without trying this or that." I am also lucky that I had a lot of space to build my kitchen. The cooks work around a central stove (Citronelle, Maestro and The Inn work the same way as well as many fine dining French style kitchens). The advantage to this system is that the cooks (normally less experienced than the sous chefs or the chef) do not plate their own food. They cook the food for the appropriate table and then send it to the front of the stove. Its like a dinner table where you would pass your plates to the head of the table so he/she could check to see that you had eaten everything. Same thing here. The cooks pass the food to the sous chefs and myself at the "head of the table." We check the quality of their preparations and we put it on the plates. Vulcan, a locally based company, custom built the stove for me. It's general design is based on the stove at Le Louis XV Alain Ducasse. how's that?

I've heard of a lot of sons working for their fathers, but I've never heard of a father working for a son, so this is a very unique situation. He and I started talking about doing something together back when I worked for Chef Gerard Pangaud. We really get along well and have fun together, but I still built him his own kitchen just to give us some alone time. Its the least I could do for making him work every day.

No easy answer for that question. I would say that every business person has their own formula for their success. This is mine.

please email roger.smith@2941restaurant.com to inquire about posssible very interesting position at a top dc restaurant.