Perhaps the most cheerful, outgoing person you will ever encounter is Cicely Austin, pastry chef at the very upscale Oval Room, just a block from the White House. And surely her desserts are just as cheery. So compelling are her offerings that she was just named by Food & Wine magazine as one of the 50 best pastry chefs in America. A metro-area native, growing up in Fort Washington, Austin went to school for engineering, but about the time of the Sept. 11 attacks, she realized that getting work in that field was increasingly difficult. It was time for a career change, she decided. “I always loved cooking with my dad, mom and family,” she said. “It became apparent that I could have a career [in the kitchen].”
To that end, Austin applied to the Culinary Institute of America in 2002, and after taking a year off, went back to enroll in its pastry program, graduating in 2004. The next step? A real kitchen job. “I asked pastry chef Johnny Iuzzini to please let me work with him at Jean-Georges restaurant as an intern for a year,” she said. Austin credits Iuzzini as her most influential mentor. “I learned more from him than from anyone else,” she says.
