On a recent Thursday at about 8 p.m., a few dozen patrons are midmeal at CityZen in the Mandarin Oriental when the hotel’s fire alarm goes off. No one gets up. Not one. In fact, only a few even raise their heads to look around for more direction.
They’re intent on staying put because they’ve paid handsomely for the privilege of dining here — between $75 and $110 per person, excluding drinks and wine. It’s the kind of place where the ratio of guests to employees can be as low as 3-to-1; where you get a choice of butters from two different farms with your bread; where the contents of the cheese cart are worth thousands.
But however attentive the service or fine the dairy products may be, they’re not what attracts gourmets and, on this night, makes them deaf to the fire warning. Rather, it’s the cooking of Eric Ziebold, the 36-year-old executive chef who in four short years has climbed to the top of the food chain in Washington. This past May, he was named “Best Chef: Mid-Atlantic” by the prestigious James Beard Foundation in New York. And a month later, the Restaurant Association Metropolitan Washington named him its “Chef of the Year,” after naming CityZen its “Fine Dining Restaurant of the Year” in 2007.
Popular culture has projected an outlandish image of the stereotypical chef — a screaming, type-A lunatic — but Ziebold stands comfortably outside of its beam. Far from flinging plates or berating those around him into a state of shell-shocked terror, the slight, soft-spoken chef presides over a wondrously serene scene.
“He’s very calm,” says Ron Tanaka, who opened CityZen as one of Ziebold’s assistants and recently took over the kitchen at the well-received Cork on 14th Street. “I’ve never seen him raise his voice; he’s always in control.”
Indeed, at the rear of the minimalist dining room, the open kitchen remains nearly silent while meals are being prepared. The workspaces are neat and tidy; the chef coats pristine, even after two hours of sauteing, grilling and saucing.
“I’m kind of an extra person tonight,” Ziebold says, as his sous chef expedites the food and largely runs the show. Instead, he chips in where needed, filleting fish or plating cold appetizers. Other times, Ziebold just stands and observes intently, offering a word of suggestion here and there.
The well-oiled culinary machine he’s built in Southwest Washington had its roots a couple miles to the northwest, at Vidalia. Fresh out of small-town Iowa, Ziebold graduated from the Culinary Institute of America in the early 1990s and found his way here, just when the city was coming of age as a restaurant town.
“When I went to culinary school, I made a decision I wanted to come down to Washington because I had been here for Thanksgiving vacation both years [during school]. I was like, ‘Wow, this is a nice city.’ I certainly wasn’t going back to Iowa, so I said, ‘Washington, D.C., it is.’ ”
One of his instructors knew Vidalia chef-owner Jeff Buben and told Ziebold, “This guy is going to break your [back], but if you’re going to go work somewhere and get something out of it, go work at Vidalia.”
Buben says the 20-year-old upstart used to make a tuna fish sandwich for himself at home and bring it to work for lunch. But he couldn’t resist trying to take his simple sandwich to the next level, and then telling everyone exactly how he made it. “He went into an incredible depth of technique on this tuna fish sandwich,” Buben says. “It wasn’t just about putting the sandwich in your mouth. It was about the process. How can you go wrong with a guy like that?”
And it was Buben who nudged Ziebold toward the restaurant where he made his name — the French Laundry in Napa Valley, Calif., helmed by one of America’s best chefs, Thomas Keller.
“I wanted to move to California, and at the end of 1995, French Laundry had been open about a year,” Ziebold says. “Buben predicted that in the next three years, it would be one of the top three restaurants in the country. So I went, and at that time it was just a small little [rural] restaurant.”
Ultimately, after countless hundred-hour weeks, Ziebold would become Keller’s first-ever sous chef at French Laundry and later, his first-ever chef de cuisine. Unsurprisingly, he calls Keller his main influence, not just in his cooking, but also in his management style.
“The synergy that existed between us was rare and it resulted in a team that was always on the same page and very successful,” Keller says. “I think Eric’s cooking — more importantly his sensibilities — are similar to mine, and these are what made us such a good team.”
According to Ziebold, “We were doing food that wasn’t as predominant throughout the country, in its clarity and intensity of flavors. … It used to be ‘What else can you put on the plate?’ At French Laundry, it was ‘What can we take off the plate?’”
Even today, you won’t find many foams, gelees, or ingredients disguised as something else on his menu. For such a highly regarded dining room, CityZen’s ever-changing menu is a study in approachability, replete with rib-eyes, butter poached lobsters, even potato salad. But the proof is in the pudding, or in this case, the preparation. A sweet-onion souffle on the vegetarian menu, Ziebold points out, includes six separate recipes among its various components before the final dish is plated.
For him, he says, cooking is more science than art. DELETION. “You’re doing it for an artistic impression, but you can’t get there without the science behind it. Picasso wouldn’t be Picasso if he didn’t understand color.”
So it’s no wonder that a big influence for him of late has been Asian cooking and hospitality. During a recent trip to Asia, he bought an apple and brought it back to his hotel room to eat later. When he left for dinner and the staff came in to do the turndown, they placed a plate, a knife and a napkin next to his apple — a perfect example of Asian service and attention to detail.
“This is my dream, to have a kitchen full of Japanese cooks,” he jokes. “They execute so well.”
Indeed, Ziebold is quick to point out that Keller’s influence extends not only to cooking, but also to how he relates to people as a manager. He asks for a two-year commitment from his staff, and in exchange assumes the responsibility of grooming them to be chefs themselves. “You shouldn’t just understand enough about your own job, you should understand enough about the other person’s job, about what’s going on in the kitchen to know what [you] can do to help.”
Now, one of his biggest challenges is fending off constant rumors that he’s getting ready to leave to open his own restaurant. He denies them all, saying he enjoys his relationship with the Mandarin and he wants to remain in Washington.
Ziebold credits his success to “hard work and a fair amount of luck” — a sentiment that comes through when he discusses his restaurant as well. Contemplating the nearly full house he expects on a hot, sleepy August evening, he asks, “What is it that [makes] that many people come here every night? … You’re lucky to be that busy. There’s so many restaurants to choose from.”
From Iowa’s cornfields to CityZen’s kitchen
• Born in Ames, Iowa, on Jan. 22, 1972.
• Studied at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., from 1992 to ’94.
• Hired by Jeff Buben at Vidalia in D.C. in 1994. Served as chef de partie, saucier and poissonier.
• Moved to the acclaimed Spago Restaurant in Los Angeles in 1994 to serve as chef de partie.
• Was hired by renowned chef Thomas Keller at the French Laundry in Napa Valley, Calif., as chef de partie. Named chef de cuisine in 1999, becoming the first person awarded that title by Keller.
• Returned to Washington as executive chef of CityZen in the new Mandarin Oriental Hotel in 2004.
• Named one of “America’s Best New Chefs” by Food & Wine magazine in 2005.
• Named one of Forbes.com’s “Ten Tastemaking Chefs” in 2007. CityZen named “Best Fine Dining Restaurant” by the Restaurant Association of Metropolitan Washington.
• Named “Best Chef: Mid-Atlantic” by the James Beard Foundation in May 2008, and, one month later, named “Chef of the Year” by the Restaurant Association of Metropolitan Washington.
