With his silvery buzz cut, ruddy complexion and snapping blue eyes, Tom Power looks more like Hollywood’s answer to a swim coach or prototype surfer than a happening chef. By his own admission, the chef and owner of Corduroy Restaurant, a D.C. “hidden treasure,” instead spends 60 to 70 hours a week indoors behind his very hot stove, not out swimming.

Washingtonians are the luckier for this. Power has moved from high school dishwasher to Johnson and Wales graduate to hotel chef to sous chefdom with Michel Richard’s Citronelle to Corduroy, where he has cooked the past seven years.