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Stefan Trummer, dressed in a navy suit sans tie, poured a bright red strawberry-tomato daiquiri, slushy but classy, into a martini glass. On a flat, wide spoon, Jon Cropf sent out a canape of bay scallops with tomato, whipped herbs and a puffy, crunchy yuzu cracker.
But this wasn’t Clifton. It wasn’t at Trummer’s eponymous restaurant, Trummer’s on Main, where Cropf is executive chef. It was in the West Village, in the courtyard where famed culinarian James Beard once lived.
On Monday night, the Restaurant Association of Metropolitan Washington in partnership with Events DC brought RAMMY award finalists to cook at the James Beard House for a “Best of DC” dinner. Virginia was represented by the Trummer’s team, with Trummer, Cropf and pastry chef Meagan Tighe.
Gerald Addison and Chris Morgan from Maydan, which just last week was named the No. 2 Best New Restaurant in the country by Bon Appetit, were also there, plus Amy Brandwein, who won a Chef of the Year RAMMY for Centrolina; Nicholas Stefanelli, the chef of Masseria who is opening up Officina, a three-story retail and restaurant project, at the Wharf next month; and Russell Smith, the new chef at the helm of the revered The Source.
The crowd is a combination of friends and family of the chefs, New York media and New Yorkers who just love food. When servers passed around Brandwein’s long noodles (tagliolini and ndjua) twirled around forks as an appetizer, one of the older men said to his wife, “I’ve never seen that before—we need to remember that for our parties.”
The house has been converted into an event space with a miniature commercial kitchen and the upstairs serve as the offices of the James Beard Foundation—best known for its own annual restaurant and food media awards—but there’s still touches of Beard himself, like a bathroom with mirrors for walls. The bathroom on the first floor is wallpapered with illustrations of vegetables, naturally.
A five-course dinner for more than 70 guests is a feat to pull off, but the results tasted much more like restaurant-quality food than the catered event it really was, featuring: an artichoke salad (Centrolina), Armenian beef tongue with pickled vegetables (Maydan), chili oil poached halibut (The Source), Maccheroni Molinari Domus, a dish of noodles and crab (Masseria), New Zealand venison with grits (Trummer’s) and Ovations of Oranges with sorbet and olive oil cake (Trummer’s).
Every year RAMW hosts local chefs at the Beard House, where, says RAMW CEO and President Kathy Hollinger, “so many chefs before them created culinary magic.”
