Art Smith starts his mornings with crab cakes at Johnny's Half Shell.

Last month, Art Smith—best known for his decade-long stint as Oprah Winfrey’s personal chef—opened Art and Soul on Capitol Hill. Now the Chicago-based chef is spending 12 days a month in DC, hanging his hat at the Affinia Liaison hotel, where his restaurant is located.

The Southern-born Smith is no stranger to the District: Before connecting with Oprah, he cooked for former Florida governor and senator Bob Graham’s family and spent lots of time with them in Washington. “My family has a lot of DC connections, too—my dad was a congressional page, and my aunt was one of the Washington Redskins weather girls,” Smith laughs. “She told the weather in a bathing suit.”

With an incoming President who’s also from Chicago, there have been plenty of murmurs about Smith as a potential White House chef. He’s cooked for the Obamas before, at a dinner hosted by Winfrey. So has he been approached by the new administration? “They’re just rumors, but it’s nice to hear those rumors,” is all he’ll say.

On a day off back home in the Windy City, Smith took a few minutes to share some of his (and Oprah’s!) Kitchen Favorites.

On weekends, you'll find Ris Lacoste at the Dupont and Arlington farmers markets.

Ris Lacoste ended her decade-long tenure at Georgetown’s 1789 on New Year’s Eve of 2005, and though she’s kept busy the past few years with consulting and charity projects, she can’t wait to get back into the kitchen full-time. “It’s my life. I love it and I really miss it,” says the Massachusetts-born, French-trained chef.

This past August, Lacoste signed a lease for the restaurant she’s been dreaming about for years. Called Ris, the dining room will be in the Residences at the Ritz-Carlton (23rd and L sts., NW) in DC’s West End. The menu will combine East Coast seafood—inspired by Lacoste’s mentor, Bob Kinkead—with a “touch of France,” a nod to her days studying and working at the famed La Varenne cooking school.

“Right now, we’re in the heavy-duty design phase,” says Lacoste, acknowledging that there are many stages to get through between now and her projected early-summer opening day. Lacoste has worked in the food industry since she was a kid, starting out as a clerk in a neighborhood deli. “I always talked to the purveyors, talked to the milkman,” she laughs. “All of the stuff that I do now as a chef, I’ve been doing since I was 12.”
 

Chef-turned-sommelier John Wabeck can't say no to the Jumbo Slice.

John Wabeck is about to start a new chapter in his restaurant career. When Inox—the forthcoming restaurant from Jonathan Krinn—opens in Tysons Corner this December, the former New Heights and Firefly chef will be not in the kitchen but in the dining room running its wine program.

Though Wabeck has spent most of his working life in kitchens, he’s always been passionate about wine. When he was in high school in Salisbury, Maryland, “my friends and I had more wine than we should have,” he laughs. On his 21st birthday—the same day as his mom’s 50th—Wabeck’s family celebrated by sharing “a bunch of wine.” He even remembers what they drank: 1988 Storybook Mountain Zinfandel.

After graduating from the Culinary Institute of America in 1992, he came to DC and cooked at Red Sage, 1789, Restaurant Nora, and New Heights. He then moved to the Napa Valley, where he ran the kitchen at Brix restaurant in Yountville (the tiny town that’s home to Thomas Keller’s French Laundry), and worked at a boutique winery. Five years ago, Wabeck came back to DC and opened Firefly, then returned to New Heights for a second stint as its executive chef.

A rocket scientist by day, Steve Davis dishes out frozen yogurt nightly at his new Dupont Circle shop. Photograph by Chris Leaman.

It’s 9 o’clock on a Saturday night, and Steve Davis is challenging the customers in line outside Mr. Yogato, his frozen-yogurt shop in DC’s Dupont Circle neighborhood. Ten percent off, he says, to anyone who can name the world’s five most populous cities—or recite a speech from the movie Braveheart. Beneath Davis’s baseball cap is an ear-to-ear grin as endearingly goofy as the trivia games that make regulars of first-time visitors.

Mr. Yogato isn’t your usual business, and Davis isn’t your usual businessman: By day he’s a rocket scientist with degrees in aerospace engineering and particle physics. He works for SpaceX, an engineering firm subcontracted by NASA to build space capsules. “My job,” Davis says, “is to make sure the rockets go straight.”

Davis discovered frozen yogurt while working for SpaceX in Los Angeles. He ate at Pinkberry—the habit-forming frozen-yogurt chain—at least once a day.

To get his frosty fix in DC, Davis prevailed upon 21 fellow rocket scientists, friends, and family to invest. “My friends and I always talked about opening a fun, goofy store. But we really have no idea what we’re doing,” he says.

CityZen's Eric Ziebold made good use of his two weeks off. Photograph by Kathryn Norwood.

Instead of a photo album, CityZen chef Eric Ziebold is using his menu to document his summer travels. “I was going to go to Europe for the whole time,” he says about his original plans for the restaurant’s annual two-week August vacation. “But that’s a long time to go to France, especially with the value of the euro. So I started looking into North Africa—a friend of mine has a house in Sidi Bou Said, Tunisia.”  

First, though, he hit Puerto Rico for a three-day weekend with friends from high school. Ziebold passed his days in Piñones, just outside of San Juan, nibbling on bites from street vendors. He was particularly taken with the grilled pork belly brushed with barbecue sauce, which cost him a mere dollar. The CityZen BLT, which includes crispy shoat belly, is part of an $80 three-course tasting menu.

Ziebold did end up in the land of baguettes and Brie for a week and spent every morning at the market in Archachon, near the Bordeaux region. Rare finds in the United States, such as tête de veau and veal tongue were readily available, as was the silky pâté forestier, made from mushrooms.

 

Harley-riding RJ Cooper is crazy for all things swine.

This week marks R.J. Cooper’s fourth anniversary as chef de cuisine at downtown DC’s Vidalia. Last year, he took home a James Beard Award for Best Chef Mid-Atlantic—the same prestigious honor that Vidalia owner Jeff Buben received back in 1999 when he was running the kitchen himself. Cooper still serves the restaurant’s signature shrimp and grits, but his creative menus have only a slight southern accent—think pâté studded with Virginia peanuts, frog’s legs with polenta and parsley butter, and a dish of braised pork cheeks wrapped in chicken skin that Cooper calls “andouillette.”


After culinary school in Illinois and cooking stints in Atlanta, New York, and Anchorage, the Detroit native moved to Washington almost a decade ago. He cooked at New Heights and Toka Café before joining the Vidalia team. Cooper’s favorite restaurant city? “DC, absolutely,” he says. “We have some of the youngest, most creative chefs in the country right now, and we’re being pummeled by international celebrity chefs. So we’re always pushing the envelope.”