After Tatiana, Kwame Onwuachi Continues His Empire Building in Washington

New York Times

3 days ago

We New Yorkers like to think of ourselves as the toughest crowd there is. Conquer us, you conquer the world. And the chef Kwame Onwuachi did: Nearly three years after he opened Tatiana by Kwame Onwuachi at Lincoln Center, the wait is still an hour or more without a reservation (and you can't get a reservation).
How do you follow up such a blockbuster? Last fall he unveiled Dōgon by Kwame Onwuachi at the waterfront Salamander Washington DC hotel. The distance between his restaurants is about 234 miles, but that is mere geography. Tatiana is jostling and alive, with the slightly twitchy energy of a city that's always angling for the next big thing. Dōgon has twice as many seats and the palatial sweep of Le Bernardin. Servers maintain a diplomatic distance; other guests recede to murmurs.
Some details have carried over, like the black-veined marble tabletops and shimmery chain curtains, here shrouding the entrance in gold and silver. But the narrative has shifted. In New York the curtains evoke Mr. Onwuachi's childhood memories of jumping chain-link fences in the Bronx; in Washington they hark back to the chains used in 1791 by the freeborn, self-taught Black astronomer Benjamin Banneker to survey the land that became the nation's capital.
It makes sense that Mr. Onwuachi would see in Banneker a kindred spirit. He, too, is a maker of maps. Tatiana traces the contours of New York, its bodegas, delis, roti houses, shawarma carts, dumpling stalls and barbershops selling bootleg cocktails in foam cups, all of which have appeared in some form on the menu, be it a curry goat patty or an aged rib-eye chopped cheese. This is at once personal and political, juxtaposing the particulars of memoir with the perspective of peoples on the margins, who were never given the keys to the city but made it theirs.
At Dōgon, the sense of place is more diffuse. Washington is home to the largest Ethiopian population outside Ethiopia, so Mr. Onwuachi gives cornbread a swath of shiro butter, made with ground chickpeas simmered into silk and fevered with brick-red berbere, the purr of chiles tempered by sweet-warm cardamom and cloves. For tigua, a peanut stew from Mali — home to the Dōgons, believed to be Banneker's ancestors and themselves known for their skill in reading the stars — carrots attain the depth of Vietnamese caramel, brought so near burning that they push past sweetness, and are beautifully meaty under the teeth.
Of course there is crab, a salute to Chesapeake Bay, to be assembled on little fluffy hoe cakes, like caviar on blini. To build the bite, spoon over the crab's topping of shito crunch, adapted from an inky Ghanaian distillation of dried fish and shrimp, then add creamy, grassy-hot ají verde, the green sauce found at local Peruvian rotisserie joints. Be meticulous: The magic works only if you get everything together.
A small technical marvel of a dish honors the Trinidadian immigrant Ben Ali, who with his wife, Virginia, opened Ben's Chili Bowl in 1958 on U Street, the historic center of Black life in the district. The Alis donated food to protesters marching for civil rights and stayed open during the 1968 riots, offering shelter while storefronts around them burned. Ben, who died in 2009, loved curry beef; Mr. Onwuachi swaps in lamb shoulder, cooks it to near collapse, whips it just enough for the fat to emulsify, then chills it under a weight until flat. This comes to the table in crisped, brownie-size slabs — only three, but dense and rich, salt and savor compressed like a haiku or a neutron star.
Classics are not exalted but simply permitted to be all that they are, both humble and luxurious, like soul-reviving berbere chicken alongside West African jollof rice, soupy collards with cipollini onions close to candy, and shrimp in a Louisiana tribute sauce whose heady ingredient list includes caramelly lager, roasted lobster oil and a nearly one-to-one ratio of shrimp to butter.
At times it seems Mr. Onwuachi wants to grasp the whole world. A butterflied branzino wallows in a curry that refuses borders, borrowing from Japan (kombu), Thailand (lemongrass), India (garlic and ginger), Trinidad (green seasoning, fragrant and vivid) and Ghana (a shito reprise). This is excellent. But elsewhere the through line gets lost. Ingredients, too: I couldn't detect the plantain in the hoe cakes or the Ethiopian spices on an unmemorable Wagyu short rib, or even the oyster in a charbroiled oyster — a nod to Drago's in New Orleans — that was all garlicky cheese, no brine.
Dōgon is something of a victory lap for Mr. Onwuachi. (His first restaurant opened in Washington in 2016 and closed within three months.) The space, off the lobby of the Salamander, is handsome, with blue shadows and cast-glass pendants whose smeary gleams recall the stars that guided both Banneker and the Dōgons. Diners promenade in jeweled headpieces, stilettos and dresses like second skins.
If Dōgon feels less immediate and vital than Tatiana, it's also more accessible — which is to say, more replicable. You can imagine outposts in London and Dubai. The chef is a man on a mission, shuttling between restaurants and already planning the next one, a steakhouse scheduled to open in Las Vegas by year's end.
I wish I'd had more of a chance to soak it in, witnessing the birth of an empire. One night the server dropped the bill at the same time as dessert; we'd been seated less than 90 minutes. Too bad, because the desserts were worth lingering over, mostly unshowy and true to season: tangy fior de latte ice cream with sour-bright lemon curd, fluffy golden rum cake under vanilla whip and charred gooseberries.
The exception was cherry tea sorbet — a nod to Washington's official fruit — buried in shards of frozen cherry juice so cold, they smoked. I couldn't wait. I plunged in a spoon, but when I closed my mouth around it, it burned. The ice had been dosed with liquid nitrogen. My tongue stung all the way back to New York.
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