Alison Swope - Chef of Restaurant K by Alison Swope

When Andale, the Penn Quarter restaurant focusing on the foods of Mexico’s Oaxaca state, closed at the end of summer 2006, it was more than usually distressing for Alison Swope, the executive chef and co-owner behind Andale. “Most of that staff had been together for 10 years.” 

Loyal followers of Swope’s cooking were equally dismayed. There are few enough women chefs in Washington that it can afford to lose one, especially one of her caliber. And Swope had been a fixture in local kitchens for as long as anyone looking to eat inventively in the capital can remember . “Around 25 years or so,” she confirms, with a raise of her finely-sculpted eyebrows. But now she’s back, at Restaurant K by Alison Swope, a football lob from Farragut Square NW.

Swope began stimulating palates almost a quarter of a century ago at New Heights in Woodley Park, executive chef there at the astonishingly young age of 26. The innovative restaurant was a shot in the arm for a capital more attuned to classic steakhouse fare. One of the first in Washington to feature contemporary American food, diners flocked to it for Swope’s highly creative cooking. “Now I wouldn’t dream of doing half the things,” she says, with a chuckle that shakes the rich red curls framing a wide, clear forehead. “Some of them were godawful!”

Diners who remember her black bean paté that in some shape or form has never left the menu since, probably wouldn’t agree. Her spirit of adventure was worth following, even if it may not always, in her opinion, have hit the mark. And her diners did follow. When she moved on after three years to the now closed Santa Fe East in Alexandria, they crossed town to eat her take on South Western food. She practiced it in all its permutations for the next seven years before moving back into DC to take over The Mark on 7th Street NW, as co-owner and executive chef. 

For three years she continued to produce the modern American comfort food that had made The Mark so popular. Then suddenly, she took a remarkably courageous and hugely risky step. “Sometimes you need to shake things up a bit,” she says. She closed the restaurant down and disappeared for a while, only to re-emerge and reopen it as Andale, a hip Mexican cantina serving dishes from Oaxaca. 

That need to shake things up had propelled her down to Mexico to learn more about its cuisine. “So much stuff is Mexican I thought, I need to go and see what this place is like.” Quite by chance she found herself in Oaxaca. “If you pick the right place, at the right time, it can be life altering.” As the whole Oaxacan experience proved to be for her. She took some tours. She took some cooking classes, and was blown away by what she discovered of the balance between complexity of flavoring and subtle nuance of tastes that she experienced. She was so inspired she says that if she’d had no previous idea what she’d wanted to do for a living, this food would have guided her into cooking. 

She was also impressed by the importance Mexicans placed on social value of food. “A lot of people make this connection - the human connection between food and family and the way people live and eat in their intimate settings.” It disturbs her that it’s a connection she feels is disappearing from U.S. culture. 

She grew up in a family where that connection between food and family was natural. Her maternal grandparents were from Germany. “Food was always a big deal.” And her mother was a very good cook. Preparations in the kitchen for the holidays began two and three days ahead and were exciting and compelling to a young child. “It was always such a mystery, so involved, so complicated.” 

When Swope returned from Oaxaca to Washington, she built a menu for Andale around what she had learned there. In the four years of its existence, she returned to Mexico eight times, on each occasion to a different state. Mexican flavors will always be an element in her cooking, she says. Restaurant K is backed by the thoroughly American McCormick & Schmick’s Seafood Restaurants. Yet with their encouragement she’s insinuated authentic flavors of Mexico to some of the dishes there. 

As well as the hours in the kitchen, she’s spending time searching out good ingredients. “It’s the biggest problem. You’re finding one element at one farm, another at another. It’s just not one stop shopping.” Only when she sees what’s available does she decide what she’ll cook. “It’s the way I shop at the grocery store. It means you’re working with the best ingredients at their peak.”

She credits the German side of her family for her organization skills and her work ethic. “More than anything, that’s the thing that has sustained me and enabled me to stick. A lot of people are under the impression restaurant cooking is glamorous. They see it on TV. It’s not. It’s manual labor. But in my mind there’s nothing better than manual labor.”

Swope goes in for manual labor even when she doesn’t have to. When she’s not at the restaurant, she’s at home in Manassas, where she lives with her two dogs, gardening and totally engaged in the physically demands of the soil. Her son Zachary is away at college so she can do what she wants with her own time. Which means she doesn’t have to prepare any meals she doesn’t want to. “I don’t cook. I don’t eat well. Most chefs don’t eat well. They have high cholesterol, high blood pressure.” 

There are no vegetables in her garden. “I only grow flowers. I can’t say I’m particularly good at it, but I just love flowers. Nothing makes me happier than sitting in my gardening things, caked in mud, looking at some flower I’ve planted.”  
 
Restaurant K by Alison Swope is located at1700 K St., NW (202-974-6545; restaurantkbyalisonswope.com) Main courses cost from $18 to $29.

This article by Julia Watson first appeared in the NorthWest Current, the Dupont Current, the Foggy Bottom Current, the Georgetown Current. Photo Bill Petros/The Current.