Barton Seaver - Owner-chef of Hook

Barton Seaver sits like a coiled spring at a table at Hook, wearing a baseball hat that
reads “No farms, no food.” Hook, launched this spring, is a Georgetown restaurant devoted (the word is carefully chosen) to seafood. Seaver is its owner/chef and a man being carefully watched by people who, like the Restaurant Association Metropolitan Washington and StarChefs.com, have called him a “rising star.”

At the time of his interview, it is he who is doing the watching, a little tensely — for deliveries of fresh fish. He buys most of his direct from fishermen. One of these sends him the entire catch. Sometimes this means, in the case of a recent delivery of flying fish, that he may not know what he’ll be preparing until it turns up at the front door on M Street.

“I’ve never seen it on a menu anywhere,” he admits. He relishes challenges like these, of turning an unfamiliar fish into a menu attraction for as long as he has stocks in his rapidly turned-over refrigerator. He’ll do what he does to all his fish: “Try them first, figure what the fish needs and wants — something to highlight the quality of the fish. It’s not about my creativity and ego.”

It’s this devotion to his product that is attracting the attention of serious eaters and reviewers. There is meat on his menu. But he believes that for chefs who want to test what they are capable of doing, “Fish offers a better palate, gives you more scope.”

Seaver grew up in a small family in Mount Pleasant, where everybody, he says, was interested in food. “It was always an integral part of the family experience,” with home-cooked meals, always freshand simply prepared, seven nights a week. “We always ate healthily,” he says, shopping at local markets for the freshest seasonal
ingredients.

Summers were spent on the shores of the Patuxent River, “crabbing and picking veg out of the garden.” His father, a great fish cook, prepared everything from soft-shell crabs to whole fish of testing size.

After attending high school at St. Albans, Seaver went to work in the kitchens of local
Washington restaurants — Ardeo, Felix and Greenwood among them — before heading to the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y.

He graduated with honors and was offered a fellowship post teaching courses in meat and fish. The experience gave him contacts with East Coast fish suppliers and exposed him to less-familiar fish and how to use them. It was there that his deep commitment to using only fish from sustainable sources took root.

After stints cooking in restaurants in Chicago and New York, he took off abroad and traveled around Spain, working on small fishing boats and cooking in seaside restaurants and with local families in their kitchens, learning as he went.

Then José Andrés showed up, guided to Seaver by a mutual friend, and offered him a job at his 7th Street restaurant, Jaleo. In 2005, Seaver moved on to become executive chef at Café Saint-Ex, where his reputation took off, and he revamped, a year later, the menu of Bar Pilar, its sister restaurant.

He left in March 2007 to open Hook. Owning his own restaurant gives him a chance to put his beliefs into practice. He buys from family farms. He won’t put more than five items on a plate. His fish comes to him within two days of being caught, so fresh that he offers a list of various finely shaved fish “crudo,” the Italian word for raw. He doesn’t use butter and cream or even stock — the fish itself will provide all the flavors necessary to a
dish, he says.

“Almost everything passes over the wood grill at some point, so we don’t need stock,” he explains. “Smoke provides that richness.”

He is proud of the fact that his menu has no particular vegan or vegetarian options. “Almost everything we do can be made vegan or vegetarian. We do what we do, sans fish. All my vegan and vegetarian customers are blown away.

At 28, not only is Seaver an owner/chef, but he’s also a certified sommelier with continuing studies through the Wine and Spirits Educational Trust in London. He’s active in the Slow Food movement, the International Seafood Conference, the James Beard Foundation, the National Restaurant Association and the Seafood Choices Alliance. Forming a relationship with enough people to supply a restaurant takes a great deal of work and time, and the Seafood Alliance has helped him make the connections.

Plus he writes an article once a month for StarChefs.com.

If Seaver, who lives in Columbia Heights, finds any time to spend on himself, he spends it exploring Washington. “I am definitely very active in the city. I’m not at a bar drinking. There are so many things to do. There’s so much culture. It’s an amazing
place to live.”

Hook Restaurant (202-625-4488; http://www.hookdc.com) is located at 3241 M St. NW. Main courses cost $22 to $28.

This article by Julia Watson first appeared in the NorthWest Current newspaper.

Watch and hear Barton Seaver discuss the safety of fish farming http://news.medill.northwestern.edu/washington/news.aspx?id=72975