Chef traces roots to college — and a girl

Brendan Cox and his wife have three children under the age of 5. There’s Catie 4, Charlet 2, and new arrival, 6-month-old Evan. Cox makes their breakfast. But aside from his one day a week off, he doesn’t see them. He never gets home to Potomac till around midnight. Yup, it’s another tale of the life of an executive chef — and the tolerance of his wife.

“She knew what I was when she married me,” Cox says appreciatively of Leslie, a former attorney. “I cook. I do cook. I love to cook,” he says, his voice rising with passion. Circle Bistro is where he did it at the time of this interview.

It wasn’t what he planned. He was at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, studying history and philosophy. He was a vegetarian at the time — a stand he had adopted to impress a girlfriend. It didn’t impress his family, which made him cook his own food at home.

The school ran a Health Food Cooperative where, instead of living off the meal plan, students could make their own food. “I cooked for myself a lot and got that bug,” Cox explains. He also tried steak again, which didn’t please his fellow Cooperative cooks.

But preparing his own meals was a motivating experience. “I wanted to work hard, get opportunities to learn more. And,” he grins, “I needed beer money.” So he became a dishwasher at Spinnakers on the Chesapeake Bay. After eight months, he’d been promoted to sous chef. He’d fallen out of love with vegetarianism and in love with the work. Dispensing with college, he headed back to Washington, where he’d been born, to hone his skills.

Here, he managed to talked his way into Galileo, to learn from its owner chef, Roberto Donna, and his executive chef, Todd Gray. A year later, in 1999, Gray left to open Equinox, and he took Cox with him.

There Cox’s experience moved from high-end Northern Italian food to contemporary American cuisine. Gray, like Donna, is an ardent supporter of local producers and farmers markets. Through him, Cox built up a relationship with area growers and suppliers.

By 2002, he was promoted to sous chef, then became chef de cuisine for Gray at his new venture in Middleburg, Va. There, at Market Salamander, he developed a passion for cheese and, with a 3,000-bottle wine selection as part of his responsibility, for wine.

Then, in September 2004, an offer to join Circle Bistro as executive chef brought him back to D.C.

His cooking background was clear in the menu he devised for the hotel restaurant and bar on Washington Circle. He isn’t interested in molecular gastronomy — that transformation of food into unfamiliar shapes and textures through scientific tools and techniques.

“It may be great for some people, but I want to touch my food with my hands or my knife. Modified starch is really cool, but not for me. I wasn’t going to study with someone how to freeze wine to zero and go ‘Watch what happens when it melts!’ That’s not my thing. I don’t slavishly imitate any fads.”

What he does is let food speak for itself. “It starts with the ingredients, doing as little to them as possible” — aside from making them pretty on the plate.

He also keeps an eye on the health of his customers. “My portion sizes are adequate but not extremely large. I never want to have someone walk out really, really full. They should be able to eat two courses or three without its being an overwhelming amount of food. I’m not in the business of making people overweight. I do use butter and cream, but judiciously.” Manufactured dairy alternatives that are promoted for better health he disparages as stuffed with ingredients expressed in “pentasyllabic words and more detrimental than butter.”

Food isn’t just for staying alive, he says. Eating well is also deeply satisfying. In the spring and summer he cooks Italian. “Fresh vegetables are abundant.” In fall and winter he resorts to classic French technique. His favorite dishes on his CircleOne menu? He looks offended. “That’s like asking me my favorite kid!” Then he reflects and picks the Steelhead Trout. “And the duck we serve at dinner. I really love that.”

He says he’s attached to Washington, but he’d go to Italy in a heartbeat. “If I could eat my way through in three months, I would be a happy person.” Until that happens, he and his wife are “not above wanting to go to a good restaurant.”

Eating his way through the tasting menu at Le Bernadin in New York some years ago “really blew me out of the water.” It was food, he says, “with passion and soul. The people working on it were really putting everything they had onto the plates and into the flavors. You could feel it. You can’t fake passion; you can’t fake soul.”

When he’s home, Cox reads voraciously. “It’s a good way for me to relax and pull ideas.”

Ownership of his own restaurant is a goal. “It’s the only way for a chef. It’s all about ownership,” he says. But he never wants to have his name on anything he isn’t proud of. The best words any diner can say to him are, “God bless you. That was fantastic!”

In 2006, the Restaurant Association Metropolitan Washington nominated Cox as “Rising Star of the Year” and Circle Bistro as “Informal Dining Restaurant of the Year.”
1401 K St NW, 202 216 5988   

DC Coast (202 216 5988; dccoast.com) is located at 1401 K St NW.
Circle Bistro (202 293 5390; circlebistro.com) is located in One Washington Circle Hotel, 1 Washington Circle NW. Main courses cost $19 to $27.
Notti Bianche (202 298 8085) is located at 824 New Hampshire Ave NW 

This article by Julia Watson first appeared in the NorthWest Current newspaper when Brendan Cox was chef at Circle Bistro and Notte Bianchi. Photo BillPetros/The Current. 

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