Ethan McKee - Chef of Rock Creek at Mazza

The executive chef of this nutrition-focused restaurant makes a three-course meal for under 850 calories.

The notion of going out to dine nutritiously might seem like a contradiction in terms. But a meal at Rock Creek Mazza isn’t different from a meal in any other fine-dining restaurant — except that you can calculate the nutritional breakdown of your meal if you choose, with the help of a fact list on the back of the menu. Who would have guessed that there are 32 more calories in the Nantucket Bay Scallops than in the gnocchi? Or that there’s no cholesterol in the Butternut Squash Soup?

This is not a menu based on the sort of health foods whose names alone can conjure up dread, like tofu or wheatgrass. Dishes read like they do at any high-end establishment, such as Sesame-Crusted Grilled Yellowfin Tuna Loin with Bok Choy, Shiitake Mushrooms and Carrot-Ginger Coulis, and Roasted Amish Chicken Breast with Quince, Crushed Sweet Potatoes, Mushrooms and Hazelnuts.

When Judith Hammerschmidt and Tom S. Williams opened their first restaurant, Rock Creek Bethesda, in 2005, they did so in an effort to put food on the table that was as kind to the palate as to the body. The venture was so well-received that they launched a second location last fall. The esteemed Ris Lacoste, for years the chef at 1789, was brought in asa consultant, and Ethan McKee, previously sous chef at Equinox, came on board as executive chef.

McKee had spent seven years at Todd Gray’s restaurant, starting as line cook and finishing as chef de cuisine and helping develop the menu. It would be impossible to spend so long in Gray’s company and not absorb his philosophy of cooking seasonally, and, as much as possible, locally and organically. With that background as a basis, McKee has constructed a menu at Rock Creek where a three-course meal can come out at fewer than 850 calories. How, without resorting to butter or cream, does he make dishes taste rich inthe mouth?

“Where before I’d use cream and butter for thickening, I’m using a lot of vegetable purées,” he says, noting that the restaurant’s “conscious cuisine” policy has forced him to learn a whole new cooking style. “I really have to look at what I’m doing. My background includes tons of butter and cream — two things I’vecompletely eliminated. Along with deep frying.”

He’s also discovered the versatility of yogurt. “It’s something I’m learning how to use. The most important thing is to drain it for 24 hours to get rid of all the water. Then it gets the consistency of sour cream.” He collects it in a large cooler on Saturdays from Leesburg’s Blue Ridge Dairy at the farmers market in Clarendon.

McKee still uses heavy cream and butter in some desserts. “The main thing that sets us apart is we use a product called Whey Low.” It’s a sugar engineered by a Maryland biotechnologist that has the glucose removed, so a teaspoon contains about one-fourth the calories of a teaspoon of regular sugar. “It’s the only sugar you can substitute one-to-one in baking recipes,” McKee says. “Generally you can’t bake with substitutes.”

McKee is sympathetic to diners’ longings for desserts. In fact, he does something more restaurants should consider: He offers “small bites” of each of them. So diners can compose their own desserts with up to five different tastes of the menu on one plate. Before you ask how desserts fit into the restaurant’ nutritional concept, consider that McKee sends every one of his recipes to a nutritionist for approval before putting it on the menu.

McKee is proud of the new avenues this way of eating has opened up. Coming from Austin, Texas, he’s a big fried-chicken and barbecue fan. But in common with so many other diners, when he wanted to eat “lite” he found the only option was to go out for sushi.

Rock Creek Mazza may benefit in the future from that Texas fondness for barbecue. He has been experimenting with different meats and fish in a smoker he has in the back of the restaurant. “It’s a way to add a lot of flavor,” he says.

He doesn’t look like he needs to worry much about what he eats. He’s trim in build and says he’s always been athletic. “I grew up playing soccer.” His sister has just joined a co-ed team and is pushing to get him to play with them. He tried football one season but didn’t like it very much. “Too much equipment to wear.”

McKee has cooked almost his whole life, beginning with helping his mother run her catering business when he was 12, the same year his family moved from Austin to West Virginia. At 17 he landed his first cooking job, in a neighborhood sports bar, and then he took himself off to the professional program at L’Academie de Cuisine in Gaithersburg. After that he cooked with Bill Jackson for a year at the Carlyle Grand in Arlington and for two years in Vail, Colo., at Left Bank, a fine-dining French restaurant. An opportunity to work at Equinox brought him back to Washington.

He lives in Fairfax but wishes he could be closer in so he wouldn’t have to contend with the horrendous morning traffic. He wouldn’t change his job, though. “I’m here 15 hours a day, and I still don’t get everything done. But there is definitely no other job where I would go so many hours. There’s so much to do every day it doesn’t get boring.”

Rock Creek at Mazza (202-966-7625; rockcreekrestaurant.com) is located at 5300 Wisconsin Ave NW. Main courses cost $18 to $29.

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