A growing family — at work and home

Geoffrey Tracy and his wife, MSNBC’s chief Washington correspondent, Norah O’Donnell, are expecting twins, a boy and a girl, on May 20. It wouldn’t be hard to name them. The boy could be called Geoff after Tracy’s two District restaurants, Chef Geoff’s. And the girl could be named Lia, after the one he opened in Maryland in December. The menu at Lia’s is focused on contemporary takes on Italian soups, salads, charcuterie and pizzas, and the name comes from the second half of the word “Italia.”

“I feel all other chefs in the world name their restaurant after their children. Maybe we could name our children after the restaurants,” he says, chuckling. It can’t be the first time anyone has suggested it, but he goes along with the joke.

Tracy may be a budding restaurateur, but at Georgetown University he studied theology and world religions. At the same time, though, he became the general manager of a student-owned company that ran all the campus shops that students use, from the grocery to the movie-rental store. “It was one of the best experiences I had at Georgetown,” he says. “I really like all the things that go into organizing business, the hands-on components.”

He also met his wife there, in 1991, and they married 10 years later. But she was the only part of his future that seemed settled when he graduated. He didn’t want to follow his friends into law school — “Not my cup of tea,” he says with a rueful grin — so that summer, he took a bike trip all the way from San Diego to Florida to clear his head. On his return to his hometown Washington, he bumped into a family friend, a man he calls his mentor, Tom Myer, executive vice president of Clyde’s Restaurant Group, and told him of his goal to own a restaurant.

Over lunch, Myers advised Tracy to take a job at Clyde’s — work in the kitchen, work the front of house, work anything that would show him what it
involved to make a restaurant function. “And if I still liked it, I should go to culinary school.”

He really did enjoy it. So off he went to the Culinary Institute of America for what he calls “an awesome time. There were different chefs teaching you. I did stuff you can’t really do in normal life. I joined an ice-carving club. We had cheese tastings, beer tastings, champagne tastings.” His externship was spent at Galileo, Roberto Donna’s 21st Street restaurant.

When he graduated, Clyde’s took him back, for his first management job. Next, he became dining room manager at 1789 Restaurant, near the Georgetown University campus, while keeping his eye open for a space to launch his own place. A couple of things fell through, he says, until one day he was shown the spot that became his first Chef Geoff’s, on New Mexico Avenue near American University. That was almost seven years ago.

“I always felt at that point in Washington there were a lot of high-end restaurants and a lot of cheap restaurants, both good on both levels. But there was not enough chef dining in the middle,” he says. “Now there’s more competition in that category. And that’s OK. Chef Geoff’s is a neighborhood restaurant. But we have 300, 400 people there a day. So that’s not just neighborhood. More people are coming from farther out.”

In September 2002, he opened a second Chef Geoff’s downtown, three blocks from the White House, on Pennsylvania Avenue, taking over from a place that had gone bust. “After 9/11, a lot of restaurants went out of business. We didn’t have any money, so we just polished up the place, put a fresh coat of paint on, made it happen. It was a shoestring job,” he says.

Lia’s, by contrast, is a full-on architecture-and-design concept. Tracy went in while the Friendship Heights office building that it’s housed in was under construction so he could get exactly thecontemporary-rustic meets-Italian-chic look he wanted. The office workers upstairs and in surrounding buildings are glad to have the space for lunch and after-work drinks. “They kept saying, ‘We want a big bar, a really big bar!’” says Tracy.

He opened this third restaurant because, he says, “I wanted opportunities for everybody. I have all these great employees working for me.” Some of them are people he learned his craft alongside. “When I started out, three of my classmates at the CIA started with me. One of them is with me still.”

At the same time the new space was being developed, he and his wife were in the process of gutting a Wesley Heights house he had just bought. “I would visit two construction sites every single day. You haven’t seen my bank balance.” He makes a downward swooping gesture with his hand.

It means he hasn’t had much time for vacations. “I haven’t taken one in two years, as my office manager reminds me,” he says. But he has traveled. When the lease for Lia’s finally came through, he was on a working trip in Italy. He’s a trim man, and he rolls his eyes at the memory. “It was two weeks of food and wine, three or four wineries a day. I had to do five miles running a day to break even!” He also tries to get out to California once every two years to keep up with the new wines and restaurants.

But for a regular break he has Friday nights. It’s officially date night for a man whose restaurants are open seven days a week. He and his wife “slink over to 2 Amys around 9 o’clock for a glass of wine and a pizza.” Or if they don’t go to the Macomb Street pizzeria, they’ll go to BlackSalt on MacArthur Boulevard for some fish.

“I don’t know how travel comes up in my future,” he says a little wistfully. With twins on the way, it looks like he’ll be staying put for some time.

Chef Geoff’s Uptown (202-237-7800; http://www.chefgeoff.com) is located at 3201 New Mexico Ave. NW. Main courses cost $9.95 to $25.95. Chef Geoff’s Downtown (202-464-4461; chefgeoff.com) is located at 1301 Pennsylvania Ave. NW. Main courses cost $16.95 to $29.95. Lia’s (240-223-5427; http://www.liasrestaurant.com) is located at 4435 Willard Ave. in Chevy Chase, Md. Main courses cost $10.95 to $18.95.

This article by Julia Watson first appeared in the NorthWest Current newspaper. Photo BillPetros/The Current. 

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