Jamie Stachowski - Owner-chef of Restaurant Kolumbia

Chef brings big personality, family recipes to his K St. spot

There’s as much flavor in an interview with Jamie Stachowski as there is in his classical European cooking. To give you a taste of the full force of the man and how he sounds, a reporter could just type out everything he says unedited, stick quotation marks at the beginning and the end of the piece, and just let his words flow uninterrupted.

It’s like a confrontation between “The Sopranos” and “The Godfather,” all high-octane energy and heated hand gestures, albeit with a Polish-American twist. The owner and executive chef of Restaurant Kolumbia, in the heart of the lobbyist kingdom on K Street, has been working with food ever since he was a kid, when he spent time in the Buffalo, N.Y., kitchens of his extended Polish family.

“Both my families owned Polish restaurants. I’d be in them at a young age, back when I was going to school a few short years ago.” He peers at you sideways to see if you’ll say anything and runs a hand quickly over his head. He is in his mid-40s.

Stachowski’s hair is brushed straight back over his polo shirt collar. It’s not impossible to imagine Eric Clapton strolling in and Stachowski springing up to jam with him on a Fender Stratocaster. He looks like that kind of guy. But he’s not. He’s a passionate cook.

“My mother’s family managed some French restaurant. On my father’s side, he was in what they called gin mills. An uncle had a classic soda shop called Babe’s [that] I worked in. It was great, it was great, it was great! You know what I’m saying?”

Chefs back in Buffalo “were either the town drunk or they had just got back from service. There were great chefs in great establishments in New York and San Francisco. But in Buffalo in the ‘70s? Everybody cooked. Now nobody cooks.”

He began because he wasn’t doing so well in school. “Back then, if you were in the public school system, they didn’t do anything. I just drifted into something else” — a neighborhood Italian restaurant in 1977, when he was 15, to be exact. “In the kitchens I just felt great. Cooking was easy to me.” But it was hard work. “There were no dish machines, only sinks. No convection ovens, no food processors, no microwaves. You were lucky if you had a mixer. I think about all the equipment and tools we have now — it helps a lot.” Does he think it results in better cooking? “Probably not.”

He never went to culinary school. “By the time I started here in the ‘70s, early ‘80s, it was, You want to pay $17,000 to learn to cook? Or get paid $17,000 to cook? Not to say school doesn’t help people.”

But by 19, he was already working in a renowned French restaurant in Los Angeles. It changed his whole view of cooking. “They were using different products. It was more regimented. Everybody was in chef’s whites. There was a clear emperor in the kitchen. I thought, I want to be that guy.” He won’t wear chef’s whites anymore, though.

“Everyone wears one. No joke! Every one of these young men!” Back in the day, “It was something you earned, over 10, 15 years. We were browbeaten. After that, when you see it everywhere, without the same meaning, you have a bad feeling. My son says I’m bitter. Maybe.” He considers. “But no. It’s all about respect. Now, when I see it all over the television? Rachael Ray? They cheapen it.”

Still, he’s not against food shows. “Commercialism has done us all good. You can tell people how to be a chef de cuisine in 30 minutes!” If he was asked to do the same? “Sure, that’s what I’ll do. But on my program, I’ll say, ‘No, you CAN’T do this!’” He guffaws with laughter.

After apprenticing with Wolfgang Puck and other West Coast culinary stars, he came East, first to New York to Le Périgord, then to the capital.

If his name doesn’t trip off the tongues of Washingtonians who eat out, his food has definitely slid across them at some point.

In 1984, at 21, he was cooking with Jean-Louis Palladin at Jean-Louis at the Watergate, where he met his wife, Carolyn, a Washington native. At 23, he was hired as chef to open Johnny’s, in Bethesda. In 1989, he became chef at Madeo on 23rd Street. Next came four years with a restaurant group that gave him the chance to spend a year in Beirut, Lebanon, opening an American restaurant.

When he returned to Washington in 1997, he became the chef of the respected P Street seafood restaurant Pesce. Two years later, he opened eCitie in Tysons Corner, voted Best New Restaurant of the Year by the Restaurant Association Metropolitan Washington. Working with Carole Greenwood at her eponymous restaurant in Cleveland Park (now closed) followed, before he took over La Tarbouche and turned it into his present venture, Restaurant Kolumbia, which his wife runs.

When Stachowski starts waving his arms about and his voice rises excitedly over some anecdote, Carolyn passes quietly by the table, squeezes him lightly on the shoulder, and he subsides a little.

He’s enthusing over the charcuterie he makes himself. “We don’t pick up the phone to New York to send us Speck ham. We have a cave outside town where we cure it ourselves.” It’s the garage of their house near Seven Corners, Va.

He lists the French and Polish classics he makes. “We do boudin rouge [a blood sausage], tête de veau [head cheese], smoked lamb’s shoulder, kielbasa, cured venison, pepperoni.” A selection is presented on a big wooden board, with mustard and his own pickles. “Delicious, handmade by the Polack,” he says with a grin — “all stuff obviously I learned as I was growing up. We had a small farm outside Buffalo. My father sets up shop with ducks, chicken, capons, calves. At one point we have 900 birds! So here’s the thing. Here I am, 12 years old. He’d grab 50 birds, slaughter them, chop these birds.” He springs to his feet and gives a demonstration of how his father and uncles would draw the blood from the ducks. “At weekends, the women would be upstairs cooking, the men downstairs, making 75 pounds of fresh kielbasa.”

Stachowski’s menu emphasizes classic French cooking. But there is a Polish influence among some of the compositions. “There’s a stigma Polish cuisine can’t be delicate. But my pierogies with truffled butter and white raisins are thinner than any ravioli you will have. There are no gimmicks here. When you work 14, 16, 18 hours a day, what’s the gimmick?”

Restaurant Kolumbia sadly is now closed.

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