Jamies Leeds - Owner-chef of Hank's Oyster Bar
First chef honors her dad with oyster joint. Now she's opening a gastropub.
Jamie Leeds is rare among chefs. First, she owns her own restaurant, Hank’s Oyster Bar, with one branch on Q Street in Dupont Circle, the other in Old Town, Alexandria, and CommonWealth, a gastropub set to open in Columbia Heights in summer 2008. Plus, she’s a woman. And then there’s the fact that she has no formal culinary training.
Born in New York but raised in Columbus, Ohio, Leeds worked in advertising after graduating in 1983 from New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology. And she was “really dissatisfied.”
What she knew she did enjoy was cooking. She had been doing it almost since she could stand, working alongside her father, Hank, after whom the oyster bar is named “He was a great cook,” she said. Until his death when she was 11, “We cooked a lot together — seafood, clams, pasta,” she said. And she carried on after, learning from recipe to recipe, teaching herself as she went.
But leaving advertising for restaurant kitchens was another story. “There were not a lot of women in cooking at that point,” she said. And then there was the matter of education. She considered going to culinary school, “but I couldn’t afford it.” Instead she learned on the job, sucking up knowledge “like a sponge!”
Her first job was prepping for the Popover Cafe, a New York eatery whose menu runs from filet mignon to popovers dripping strawberry butter. After only a few months, she was asked to take over the kitchen. At that point, she decided this was the career she wanted to pursue.
In search of more, she spent a year on the route of the “stagiaire,” the culinary world’s word for apprenticing for no money, in a series of different situations wherever she could find them.
Then in 1987, she landed a job that would be the turning point in her career.
In 1985, Danny Meyer opened what quickly became an outstanding critical success in New York City. Union Square Cafe was an entirely new concept: reasonably priced American food with an Italian bent, served in informal surroundings.
Two years into the project, Meyer hired Leeds as a line cook. When she mastered each of the stations in only one year, he promoted her to sous chef. And in 1990, he sent her to France to apprentice at Le Cerf, located within a hotel in Alsace known for the deer of the game-rich region. She lived on a white-asparagus farm, bicycling to work. Meyer — “such a great guy,” she said — flew over to see how she was doing.
Then the chef of the Hostellerie, a family-run hotel, passed her on to the four-star Hôtel Negresco in Nice for a broader experience. That chef sent her on to Didier Oudill, an ex-Michel Guérard chef, at his Pain Adour et Fantaisie in Gascony.
She mastered workable kitchen French and excelled at her cooking. But her fellow — male — cooks couldn’t make out why, at 30, she would prefer to be in a kitchen, not at home surrounded by children. (She and her partner now have a son who is 3 1/2 and the reason Leeds decamped for Washington in 2002.)
When she returned to the United States after her year in France, Leeds decided against helping Meyer with his new project to open Gramercy Tavern in New York. “I was eager to use what I had learned. I wanted to be a chef,” she said.
She was introduced to Richard Melman, who owns and runs Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises, a Chicago-based corporation that owns more than 70 restaurants nationwide. He brought her in to oversee the launching of a Spanish concept restaurant in Chicago, Cafe Ba-Ba-Reeba, where she worked as executive chef for two years. Then Melman promoted her to corporate chef to help him open Foodlife in Chicago’s Water Tower Place, an “eatery” offering 13 cuisines.
After four years with the corporation, she returned to New York City, where she and two women from Union Square Restaurant wanted to open their own restaurant in Brooklyn. “But it was too scary for them. They were too young and not ready,” Leeds said.
So she turned to consulting work. Between 1995 and 1997, she created menus, designed kitchens and ran staff training for restaurants in Chicago, New York and San Francisco. Next she opened The Globe, a 180-seat brasserie in the Flatiron district of New York City, where she stayed three years.
A move to Drew Nieporent’s Myriad Restaurant Group followed. The award-winning restaurateur owns practically every restaurant you would want to eat at in several cities, from New York’s Nobu and its numerous branches to the Coach House on Martha’s Vineyard.
Leeds joined the group as executive consulting chef, overseeing, among others, New York City’s Tribeca Grill, the Steelhead Grill in Pittsburgh and Seattle’s Whotel. It was around that time that Leeds and her partner began talking about having a child. Then came the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. “And I was not crazy about staying in New York,” Leeds said. In 2002, when she was offered the job of opening 15 Ria, the restaurant in the new boutique Washington Terrace Hotel on Rhode Island Avenue, she didn’t hesitate.
The only thing she missed once she moved to the capital was the kind of casual New York restaurant she liked to hang out in, like the Pearl Oyster Bar, “one of my favorite places.” It offered the sort of clam-shack kind of eating she and her father had so enjoyed.
In Washington, when she arrived, “The only way to get seafood in town was from high-end chefs.” So in May 2005, Leeds opened her own space, an informal neighborhood spot that might have been snatched from the New England shore. In spring this year, it was nominated “Best New Restaurant” by the Restaurant Association Metropolitan Washington.
It serves mostly fish, and oysters from carefully chosen farms. But along with daily fish specials and a lobster roll that’s a Vineyard vacation on the spot, Leeds offers a section called “Meat & Two,” with different cuts each day of the week (except her short ribs, which are so popular she runs them on both Monday and Tuesday).
You won’t find the favored word “fresh” on her uncluttered menu. “Why would you even need the word?” she asked, bemused. “My philosophy is, it’s automatically the best and freshest.”
This article by Julia Watson first appeared in the NorthWest Current. Photo courtesy of Hank’s Oyster Bar
News Update: Jamie Leeds to open gastropub CommonWealth this summer
The British gastropub comes to Washington, thanks to Jamie Leeds. She and operating partner Sandy Lewis are opening CommonWealth mid-summer in Columbia Heights, a chef-driven, British inspired restaurant, with a public house atmosphere. Before you gag on 'British-inspired', the Brits have come a long, long way from Spotted Dick and Tripe and Onions (though take it from me, Spotted Dick and Custard is yummy.) When the dollar doesn't cover much more than the cover charge in Britain these days, the gastropub is your best eating bet. Good, classic English food in relaxed surroundings served up by chefs bored by pomposity running kitchens that serve up good value, well-cooked food from fine British ingredients. Gordon Ramsay has two. Leeds went to London to research and will open hers at 1400 Irving St NW in the Highland Park residential building as a sibling neighborhood restaurant to her two Hank's Oyster Bars.
The menu will include Potted Shrimp, Scotch Eggs, Toad in a Hole, Fish and Chips, Bangers and Mash, Welsh Rarebit, Steak and Guinness Pie, Pork Pastie and Sticky Toffee Pudding, with a traditional British "Sunday Roast" on Sundays.
“Our goal is to build on these concepts and create a gathering place in the neighborhood of Columbia Heights, a place to relax and nourish one’s self with farm-to-table fare. We want our guests to feel at ease, to order without pressure; to have a great beer or glass of wine and take pleasure in food for nibbling or dining,” says Sandy Lewis.
Or you could just settle down with a pint of the best brew and a game of checkers or backgammon. If anyone asks how you're doing, just trot out the Brit's favorite response: "Mustn't grumble."
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