Janis McLean - Chef of The Morrison-Clark Inn

 From corporate officer to lead chef

Janis McLean ran away from a good, steady corporate job that she’d held for seven years to cook, even though years before she had discovered that “cooking for others isn’t as easy as it looks.”

“I’ll never forget the time I catered my first party,” she says. “It’s one thing thinking you can do it and [another] actually doing it. It was for a friend’s father’s 70th birthday. I did the whole buffet for about 80 people. It was exhausting and exhilarating at the same time.”

Her family didn’t think she’d gone mad. “I was one of those girls with an Easy-Bake oven. I subjected my poor family to biscuits at Christmas when I was 6. In junior high I started serving desserts. By late high school it was family dinners.”

And once she left the corporate world, she just steamed right along, completing, this January, a satisfying career circle. That’s when she returned to the Morrison-Clark Inn, to head the kitchen there. Her first professional cooking job after the corporate world was as sous chef there under Susan McCreight-Lindeborg.

She had, in fact, not been far from the cooking world when she went into business. After graduating from college with a bachelor’s in program management, she joined the 13-store retailer Kitchen Bazaar, where she became corporate officer. There, she says, she was exposed to cookbook authors and traveling chefs doing demos and realized cooking might be the profession for her. “I thought, Oh, wow! I can do this!”

She credits her highly supportive husband, a contractor, with asking the right galvanizing question at the right time. She had discovered L’Academie de Cuisine in Bethesda and was taking a nine-month-long professional program part time, on Mondays only. To attend, she arranged for her bosses at Kitchen Bazaar to let her make up the missed work and to avoid scheduling meetings on Mondays. Her husband asked, “What do you want?” McLean answered that she wanted to learn to cook professionally. He said,
“You’re not listening: What do you want?” She reflected and replied, “I really want to do the full-time program.”

As she had just paid off her last student loan, it was he who had the leap of faith to encourage her to take out another one and leave her job entirely.

It helped that the cookbook buyer for Kitchen Bazaar had been approached by Anne Willan, founder of the prestigious cooking school LaVarenne in France, to help her handle her overseas tour arrangements. She turned the job down, but pointed Willan toward McLean. So while working hard enough on her culinary course to graduate at the top of the class with distinction and honors, McLean also oversaw Willan’s teaching and book tour plans. “I thought I could do it at midnight in my bunny slippers,” she says.

After L’Academie, she joined McCreight-Lindeborg at the Morrison-Clark Inn as sous chef. She didn’t intend to stay long. “Restaurant years are like dog years,” she says. But she remained there five-and-a-half years.

Then McLean moved to the recently closed Red Sage. She wanted to learn a cuisine different from the Morrison-Clark Inn’s American regional style, she wanted to learn how to do volume, and she wanted to have a name restaurant on her résumé. “And I wanted to be in and out in a year.”

She stayed two-and-a-half. “I adore Morou [the chef there, who is known only by his first name]. He is really decent, really kind. He gave me great opportunities.”

By then, she was also processing student registration for LaVarenne and doing its general public relations and marketing. “It was tricky. Red Sage was a 60hour week, plus [I was doing] a 20hour week for Anne.” In the summers of 1999 and 2001, chef Morou released her to go to France, first as Willan’s assistant course director, then as course director. “The second year I got a little homesick. I never got homesick in my life!” McLean says. “I was a camp counselor and I had no patience for kids who got homesick. But week five, I just needed a hug.”

She came back wanting to have her own restaurant. She and her husband and dog, Ursa, have always lived in Silver Spring, and she had thought about opening a neighborhood bistro. With her training in business management, she wrote her business plan herself and produced all of her own spreadsheets, to the amazement of the five banks she approached.

But all bar one turned her down for a loan. “The last one said yes, but we’ll only give you half.” So she set about trying to raise the money. “Meanwhile, a friend was opening what he said was a coffee shop in Silver Spring.” It would be called the redDog Cafe. “I said, I’ll consult; just write the menu.” She produced his spreadsheets and cash-flow projections. Finally, he asked her to help him open the place. “I told him, I’ll just stay six months.”

She left three years later.

“I learned what it takes to open a restaurant. I got to learn more about plumbing than I ever want to know! But it hasn’t dampened my enthusiasm to open my own.”

Then the offer came to return to the Morrison-Clark Inn as executive chef. The inn, on Massachusetts Avenue, is beguiling, built as two private houses in 1864. It’s Washington’s only hotel listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

McLean says that since she last cooked at its restaurant, diners have changed. “They’re much more sophisticated. People are traveling now; they know much more about food.”

There are limits, though. Along with her produce, she is sourcing her eggs and poussins locally. “And I put them on the menu as poussins and no one ordered them. Maybe people are intimidated and don’t want to mispronounce the word. So now I call them petit roasted chicken and they’re selling really, really well.”

What pleases her most about her job is looking after people. “We’re in a nurturing profession.” In a hotel you do things you wouldn’t in a regular restaurant, she says, like cooking chicken soup to order for a guest who had come down with a cold.

She has to curb this instinct, though. “Part of my nurturing is I want to feed you a lot of food! So I use a ring mold. It’s easy to put too much on a plate, but with a ring mold, you’re actually controlling portion size.” Have diners ever objected that they have too much to eat? “No one’s ever said that to me,” she says with a laugh.

The Morrison-Clark Inn (202-898-1200; http://www.morrisonclark.com) is located at 1015 L St. NW. Main courses cost $24 to $36.

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