The morning I went to interview Jeff and Barbara Black, owners of BlackSalt, BlackSalt Market and Addie’s, 6000 bottles of cabernets had cascaded from a falling wine rack to the floor at BlackSalt. The Blacks were in mourning. “It’s like leaving art work in the rain,” said Barbara. “This is what I’d call alcohol abuse.”

But only a brief glance through their restaurant resume would indicate that the Blacks will survive. They’re fighters. After all, at the very time they were extending themselves from BlackSalt on MacArthur Boulevard into their Bethesda restaurant Black’s Bar & Kitchen, the Gulf Coast Kitchen came up for sale in Garrett Park where the couple live. “I said to Barbara, if you don’t get this now you will always regret it,” says Jeff Black. Which is how they found themselves buying what had once been the Post Office and developing two new restaurants at the same time. 

Both projects went way over budget. “I think we’ve bitten off more than we can chew,” Barbara Black told her husband. But he urged that whatever she felt, she shouldn’t stop going forward. This at a time when she was also bringing up Simon and Oliver, then aged 6 and 5 years old. So the Garrett Park venture became Black Market Bistro, the second restaurant in their group to go beyond seafood and provide New American cuisine. The other to do so was their first venture, Addie’s, named after the grandmother who taught Jeff to cook.

Jeff Black had been working for Bob Kinkead at his Pennsylvania Ave fish restaurant at the time. “The majority of people who came to Kinkead’s lived in Maryland. I said, I want to take a restaurant to them. Bob said, it won’t work.” Jeff spotted the site he thought might be a draw, on the Rockville Pike near the White Flint Mall. “It was just a little house that was a restaurant.” So he went in, apologized for being “right out of line” to the owner, but suggested that if she were ever interested in selling, he would be interested in talking. He was too late, he learned. The business had just been sold. About to walk out, he turned around and said, “Sometimes these things fall apart. I’ll leave you my number just in case.” Not long after, the call came through.

An area native, Jeff Black started in cooking at home. “I come from working class parents. If I wanted to eat, my older sisters said, I had to get into the kitchen.” He began working in restaurants at 13. “I was very shy. I had a friend, very verbose, who was going for an interview in a restaurant. He talked and talked. I’m standing in back, quiet as a mouse. I like you, the owner said to me. You don’t talk. So I got hired. I wasn’t looking for a job! I was kind of the utility guy – passed the ketchup, cleaned the floors. I did that for three years. It was nice having money.” Next he moved to a grocery store, checking prices after work, graduating to assistant manager before heading back to restaurants.

By the time he was 17 - under the legal drinking age - he was bar-tending and working in the kitchen of a Greek restaurateur. He’d become hooked on professional kitchens and decided this was what he wanted to do for a living. His father disagreed and pushed him off to college. “Restaurants didn’t have the glamour then,” says Jeff. “But I knew you could make money at it.” As soon as he finished college, he was back in a restaurant kitchen, in Houston. “I wanted to get serious about cooking. I thought I was on the right track, I was doing everything the chef didn’t know how to do. Every day I told him, I want to learn about seasons, the history of the product. He never would talk to me. There was seafood going through. I said, I need to learn this! This is why I am here!” Eventually, the chef confessed he had no idea about any of it. He had been faking. He had lied on his resume. So at 27 Jeff took himself off to the Culinary Institute of America, where he met Barbara. They married the year she moved from Marriott’s Health Care division to help open Marvelous Market’s Dupont Circle store and decided before they had children to take a shot at getting a restaurant of their own.

At BlackSalt, their second venture, seafood was the focus. “Jeff’s father was a big fisherman,” Barbara explains. “Every Friday he took Jeff out in the Gulf of Mexico. If it didn’t hurt, it wasn’t fishing.” When they opened their third, Black’s Bar & Kitchen, another seafood spot, it was because they wanted a larger location for parties, plus an oyster bar.

Launching Black Market, Jeff's father acted as contractor with Jeff the laborer. Barbara and her mother tiled the tables. They’d been called about them by another owner whose business was falling through. You can have the tables, he said, but you have to come tonight. They rented a U Haul and in the wee small hours threw them into the truck. “It looked like we were stealing tables!” says Barbara. And it was just the start of paying for their investment with what they call “A lot of creative financing. I didn’t get paid for the first nine months the restaurant was open,” says Jeff.

These days, the Blacks look around their restaurant staff lists and realise they have 217 on their payroll.

Addies, 11120 Rockville Pike, Rockville, 301 881 0081; http://www.addiesrestaurant.com/ $18-$29
BlackSalt, 4883 MacArthur Blvd. NW, 202 342 9101 http://www.blacksaltrestaurant.com/ $25-$33.
Black’s Bar & Kitchen, 7750 Woodmont Ave, Bethesda, (310 652 5525: http://www.blacksbarandkitchen.com) $21 $33
Black Market, 4600 Waverly Ave., Garrett Park, (301 933 3000; http://www.blackmarketrestaurant.com/ $12-$26

Photo by Charma Le Edmonds, Shelter Studios. Left to right: Barbara Black, Jeffrey Black and Jon Linck, of the Black Restaurant Group.

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