John Wabeck, now sommelier at Inox after a stint at New Heights, was interviewed when he was the chef at Firefly.

A star chef comes to rest at Firefly

John Wabeck is allergic to mushrooms. And red wine and chocolate give him devastating migraines. It’s a terrible drawback for anyone, but Wabeck is the executive chef of Firefly, a three year-old contemporary American bistro in Dupont Circle. Tasting some of his dishes “is like playing with fire,” he said.

Wabeck’s work at Firefly won him the Restaurant Association Metropolitan Washington award for “Rising Culinary Star” in 2003. But he might never have turned to the stove had it not been for his parents.

Ask a chef what inspired him to become a professional cook, and he’ll often cite a mother or grandmother’s good cooking. But Wabeck said it wasn’t his parents’ cooking that inspired him.

“They adhered to the cook-the-hell-out-of-it style,” he said, making an exception for his father’s fried chicken. Wabeck’s father, a doctor of food technology specializing in poultry at the University of Maryland, produced it in the lab’s pressure fryercooker, and Wabeck said it was the best fried chicken he’s ever had.

But in Wabeck’s case, cooking was just a way of getting out of teenage trouble. “I was 18 and stupid,” he said, so “my parents and I decided I would head straight on out.” He left his home in Salisbury, on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, to earn his living and straighten up.

At first he didn’t get far — in distance or style. Doing unskilled jobs in seedy kitchens in Ocean City, Md., he saw people twice his age making next to nothing. And on top of that, he said, “There were all the bad influences that went with Ocean City.”

But to his surprise, he began to like the restaurant business. So he “wised up and went to the [Culinary Institute of America].” Despite his success, he regrets not having taken more time on the intern route. “I could be better at what I do if I had known you can work at Citronelle [Michel Richard’s award-winning Georgetown restaurant] for free. I didn’t know about the levels of dining out there, didn’t know you could spend $600 a person for lunch.”

Plus, doing 40 covers a day with 16 other students was a little out of touch with reality, he said. “It’s not what you’re going to have to face for the rest of your life,” such as at Firefly, which serves 150 a day.

In the real world, he had to adapt. After graduating, he went to work under Bill Phillips, sous chef at Red Sage. “I was very, very slow, and Bill got rid of that really quickly by giving me a kick [in the rear],” he said. Wabeck now honors Phillips as “the guy who gets most of the credit as to what little I’ve accomplished.” In fact, he’s accomplished a lot.

From Red Sage, Wabeck spent three-and-a-half years as sous chef to Ris Lacoste at 1789, followed by over a year at Asia Nora. Then Nora Pouillon installed him as chef de cuisine at Restaurant Nora in 1997. A year later, chef Matthew Lake, whom he had known at Red Sage, picked him to take over at New Heights.

While cooking professionally, he was bitten by the wine bug. After 18 months at New Heights, he was tempted away to the Golden State by the offer of executive chef at Brix in California’s Napa Valley. He didn’t stay long — he wasn’t happy out West. But before the call came from the Kimpton Group, luring him back to Washington to open the bar and lounge for Hotel Rouge and Topaz Hotel, he wanted to learn more about wine. He spent three months at Napa Valley’s Darioush Winery doing “grunt work”: putting his back to everything from harvesting grapes to cleaning barrels in order to gain more knowledge.

At Firefly, located within the Kimpton Group’s Hotel Madera, he is bringing together all the strands of cooking he learned over the years. When he incorporates techniques or flavors from other nations, he aims to isolate “whatever is important to whatever
cuisine, respecting how certain products are used in each culture.”

He lists the way Lacoste taught him about balance and how to make food taste good, and how Pouillon ingrained in him care for sourcing his ingredients. “It would be an insult to Nora if I didn’t,” he said. While it’s important to him that his customers know his food is of sound origins, he keeps the details off his menus. “Listing just to list it? Who cares? It’s just another way to put words on a menu. Less is more in the style of labeling menus.”

He thinks the United States has not produced “terribly adventurous eaters” until recently. “Now there’s pretty good eating round this country.” Bottom line, he believes all cooking, from Japanese to Mexican, always comes back to French cuisine and technique.

He lives near the restaurant, on 16th Street, where he often spends six or seven days a week at the stove. Does he mind? He shrugs. “Does it matter?” When he was down to a handicap of 9, tendonitis forced him to give up golf. “So the only other hobby I have is wine.”

Firefly (202-861-1310; http://www.fireflydc.com) is located at 1310 New Hampshire Ave. NW. Main courses cost $17 to $24.

This article by Julia Watson first appeared in the Northwest, Dupont, Foggy Bottom and Georgetown Current Newspapers. Photo courtesy of Firefly.

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