Peggy Thompson - Chef of DISH
New start brings rewards and love
With just the lightest touch of pressure, we discover that Peggy Thompson’s story is not just a culinary, but also a romantic, fairy tale.
The recently appointed executive chef of DISH, located at The River Inn, comes to the job from, as she says, “the other side of the business.” For years, Thompson was a meeting planner. Among her responsibilities was going out with her boss to find good restaurants for meeting venues. On Fridays at the office where she worked, they had an informal cooking contest between departments, which she loved.
“One day, I was sitting at my desk and I was thinking how bored I was. I thought, ‘Am I going to spend the rest of my life sitting in front of a computer?’”
After this revelatory moment, she saved up to leave and go to L’Academie de Cuisine’s professional culinary school in Gaithersburg. “I really had to save up. Because for me, I was starting over. I only earned $6.50 an hour on the school externship,” Thompson said.
In school, they were assigned — working in groups of three or four — to produce lunch in two hours, with 10 minutes to put it together for serving. It was, she says, “a little stressful to keep going at it.”
And the school “really recommended that you don’t work a job” before completing at least six months’ training. “But I can’t stand not working.”
So after only four months at the school, Thompson arranged for an internship on her own, at the Henley Park Hotel under the tutelage of the executive chef at the time, Richard Thompson. She stayed three years, way past her graduation in 1997 from school.
Her printed résumé comes detailed under the name Margaret Newbold. Yet at DISH she’s known as Peggy Thompson. Is there, by any chance, a link to her former mentor, Richard Thompson? Her fine golden hair falls forward as she dips her head quickly and
her pale porcelain skin turns a light shade of pink. That’s her husband.
“He started out as a mentor. We worked together two years before we started dating,” she says. Then they both moved to International Country Club in Fairfax, Va., where she was the banqueting chef and ran the club’s Gourmet Restaurant as chef de partie.
When Richard Thompson went on to the Morrison-Clark Inn restaurant in Washington, she transferred too, as chef de cuisine.
Then her husband got a job at a country club on Turks and Caicos Islands. He is a certified scuba diver, so for him it was the perfect job. But not for her. “I am actually more of a city person,” she says. So she, meanwhile, became chef de cuisine at the Henley Park Hotel and later banquet and general sous chef for the Historic Georgetown Club.
For a year and a half, she loved flying out to Turks and Caicos — but, she says, only to visit. “I could probably do it short-term,” she says of living there. Still, after a while she found herself saying to her husband, “Hurry up and get a job and come back to the U.S.”
But even now that they’re in the same city, they don’t see much of each other. “He’s very much a morning person. He wakes at 3. I’m more a late-night person. I get home, he’s in bed.”
She’s delighted that her first position as executive chef is at DISH. “It’s perfect because it’s not overwhelming. It’s a 49-seat dining room, with nice food, not over the top.”
A number of chefs have passed through the place in fairly quick succession over recent years. She has revamped the menu to match its new, more-casual décor, which includes a long, high-refectory table parallel to the bar, set among others of conventional height for two, four and more. “It’s a neighborhood, friendly place. You don’t have to dress up to come down.”
There’s a new extended bar menu with choices that run from a soup of the day to miniburgers, fries under a coat of melted cheddar and bacon, crispy calamari, salads and different takes on the BLT. Louisiana gumbo shows up on the lunch and dinner menu, alongside salads and seafood. Chicken breast at lunch with mashed potatoes and pan jus expands at dinner into half the bird. And there are pan-seared fish and pastas in different formulations on both menus.
Thompson is in the kitchen six days a week. How does she relax on her one day off? “I usually try to sleep a little bit. I approach the day like it’s a full weekend. The first part of the day is when I do the housework. The second part is for something fun.”
Before she heads for work, she tries to exercise, “just for peace of mind. It makes me feel better.” It doesn’t always happen, though. “There are days I set the alarm and I say, ‘No, I have to sleep.’” She has contact with a personal trainer by Webcam, so she doesn’t have to fit in her exercises with a gym schedule. “I can do it at my house.”
She and her husband take turns to cook, and they find they talk about going out to eat around Washington more often than they manage to do it. “We live in Sterling [in Virginia]. It’s hard to get out and come back to the city to eat,” she says.
Thompson loves all kinds of ethnic foods. “Asian food, south Indian food — I love all spicy food. If I could cook everything spicy, I would probably try to!”
When she was at the Henley Park Hotel, her husband taught her “a little of pastry things. And I would do a lot of ices.” One day, she says, she would like to train in
pastry so she could get certified for the full complement of cooking skills. But she already does a mean take on molten chocolate cake served with ice cream and berries. Hers is a kind of chocolate bread pudding with devil’s cake folded into a custard, then cooked in a ring mold with a chocolate ganache center that oozes out when it’s cut into. It is, she says, “kinda good.”
DISH (202-338-8707; http://www.theriverinn.com) is located at 924 25th St. NW. Main courses cost $17 to $32.