Peter Schaffrath - Chef of the Hay-Adams Lafayette Room

At the Hay-Adams, a holiday tradition 

While you settle into the unwrapping of presents on Christmas Day, surrounded by family old and young, consider Peter Schaffrath. The executive chef of the Hay-Adams will be hard at work in the hotel’s kitchen, drumming up festive treats for the Lafayette Room, like pheasant with red cabbage and cranberries and a sauce so reduced it slides unctuously over the tongue like velvet.

Schaffrath hasn’t spent Christmas Day at home with his family for the five years he’s been running the kitchens at the historic hotel. Still, you don’t need to feel too bad for him. He’s German by birth, and in that country the tradition is to celebrate on Christmas Eve — which is what he will be doing this year, as he does every other.

He will begin by going to church to listen to one of his adult daughters help ring the bells. After the service, he and his wife, a French teacher at a local school, will open presents with their children and two grandchildren. Then the family will eat a carp cooked in a court bouillon served with butter sauce. Following that will be a stollen, a breadlike German cake with a marzipan center and bulging with citrus peel, dried fruits and almonds, flavored with cinnamon and cardamom.

Maybe there’ll be choux puffs with whipped cream and different kinds of chocolate cookies. “Everybody gets a little tray or plate of cookies and cracked nuts,” says Schaffrath. “People these days are too lazy to crack their own.”

Schaffrath always wanted to cook. Born in Aachen, Germany, he and his brother were shipped over to an uncle’s restaurant in Switzerland for vacations from the age of 8. While his brother played soccer outside, Schaffrath was in the kitchen eating whatever he was tossed, but also becoming fascinated by the whole cooking process.

After high school, he joined the catering college in town, then worked for three-and-a-half years at two of Aachen’s best restaurants, one of them his first introduction to a hotel kitchen.

Then began a series of career stops across Europe. He went first to Zurich, to a small restaurant that made, among other local specialties, what he says was the best cheese fondue he’s had in his life. Swiss cooking was new to him. But he liked it enough to move on to another Swiss restaurant, in a hotel on Lake Geneva. Its chef had worked at the Hôtel de Vendôme in Paris, so Schaffrath, now in the French-speaking part of Switzerland, learned not only the French language but also French culinary techniques.

He took these two new skills with him to his next job, his first at a major hotel chain, the InterContinental in Geneva. “I was in my early 20s and I wanted to travel, and I wanted to work for a major hotel company because they offer the opportunity to move within the group.”

While he was there, the InterContinental picked him to help with a celebration in Esfahan, Iran, of the 2,500th anniversary of continuous Persian monarchy. “I’ve never seen so much golden caviar as that! And it’s such a rare species — I’ve never seen it again!”

Then he decided he should learn English. So he went through the InterContinental group to London. There he met his French wife, who was doing an apprenticeship while studying at a hotel school in Paris. When it was over, he went with her to Paris and worked at the InterContinental’s restaurant Le Soufflé. “So many soufflés!”

Married by now, Schaffrath moved to La Closerie des Lilas, a Paris institution that put Montmartre on the map, drawing artists and writers like Zola, Cézanne, Picasso and Hemingway. He spent the next five years there, improving his French. Eventually his wife left the hotel world to have children, and Schaffrath decided to return to InterContinental.

The company sent the family back to London, to the Park Lane InterContinental, where over the course of five years he was promoted to executive sous chef. He won the prestigious Mouton Cadet Menu Competition and 1,500 pounds, which became a down payment on a house.

One evening, a diner from Dallas asked him if he’d be interested in working in the United States. “It had always been my dream,” Schaffrath says. His wife was less enthusiastic, so they agreed to stay only one year. That was more than 20 years ago. “Now she doesn’t regret it,” says Schaffrath. He loved Dallas. “It had a great chef community which I miss a little here.”

When a manager from London came to work at the Willard InterContinental in Washington, he begged Schaffrath to leave Dallas to help him. “It was the early ‘90s, and there was a pretty bad recession in Texas. I was ready to move on,” he says. He spent the next 11 years at the Willard.

He joined the Hay-Adams following its renovation five years ago and immediately sat down to select a direction to take the kitchen in. Clients “are very much business people. They want a home away from home.”

He describes his menu as American with a European influence and an emphasis on local products, “which I really like to promote.”

The Hay-Adams (202-638-6600; http://www.hayadams.com) is located at 16th and H streets NW. Main courses cost $30 to $36.

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