Tim Elliott - Chef of Mie N Yu

A guide on Mie N Yu’s culinary road

Cooking for a 205-seat restaurant serving around 1,800 guests a week in several dining
rooms on two floors is demanding. When the menu ranges from the Mediterranean Sea to the South China Sea, pressure in the kitchen is even more intense. It seems only a chef who has come from both the creative and the management ends of the hospitality business could handle the challenge without a flap.

Tim Elliott, executive chef of the multi-themed Mie N Yu, is just right for the job. He spent years in high-level chef positiosns with Marriott Hotels before opening Mie N Yu in 2003. Last year, the Georgetown restaurant was picked by the public as Favorite Restaurant of the Year at the Restaurant Association Metropolitan Washington awards.

Elliott began in the industry in typical fashion, working in a small restaurant all through high school. “And I met two guys who were going to culinary school. I kind of knew they were out there,” he said of the schools. But he wasn’t sure what went on within their walls. This was in the ‘80s, when being a chef wasn’t yet the fashionable draw it is now.

So he looked into training courses and signed on to a two-year program at Baltimore International Culinary College, in the city where he grew up.

To pay for it, he went to work for Marriott Hotels. “I did school in the day and Marriott at
night. When your employers see you doing that, they take you seriously.” Marriott  ertainly did. When Elliott graduated in 1990, the company offered him a position as executive chef at the Marriott at Baltimore/Washington International Airport, managing the restaurant and banquets and creating menus for the JW Steakhouse.

They brought him to Washington in 1994 to do the same for the Marriott at Metro Center, where he stayed for three years. Next he shifted to the Inner Harbor Marriott, where he worked for 18 months as executive sous chef. In September 2000, he was back in the Washington area, serving as executive sous chef for a year at the Key Bridge Marriott in Arlington. Finally, his Marriott period ended, after nearly two-and-a-half years as executive chef at the Washingtonian Center Marriott in Gaithersburg, when he was enticed away, in February 2003, to open Mie N Yu.

“Students come out of the CIA [Culinary Institute of America] thinking they will be executive chefs,” he said. “It’s not true. You have to work your way from bottom. You need a lot of time, a lot of work.”

Mie N Yu has almost as many different components as the Marriott hotel chain does. There’s the Hong Kong Bar in red and black, the vaulted and mirrored Venetian Bar and Lounge, and the Tibetan Lounge through beaded curtains. Diners can sprawl on deep sofas and ottomans in the Turkish Tent or sit more formally in the swathed Moroccan Bazaar, Mie N Yu’s main dining room, or the Baroque Room. If you want Elliott to cook his special tasting menu just for you and your seven best friends, his Chef’s Table is in the oversized Bird Cage, suspended above the main dining room.

Small surprise, then, that the dramatic backdrops draw visiting celebrities. Plus there’s the deejay in the Hong Kong Bar and the added fillip three nights a week of a belly dancer. Recently, Elliott revealed, “Sean Penn came for a couple of drinks. The Nanny — Fran Drescher — was here. We get lots of football players, basketball players, lots of tourists.” But also, with its campus just up the street, Georgetown University students come to Mie N Yu, along with Georgetown locals who love the fantasy.

Elliott himself calls the experience — in which he takes contemporary American cuisine and twists it with ingredients from the Middle East, North Africa, the Mediterranean and Asia to produce what the restaurant terms “A Silk Road Celebration” — “mindstretching.”

“I have no background in Asian cuisine or French cuisine. I just take what I know of American cuisine and fuse it with flavors from the Silk Road. It gives me freedom to play and work with ingredients I have never worked with before.”

The 39-year-old learns about ingredients from talking to people, he said. “I use the Internet a lot.” And he goes to food shows in Chicago, Boston and Los Angeles, where he frequents the All Asia Food Expo. He admits to a tendency to favor the Asian side of his menu but says he is going to “try to lean more toward [the] Mediterranean and Moroccan side. Asian cuisine has just more interesting ingredients, and flavors I really like to work with.” He particularly loves its curries.

Next year, Elliott hopes to do research on the spot. “My general manager wants me to travel,” he said, noting he’s planning a monthlong trip to Southeast Asia. “But it’s hard to go by yourself. You have to go with someone who knows the area.” It would be a working trip, he said, so would not include his wife. They met through Mie N Yu, but she works at Kyma, Mie N Yu’s associate restaurant in Annapolis. He was out there recently at 4 a.m., helping the chef do the inventory. “There are parts of the job I really don’t like!” he said with a grin.

He’s always on the lookout for the freshest seafood for his clientele. He has plans to “hook up with another guy to bring in more local farmers’ produce.” Meat and fish are flown in “from all over. It’s a little more expensive, but this is the best piece of fish and the best produce on a  plate.”

At home near St. Charles in Southern Maryland, Elliott cooks from time to time for friends and neighbors. But what he and his wife really enjoy is going out once a month to “good old seafood restaurants” nearby.

Mie N Yu (202-333-6122; http://www.mienyu.com) is located at 3125 M St. NW. Entrees cost $18 to $42.

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