Tom Green - Chef at the Kennedy Center
The Kennedy Center’s other production
There can't be many chefs who have to feed up to 900 people a night in two different locations — and get them all out of their seats by 8 p.m. In Washington, Tom Green, newly arrived as executive chef at the Kennedy Center, may well be the only one.
In the Roof Terrace Restaurant & Bar, he is creating fine dining, while the food at the KC Cafe is more casual. But in both cases, dinner is generally tied to performances. So while theatergoers may return for dessert after a show, the time to catch Green is dinner: Afterward, he tends to leave things in the hands of each restaurant’s own dedicated chef and go home to his wife and 2-year-old daughter in Reston, Va.
“My goal is to put her to bed, although it doesn’t always happen. Every day my wife says, ‘What time will you be home?’ I say, ‘I really can’t say.’ How many times do you think we have had this conversation?”
Plenty. He’s been in the restaurant business ever since he graduated in 1990 as a history and political science major from Longwood University in Farmville, Va. “As a college student, I went to the beach for the summer, as college students do. I interviewed at a restaurant for a position, as college students do, and on the application I wrote, ‘I like to cook.’ So they hired me as a cook and showed me where the pots were.”
It’s a dropped-in-the-deep-end way to learn. But in the loose sense, he did grow up in the food business. One grandmother taught home economics and nutrition, and one grandfather had a restaurant. “I’m not sure he was a very good businessman” is how he describes his grandfather’s endeavor.
Despite his background, scan the steps Green took, and it looks as though he went at a culinary career backward. Encouraged by his experience cooking in the Outer Banks and by what he labels his “passion” for food, he opened his own restaurant in Farmville immediately after graduating.
Restaurants have a habit of gobbling up their owners. His wife, whom he has been with for 18 years, was a hostess at their restaurant and waited tables. “She was making more money than I was!” he says.
So his next step was a move to the Fedora Cafe in Tysons Corner, followed by the Fern Street Bistro in Burke, Va. While cooking there, he finally went for formal culinary training, going to night school at L’Academie de Cuisine.
Following completion of the school’s professional course, he became restaurant chef at what was then the Sheraton Washington Hotel (now the Marriott Wardman Park) in Woodley Park and later, executive chef at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center. Most recently he worked at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History as executive chef.
He says he may go back to running his own place one day. Looking back on his time with his own restaurant, he says, “That life still is wonderful. But as we get older and have families, you make more compromises in terms of demands.”
Since he had recently run large-scale enterprises, the Kennedy Center is an ideal fit for him, says Green. You don’t have to be attending a performance to eat in either the Roof Terrace Restaurant or the KC Cafe. In fact, the Roof Terrace’s Sunday buffet brunch is one of the most popular in town. And the staggering view at night across the Potomac and over the city makes it a beguiling place to eat, show to follow or not.
Green assembled a totally new team about him when he took over the job in February. He says he is looking to give his Roof Terrace Restaurant clientele “a menu that is contemporary, that can compete with fine-dining restaurants on the street.” For those with tickets, he recognizes, “We have to be of excellent quality, but we also have to be quick.”