Tony Conte - Chef of The Oval Room

Oval Room chef brings lofty credentials

Glance around The Oval Room, which lies almost within napkin-flapping distance of the
White House, and you might wonder whether its newly appointed, out-of-towner chef knew just how much of a power-packed rendezvous spot the restaurant is. Tables are chockablock with politicians great and small, along with their followers, all of them lolling comfortably in the red-leather armchairs of the recently revamped room.

But then you remember that chef Antonio Conte is no stranger to a high-flying clientele. After all, he’s come to Washington after four years in New York City working as executive sous chef at the four-star Jean Georges on Central Park West. This spring, while he was still there, it was again awarded four stars by the New York Times.

Conte began at the Jean-Georges Vongerichten stronghold in the garde-manger — the cool pantry and refrigerated storage site where cold menu items are prepared — and worked his way up to the top. He also spent time as chef de partie — a line or station chef — at JoJo, Vongerichten’s more casual French restaurant on the Upper East Side.

It’s almost as hard to get employment with the multistarred French chef as it is to get a table at one of his 17 lauded restaurants, which dot the world from New York to Paris, London to Shanghai.

“I got the job by accident,” Conte explained. “My brother and I had gone to lunch in New York City with a friend of his, and she insisted we go there. And from the moment it started to the end of the meal, I knew I had to be there.”

Accident is also the word he uses to describe how he got hold of one of the treasures on his Washington menu — burrata. He arrived in the capital only in July, yet he has already managed to find a source for this remarkable Italian treasure. “Cheese” doesn’t cover it. It’s essentially crumbs of mozzarella suspended in a cloud of thick panna (cream), encased in a balloon of mozzarella. Conte is serving it this fall as an appetizer with what the menu calls “fig textures and lettuces.”

“We sourced it here,” Conte said, explaining that rather than flying the ingredient from Italy, he found a local maker. “It was one of those things that happen by accident. The purveyor heard we were here. And he came by.”

Looking for quality ingredients is key, he said. “The clients who get into conversations with thewaiters care about sourcing.”

Conte’s crab comes from Maine, his fish from both local and Hawaiian suppliers, and much of his produce from Pennsylvania farmers. He’s found a raiser of heritage pork that he said is some of the best he’s tasted. “I can’t describe it — it’s amazing.”

When burrata first went on the menu, “clients didn’t know what it was. We had to show them,” he said. But Conte finds no difference between his diners in New York and those in Washington. “They are just as sophisticated. People think New York is larger than it is. It’s just another city.”

Conte comes from New Haven, Conn. His Italian father immigrated to the United States from near Naples when he was 17. Ties with family back in Italy are still strong, though Conte said he doesn’t go back to visit nearly often enough.

Hoisting himself onto a bar stool in the window, he wants to make it clear before he’s even settled comfortably what led him into the restaurant business. Surveying the now-straw-colored Oval Room and its arresting contemporary art, he said, “I’m not one of those guys who was influenced by the cooking of his grandmother and mother. I was working in a restaurant going through high school and enjoyed it. I thought, keep going with it.”

So he enrolled in the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y. Back in Connecticut after graduating, he joined Sole e Luna Ristorante Toscano, an Italian restaurant in Westport. Following time as executive sous chef at theGreenwich Country Club, then the Belmont Country Club in Massachusetts, he became coowner and executive chef of Pesce in Branford, Conn., earning it several awards.

Though he doesn’t like trying to categorize what he’s trying to do, he calls his cooking “contemporary American.” Conte himself is “a pizza guy. I eat at 2Amys two times a week.”

He doesn’t go home to continue cooking. “When I get home at night, I go to sleep. We usually go out to eat. I have yet to cook since I have been here.” The reason is exhaustion as much as anything else. Restaurant days begin at 8:30 a.m. and end after 10 p.m. “When I first started cooking, I ate pizza every day,” he said.

Before moving to D.C., Conte and his wife and son had traveled down occasionally to Washington to visit family. So when they decided to leave New York, “it was first on the list to look at.”

“We had got really tired of New York,” he confessed. “We lasted
longer than anticipated.” He’s horrified, though, by Washington’s
traffic. “I would trade that in every day. It takes me one hour from
Bethesda. ... It’s the most frustrating.”

He shares with his 1-and-a-halfyear- old son, Gianluca, a fondness for a particular Pepperidge Farm snack. “He loves his Goldfish Crackers any time of day. I usually join him. Now he’s taken a liking to Nutrigrain bars. He won’t eat fruit, nothing sweet. But on
Sunday,” he revealed with pride, “he ate half a pack of bacon.”

The Oval Room (202-463-8700; http://www.ovalroom.com) is located at 800 Connecticut Ave. NW. Entrees cost $16 to $29.


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