Trent Conry - Chef of Ardeo
How driving off a cliff inspired a chef
Trent Conry slides behind the bar at Bardeo and fills a large-stemmed water glass to thebrim with coffee. The executive chef since March at Cleveland Park’s Ardeo/Bardeo, a cheek-by-jowl restaurant and next-door bar, is disparaging about mugs. Their surface area is too wide, he says, cooling down the coffee too fast. It’s an important detail for a man who reckons he gets through at least two jugs of java daily, one of them before he’s even set off with his two kids on the school run.
Previously executive chef for nine years at downtown fine-dining sister restaurant 701, Conry has challenging declarations on most of the subjects that cross his lips while he fixes you with a steady, blue-eyed gaze. For instance, he says he was born in Texas so far south that had it been 15 miles farther, he would have been born a dishwasher.
He’s a self-described Air Force brat who was brought up with his three siblings in the Lone Star state and on postings to Germany and Switzerland. When the family was back home on U.S. soil, his father, who spent all his working days in the air, would take to the roads, packing the kids in the back of the car, and just drive. “We drove forever! We drove from New Hampshire to Florida twice in a year! We drove from Texas to New Hampshire!”
Conry grins and describes his father with a derogatory epithet that is only slightly less deprecating than the words he uses to depict his brother. “You can quote me on that,” he says. But my editor wouldn’t print it. “If he [Conry’s brother] was drowning, I would probably be in the water to give him a little more to tread in,” Conry declares, with that defiant stare that makes you suspect he just loves to shock.
His grandparents lived in North Carolina. Frequent family visits there left a strong culinary impression. “They weren’t rich. In North Carolina, whenever you are pretty much middle-class, you grow all your own vegetables.” With his fingers he checks off the crops in his grandfather’s plot, then the meals. “We had breakfast, lunch, dinner and supper,” and breakfast alone involved pancakes, waffles, grits, sausages and scrambled eggs. “You name it, it was there. That was at 7 o’clock.” The other meals followed with equal amounts of food, apart from the slightly lighter dinner.
Yet Conry is reed thin. “You ever see a chef that can’t eat?” He spreads his arms to present himself. However, he does love spicy food and anything full of flavor. “Not big on boring old foods.” Conry’s wife is Turkish, and his brother-in-law’s wife is Pakistani. “The stuff they make is great food.”
As to how he and his wife met, he says there are two versions. “I’m supposed to say we were introduced by two friends. But I picked her up in a bar. I looked a mess. I had a broken nose and a dislocated shoulder. I asked her to dance. She didn’t say anything, and I said, ‘This is too difficult a question for you?’” She is, he says, a really good cook, but because of the way he would rip her technique apart, she doesn’t much like doing it. He admits he’s surprised she doesn’t sometimes pick up the pan and throw it at him.
Conry began in the culinary business as a teenager — but not because he was interested in cooking. He took a job washing dishes at the innovative Blue Strawberry in Portsmouth, N.H., because he wanted money for golf clubs. The chef quickly moved him to the prep line, where he began to learn classic French cooking techniques and show the promise that has since led him through, among others, Tout Va Bien in New York; Dominique’s, the nowclosed classic French restaurant in the Watergate; and Occidental Restaurant on Pennsylvania Avenue.
A meeting with a tree led him to seek out jobs that led to these kitchens. While Conry was based in Snowshoe, Va., cooking at a restaurant, his car rolled off a cliff and ended upside down in its branches.
“It was ... an eye-opening experience,” remembers Conry. Undergoing extensive therapy in Washington gave him time to think. “I realized I wasn’t as good as I thought. I believed I knew it all.” From that moment, he began to consider which chefs he wanted to work with, instead of picking restaurants because of their status, or places where “you never moved up until the guy beside you died.”
Along with Ardeo, Conry oversees the other restaurants owned by Ashok Bajaj — 701, The Oval Room, The Bombay Club and Rasika. But he’s pleased to be at Ardeo. “People come to eat here because it’s like going downtown without going downtown.”
When he first took over, some of Ardeo’s regulars were “really, really upset,” at finding a new menu. But he defends his changes, explaining that people who come into restaurants all the time say, “OK, I’ve eaten everything on this.” Three or four of the old items will stay, however. “And if you call me the day before and say, ‘Can you make sure you have this available?’” then Conry will prepare what the customer requests. “They’re the people that started the restaurant. It’s no problem.”
He takes a long draught from his coffee glass, then amends this declaration, “Until you start getting 20, 30 calls a day...”
He’s his own worst enemy, he says. “One of my worst points is I get bored very quick. I change the menu when I’m bored with it. I’m planning on changing it every month.” Diners in search of the regular: You have been warned.
Ardeo (202-244-5750; http://www.ardeorestaurant.com) is located at 3311 Connecticut Ave. NW.
This article by Julia Watson first appeared in the Northwest, Dupont, Foggy Bottom and Georgetown Current Newspapers. Photo courtesy of Trent Conry.