A Cut Above
Chef de Cuisine Paul Stearman
When Robert Wiedmaier is elsewhere, his partnering executive chef is the one running the kitchen in Zagat’s pick of Washington’s most celebrated restaurant for Best Food. That’s the top!
Not very often do you get to find out about the personal life of a chef, but Paul Stearman was worthy of digging deeper. Being mechanically gifted and enjoying the intricacies of fixing things, Paul tackles anything that needs repairing in the restaurant, from HVAC equipment to lighting to light carpentry – that gene comes directly from his grandfather, the celebrated aeronautical engineer who created the Stearman Biplane, and his father, on the team behind the SR71 Blackbird; a number of his family’s works are in the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum.
Back to cooking—Paul Stearman’s mother is his inspiration and still makes the best lasagna, and his father was inclined to cook uncomplicated French meals from a cookbook in his spare time. Although Paul was always in the kitchen ready to help out, he got his professional start when he lucked into a job in high school at a local Greek-Italian family restaurant in a strip mall in Fairfax, Virginia – but only after submitting applications to the adjacent grocery and pet stores, too. He started out washing dishes and before long was working all the stations in the tiny establishment. And then he picked up another part-time job at a local bakery on weekends…and then he worked as a line cook in a local steakhouse -- all before graduating from high school.
That he is hard-working and highly motivated was already clear. But he had another great stroke of luck while still in school: Chef Jeffrey Buben’s daughter was in the same high school, and her father had organized the Careers for Culinary Arts Program there. Paul learned knife cuts; caught the attention of the acclaimed chef-owner of Vidalia and Bistro Bis; and went on to win a scholarship to L’Academie de Cuisine. Training for the scholarship competition, he worked prep at Vidalia for six months, learning not just skills but a hard-core brand of professionalism from his notoriously tough mentor. While in culinary school, he continued working at Vidalia. True to form, he also held a 500-house paper route, from 1-3am when he got off his dinner shift.
After Vidalia, Paul worked a number of jobs for colleagues he’d met there: as baker and pastry chef at Vincenzo [where he learned the art of pasta making from an Italian,] then as assistant pastry chef at The Hay Adams Hotel. His next step was a few months as a line cook at Wiedmaier’s newly opened Marcel’s. It was not intended to be long-term and so Paul went to work as sous chef at the Watergate, then Kinkead’s, then at West Twentyfour, James Carville and Mary Matalin’s restaurant. Then one day Robert Wiedmaier walked in to the West Twentyfour bar and asked him, “What are you doing here?” Paul returned to Marcel’s, working his way up from sous chef to chef de cuisine. After eleven years, the master chef [known for his personal and professional generosity] gave his protégé partnership in his exalted enterprise. In addition, Paul has also managed to convince his boss that he is the best pastry chef for Marcel’s, although being reasonable and only human, he has reluctantly given up the task of baking all the bread.
He credits both Buben and Wiedmaier with his professional development, pointing out that they have a lot in common, and are instilled with the same professional mentality [and the same propensity to express any displeasure in the kitchen at very high volume,] being trainees themselves of the legendary chef Doug McNeill in Washington, D.C. They are both scrupulously mindful of waste, and now so is Paul. It’s a matter of cost control, naturally, but also of the utmost extraction of flavor, and an honest reverence for his ingredients. Onion heels and thyme stems go into the stock pot. He demonstrates to every new chef in his kitchen why throwing away a quart-carton of heavy cream after emptying it into the pot is decidedly not ok: retrieving it from the trash, he asks them to place it near a hot burner, which causes the residual cream to run to the bottom of the carton. He has them measure it out: one full ounce still remains in the carton they have just tossed away. He has them do the math. Marcel’s goes through more heavy cream than we care to know, and that waste would amount to over $750 in the course of a year. It’s Paul’s job to care about such waste, but it’s also his passion.
He doesn’t like to yell. As he explains, he used to get ‘beaten down’ every day, and now it’s his turn, but yelling is just not his style. “Ok, I did throw a steak at someone on the line the other night – just a small overdone filet, that’s all,” he admits with a defiant grin. But his m.o. is to train, and train, and train. If there’s no time to explain on the line, he explains later.
His passion for cooking is based in the act of creation, in producing something that is going to nourish someone, as well as making them happy. In explaining the improbable honor of ‘being’ in someone else’s stomach, his intense love of what he does shines clear: “You manipulate, you touch, you create this food, it’s a very sensual process. We think of getting our hands messy cooking – but conversely, the oils from our own hands affect and contribute to the food, in a way that is small, but symbolic.” He goes on to explain that he cooks – and trains his team to cook – using all the senses. That they have to learn to feel the inherent qualities of each of their ingredients, feel the way to handle, stir, or slice them – because no recipe is going to tell them how. Listening to ‘the sizzle’ tells him how the rendering of a duck breast is going; another sizzle in an adjacent pan alerts him to the progress of a steak. Standing at the pass between the kitchen and the expediting station, he has his finger on the pulse of everything going on, and can sense [with no sizzle at all] exactly when a boudin should be pulled from the oven. He calls it an ‘internal timer.’
Several years ago, Paul was sponsored by the Jean Louis Palladin Foundation to spend two weeks in Bordeaux studying food and wine with Jean Pierre Xiradakis of La Tupina, and Christophe Chateau, director of the Five Côtes de Bordeaux. He’d love to go back to eat and drink and cook some more, but it’s a matter of finding the time – which must be shared with his numerous charity events, tennis, rock climbing, sailing, eating sushi, and riding his BMW K1200R motorcycle, very fast.