Well Done

A Conversation with Chef Robert Wiedmaier

A few weeks ago, I wrote about a brotherhood of chefs who came up together in Washington, D.C. in the early ‘80s. These men helped shape and inspire each other in ways none of them likely realized at the time, and are only now, after decades of being too busy and too scattered, having a proper reunion.

That essay came from my husband’s world, which I have always admired from a comfortable distance. I never expected that to change.

Robert Wiedmaier – chef, restaurateur, and one of the ‘brothers’ – agreed to talk to me, and the better part of that morning gave me another perspective of what that life was, what it actually took to succeed, and what the other side of that looks like now.

I began the interview by dialing the wrong number, because of course I would. That’s pretty much how my days go.

But once I got him on the line, we talked for a long time.

Robert is 66 and lives on an island now. He gets up at six-something in the morning, drives to his favorite coffee place, circles the island, and if the weather's right, gets on his boat and goes fishing.

He also works out for an hour. He told me with no small amount of satisfaction that he’s in the best shape of his life.

This is the man who was on the cover of magazines. The leader of Marcel's in Washington for 25 years, the executive chef at the Watergate, then the Four Seasons.

He also cooked in a little French restaurant alongside my husband and a handful of others back in the early '80s, preparing food he says without hesitation would earn a Michelin star today.

I believe him.

But before the magazines and the TV appearances and the restaurants that made him a name, people knew when he walked in the door, there was a D.C. kitchen, a saddle of veal, and about thirty seconds to prove he belonged in there.

The restaurant was called Le Chardon d'Or. Robert walked into its kitchen in 1983, already different than most American cooks at his age – he’d trained in Michelin-starred restaurants in Belgium.

So when he says what they did there would earn a Michelin star today, he’s speaking from firsthand experience.

The chef at the time was a man named Bill McNamee, who handed Robert a saddle of veal and said: butcher this.

He did so, quickly and cleanly. McNamee said, “You’re hired.”

That's how it worked back then: there was no multi-step interview process or trial period; you either had it or you didn't, and they could tell almost immediately.

Jim Papovich became the chef not long after, and by Robert's account, what happened next was something nearly impossible to replicate today.

"Back then, in the D.C. metropolitan area, you had maybe five French restaurants that were doing anything serious," Robert told me. "The Maison Blanc. The Sans Souci. Jean-Louis at the Watergate. Au Bouchon at the Four Seasons."

He paused. "It was a very small league."

For a city that is, nominally, the center of American power, Washington in the early '80s was a culinary backwater. You didn’t have 'inspired' neighborhood bistros or farm-to-table casual.

It was either Mickey D’s or Le Chardon d’Or, with no middle ground to coast on.

"We weren't playing around," Robert said. "Everything had to be exact."

What they made in that kitchen was ahead of its time: foie gras flan, squab, lobster and asparagus, sauces made from scratch in ways that Robert says most professional kitchens have long since stopped attempting.

One of Robert’s primary jobs (a job he was still doing decades later at Marcel’s) was sourcing, looking for the best mushrooms, the best veal, the best duck, the best truffles, the best anything he could find.

He forged relationships with local farmers who were growing exceptionally good herbs and ingredients you’d never find at the Giant or the Safeway.

They wouldn’t call that farm-to-table for at least another twenty years; for them, it was just…cooking.

And nobody took pictures. That’s one of the things that seemed to bother Robert in a philosophical rather than a sentimental way. If there were documentation, he says, the conversation would be over.

You’d look at it, and you’d know what kind of kitchen that was.

Instead, you have to take his word for it. Having dined at a few of his establishments, I do.

There is a certain irony in all of this that Robert didn’t dwell on, but as a (burgeoning) creator, I can’t help but examine myself.

The very culture they helped create now exists in Instagram grids, TikTok feeds, and YouTube tutorials.

What was once ahead of its time is now everywhere.

“Today, if you’re a young cook, there’s no excuse for not knowing anything,” Robert told me. “You can go right to YouTube, type in torchon foie gras, and you’ll have chefs like me and a million other top chefs showing you exactly how to make it.”

Back then, foie gras was exotic, like kiwis. So were shitake mushrooms, now a grocery store staple, but back then, something carefully sourced and requiring relationships, legwork, and knowledge that only came from working it out yourself.

The knowledge wasn’t on the internet; it was in kitchens. In people.

Robert alluded to what’s been lost as the particular sharpness that comes from having to figure things out for yourself and knowing that knowledge was rare.

When I mentioned that everything food-related, start to finish, was now all over TikTok and Instagram, he just said: "Yep".

To me, that single syllable held a mix of emotions. Pride, but also perhaps the mixed emotions that come from seeing what was once so genuinely rare now at everyone's fingertips.

I believe most of us tend to fundamentally misunderstand that the kitchen is just as much a psychological operation as a culinary one.

Robert explained this to me through two back-to-back stories, but started with this image that I think perfectly introduces everything else:

Every night, before service, he would gather his staff. And it didn’t matter what had happened the night before – a perfect run in a full house, nailing every dish to perfection. None of that counted anymore.  

He’d look at his team, say alright, it’s showtime, and snap his apron.

That snap told everyone: yesterday is gone, and this is what we have, so let’s go.

“I don’t care what we did yesterday,” he said. “All that matters is what we’re going to do tonight. You’re only as good as your last dish.”

Every. Single. Night.

Bad news, he said, is something people love to deliver. I don’t disagree with that, because if you have a terrible experience somewhere, you're gonna lead that conversation with a fervent “Oh, don’t go there.”

There's a weird pleasure in being the one to tell someone something they didn't know, especially bad news. But one bad night, an overcooked fish, and now you’re the bad news.

It doesn’t matter how perfectly everything else went. "All that matters," he told his cooks, "is the time you do it wrong."

Then Robert talked about wine. At a truly great restaurant, he said, you should order the least expensive bottle on the list.

The sommelier tasted fifty wines to find that one; it's there because it belongs there. But most people would just as soon overspend than feel cheap in front of everyone at the table.

So Robert trained his staff: if someone orders the inexpensive bottle, present it as if it were a thousand dollars. You tell them it's one of the chef's personal favorites and make them feel like they made the smartest choice in the room, because they did.

And because the experience is the thing, the food is almost secondary to how it makes you feel.

He knew that, and he built a career on that.

I asked him what kept him in that life, given how demanding it actually is.

He said when he hired people, he made sure they understood what they were walking into. “Look, this isn’t for everybody,” he’d tell them.

“You work late nights, you’re back in the kitchen early in the morning. You’re going to work every Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Eve. It’s a life that you’ve got to really, really love.”

And his advice to young cooks is counterintuitive but completely consistent with how he perceives excellence: don’t start at the bottom of the ladder. Start at the top and get your foot in the door at the best restaurant that will have you.

You’re going to get your ass kicked every single day. If you can take that and still want to run with it, you will. If you can’t…don’t bother.

So what kept him going?

"I used to get a high off every night," he said. "When we did a perfect service, and people loved the food. It's amazing. We like to please people. We like people to eat our food and go, wow."

I understood that completely because I married someone wired exactly the same way. My husband’s love language is food.

Not just cooking, but the entire process from selecting and preparing ingredients to watching someone take a bite and swoon.

It’s how he communicates love without words; it’s how he’s always known, without question, what he was put here to do.

That’s what Robert was describing, and that's why the brotherhood succeeded, then and now. They had talent, but feeding people was never just a transaction.

It was an act of love executed at the highest possible level, night after night, for decades.

You know someone who would love this. Send it to them.

Robert wholeheartedly believes that a palate is something you're born with, like perfect pitch or the ability to swing a golf club a certain way. You can refine and develop it, but the substance is either there or it’s not.

"If you don't have a palate," he said, "forget it. You're never going to be a great chef."

I told him I found out I had perfect pitch the same way a cook discovers their palate: someone with experience noticed.

He lit up at that. “That’s exactly it.”

What you can teach is everything else, but you start with the palate, or not at all. To that end, I told him my own cooking has gotten significantly better since I married Jim, but I would never be Jim.

He didn't argue, but stated that the tragedy isn't people who try and fail, but those who never discover or pursue what they were made for, because nobody encouraged them.

Robert admitted he was a horrible student. Hated school, barely got out of high school, he says. He didn’t pursue cooking with some sort of backup plan – food was it.

“A lot of people had families like I did: ‘there’s no money in that, don’t waste your time with something you’re obviously good at, stick to safety.’” He recalled.

“It takes a lot of balls to say no to that, if you don’t have a parent who says ‘hey, go for it, be the best at whatever it is. I don't care if it's bricklaying. Be the best one out there, and people will fly you around the world to work on their mansions."

The Depression-era parents who raised his generation primarily understood scarcity versus survival. But that’s changing, he said.

I personally believe that’s due in part to the pandemic's aftereffects. We all had a chance to see, pretty damn abruptly, that nothing is truly ‘safe’ and life is shorter than we take for granted.

Robert sees that change. That freedom to be exactly what you are.

Robert has known Jim for 43 years. They don't talk constantly, but when they do, he said, it's like no time has passed.

Their friendship started in a kitchen but grew in a little Irish pub whose name Robert can't remember. After 12-15-hour days, still wired at 11:30 at night, they'd all unwind before the long drive home.

In the kitchen, they were professionals. At the pub, they were just guys who understood each other in that ‘battle-hardened’, exhausted camaraderie that they still feel to this day.

"You're kind of out of the same mold," he said. "I can just say something to Jim, and he would know exactly what I mean because he's been there."

Tom Kee, another chef brother, is turning 72. Robert is 66. Jim is not far behind. All of them, men who chose that gloriously unsafe life path together and came out with four decades of friendship.

Some of us will never have that, and they know exactly how rare that is.

You can hear it every time they talk about each other.

And now, for Robert, the ‘after’ is just as interesting as the ‘during’.

"I never in my wildest dreams thought that being a cook would turn into what it did," he told me. The magazine covers and television shows. Walking into a restaurant and being recognized.

“It was fun,” he said. “But now, I just want to lay low."

He lived what he called the rock star life for too long. It takes a toll, he added.   

But he's still cooking and taking care of people, but in his own way now. That high he used to get from a perfect service, he still gets, but on a much different scale.

Four decades of making people happy, but for people like Robert, that was never really a job – it’s who he is.

You can’t retire from that.

So, the long-awaited reunion is coming soon. Robert says there will be cooking, wine, fishing, and lots of stories.

Jim will remind Robert of something, and Robert will remind Jim of something else. Tom will say oh my god, remember that cook, and everyone will laugh at some long-remembered inside joke.

I asked Robert to please send pictures. He invited me to come see for myself, same as my husband had. I told them I assumed nobody wants wives at a guy's trip.

They disagreed, and I’ve been convinced. So, fair warning to all involved, I'm bringing my recorder for the stories (and already wondering how many will actually make it into print).

I can’t wait to meet Polly, because if anyone knows what it’s like to love one of these beautifully crazy chefs, it’s the woman who married one.

We’ll have plenty to talk about.

Heather Papovich is the voice behind Unfinished Business. She's seen some things. She'll tell you about them.