America’s Best New Restaurant is Afro-Caribbean | On The Line | Bon Appétit

Dogon is a restaurant redefining what it means to eat a fine dining meal. We serve a Afro-Caribbean cuisine that is also inspired by the diverse culture of Washington, D.C. This is a Kwame Nwachi restaurant, one of the best chefs in the country. As the CDC, I'm responsible for managing a staff of 40 plus. I also need to create dishes that push the cuisine forward. We opened this restaurant 10 months ago. In our first year, we're recognized as one of the best new restaurants in the country. Welcome to the Salamander Hotel. We are headed into Dogon. Amazing lobby. What's good, y'all? It's Chef Martel. I'm CDC here at Dogon in Washington, D.C. It's 11 a.m. I gotta go meet with the team. Follow me. Tonight, we're gonna do about 200, 210 covers, which is an average for the restaurant. Open kitchen concept. You can see everything the cooks are doing. You can hear me yelling from the back of the dining room. I have to run downstairs and meet with the team so we get this day started off well. So we're in the production kitchen right now. This is where all our bases, all our sauces get started. Welcome, Chef Taji. He's the old man of the kitchen. Second oldest person here. Yeah, you first. I have to get changed and get ready to meet with the team. I'll see you in a sec. Let's hit that morning lineup and see what they got going on. Yo, yo, yo, yo. Two, three, four. Ringing it, ringing it today. Tonight, we are at, any guesses, Chef Eric got it. We got 220. Here we go. Oh, yeah. All right. All right. All right. Biggest projects today be a little mise we're doing for the ribs. Each member of the team has a prep list, their name on it, time in and time out. And it offers the opportunity for us to spread projects out. So we do like a break or something. We put our hands in day one. I'm busy. All right. Every day. Day one. Good. We'll work on it. We'll work. We'll work. Are you doing right, kids? Heard that. I love that. Swinging hot. Corner. So today, I'll be testing corn agousi stew. It's a riff on a classic Nigerian stew traditionally served with dried fish, crayfish. But today, I want to do a vegan or vegetarian version. Haven't decided, honestly. So Chef Kwame, the executive chef of the restaurant, is here today. And he'll give it the nod. He'll give a little feedback. And, you know, he'll like it. He'll like it. It'll be great. I wanted to use corn because corn is a little sweeter. And it offers me a good starch content, which will allow me to thicken the stew, which is normally thickened with some dried fish or crayfish or things like that. I have a special love in my heart for canned corn. It worked well. But fresh corn is so much better. It's so much sweeter. It's so great. You can even eat this raw. When it comes to making a dish for Dogon, the first thing I want to think about is, will it be effective on the line? I may think it's beautiful. I may think it tastes great. But if we can't execute it at a high level or it's not something that everyone can do, then let's try something different, right? Here, I have a little bit of comfy ginger oil. It's spicy, has savory notes, but it also lends very well to corn. Doing different flavored oils and doing different flavored vinaigrettes offer me the opportunity to add flavor without adding a completely different ingredient. So I'm scoring the king oyster mushroom to allow it to cook evenly and to allow the seasoning to penetrate all the way through. Pepper soup is also another West African traditional stew, but I'm using it today as just a seasoning. There's some allspice in there, a lot of calabash nutmeg as well, which is a cross between nutmeg and pepper is the best way to describe it. Oyster mushrooms give me umami, a little funk, also offer me opportunity for replacement for my dried fish. This dish speaks to the different pillars of Chef Kwame's culture. Caribbean. He's also from New York, but he has a strong tie to Nigeria. When I think about Armenian dishes and changing menu, I don't want to do it all at the same time. I don't want everything to kind of drop at the same time. It's a lot for me, but it's also a lot for the cooks to sort of retain all that information. I try to change one or two dishes every three months. I was in the Navy prior to starting to cook. I met this woman who was a chef prior to her enlisting, and she made me a French omelet. It was folded perfectly. It had amazing courage on the inside. It sparked my interest immediately. From that point, it was learn, learn, learn, learn, learn, and I fell into being a cook. Probably one of the best decisions I've ever made. It offered me structure. It offered me opportunity. Oh, don't burn it. So a French top is basically a circular stove. It allows us to utilize as much surface area as we can. There's a coiled stove in here that has flames shooting from everywhere, so there's hot spots, right? You work it similar to a grill, where the center is the hottest, and as you move out, it radiates heat. A lot more powerful and a lot more expensive than a regular stove. So now I am eating up my stew. It is a combination of corn, toasted agusi seed, a little bit of cumin in here. I have ginger garlic paste, onions. I cooked all that down with a corn stock that was made from roasting the cobs. R&D is probably the best part of the job. Being a CDC, you don't get the opportunity to cook as much. It's more about managing. It's more about mentoring, but at the end of the day, I'm still a chef. If you don't cook as much, you won't have the same sort of balance. You won't have the same feel for the kitchen. When you say agusi, you're going to see two things. There's a little spinach and maybe a little bit of pumpkin leaf. So I have Chinese water spinach. I also have some baby mustard, so it's peppery, and I'm splitting with ginger oil, which offers me spice. So now I'm just bringing all the dish together. A little bit of tamarind, which adds sweetness, which adds acidity. So every time I have to R&D a dish for chef, I feel a lot of things, right? I feel nervous. His name is on the wall, so I have a responsibility to uphold the integrity of not only the flavors, but also I wanted to be cool. I wanted to be cool, you know? You want to hear your chef say, oh, this is great. Anything less than that is a failure. I'm trying to craft a bite for the guests. Here is the comfy garlic. We comfy the garlic in garlic oil. Bread and butter jalapenos, that's a nod to my Philly roots. Toasted palm oil here. So palm oil, you're traditionally going to have in a lot of West African stews as the base. It has savory notes, and it will give me a beautiful look, right? And we finish off with a little nasturtium, accents the mustard, accents the pepper. Ready to rock, chef. All right. We talked about it a couple of weeks ago, so I'm excited to try it. So we're serving this with fufu or no? I think we should. It's really good. You get the agussi coming through, but it's not like in your face. Spicy. It's a little spicy. When I'm tasting agussi stew or agussi soup, I'm definitely looking for that deep umami flavor. I'm looking to see some palm oil in it, and then some sort of green element. This is a great vegetable dish just on its own, just tighten it up, make it smaller. Like everything is a bite, and then before you know it, the dish is gone. Definitely want to incorporate some baby corn, because it'll be in corn season. But yeah, this is beautiful. It's really good. So Dogon is a celebration of the cultures that make DC special. It tells its own story. The Dogon tribe from Mali, and a descendant of that being Benjamin Banneker, who created the borders of DC. We try to tell the story of all the cultures within these quadrants. So we'll run this dish about two or three more times before we actually make it on the menu. I think the bare bones of the dish is right there. Now it's time to work on that terrine for the Ben's bowl. Here we go. So here is the confit lamb. It's marinated with a little bit of curry and green seasoning, and then confit and lamb fat, some garlic, some thyme, got some bay leaf in there, a little ginger. Next to me is the lamb terrine king. This is a two-man job. I'm going to hold the bowl, and then I'm going to let the professionals profession. Lamb fat still allows us to impart flavor, and it allows us to reutilize a byproduct that we would normally just throw away. We decide to drop it into the mixing bowl, and we mix it so that the fat and the meat is distributed evenly. Pulling up, pulling up. Now we step back, and I let the youth do all the hard work. A huge part of the job of a CDC is less about the cooking and more about the training and the mentoring, and also overseeing. So I'm only going to pulse it a few times just to get it shredded out. Thank you, chef. This is a dish inspired by the late husband of Virginia Alley. She is the founder and owner of Ben's Chili Bowl. It's like a DC staple. He's Trinidadian, so this dish starts off with a Trinidadian base of green seasoning and curry. Boom. We also want to press the meat into a nice tight terrine so that it doesn't break apart inside of the fryer. The fat creates a glue. Here is the terrine that we prepped yesterday. Come on now. That's thank you. Thank you. It's nice and firm, so now I'm just scoring so that when I cut it, I know every single piece will be the same exact size. The striations of confit meat maintain this color because we cured it, and we also confit it so it doesn't go brown, doesn't go dark. You have some curry notes that you see highlighted through here, but all these white and off-colored pieces, that's all fat. Fat is definitely flavoring here, so when we go to fry this, the fat's just going to melt inside of it, and when you take that bite, it'll be unctuous. It'll be everything you really want inside of a fried piece of lamb, honestly. I wanted to be a restaurant that people want to treat like a destination and match the aesthetic of Chef Kwame and the food and the legacy that he's creating, but also match the aesthetic of the hotel. The hotel is luxury. The hotel is five-star. We want to be luxury. We want to be five-star. Shoot, if there's a six-star, I'll take it. I'm going to let the team finish portioning out the rest of this for service, but we are getting really close to dinner time, and I got to start tasting some of these dishes. Today, we're going to try the whole cake dish, and that is a two-part dish. There is the buttered crab with a little hot spice, and we also have the plantain whole cakes, which is one of those last-minute hit-and-misses, trying to figure it out. Chef Kato, we affectionately call Cake King, King Cakey, Young Cakey, Maestro of Cakes. There's a few names that revolve around cakes. Essentially, this recipe was developed through pancakes. Pancakes is something that I make for my daughters. Pancakes are also how I got my wife as well. She was a member of the private club. She would come in and have breakfast every single day, and one day, I leaned against the wall and reached over and asked, are these the best pancakes you've ever had in your life? And from there, she said, will you marry me? Whole story, start to finish. So the last thing you want is a flat whole cake, and because we add plantain, we have to add a little extra baking soda in order to get that rise that we're looking for. Traditionally, in the South, the cakes were cooked on the actual garden chill, the whole. So it would be dropped right into the fire, and they would drop the batter right on top, and that would be used as a side for beans, hoppin' john, anything like that. So following the tradition, we just wanted a pancake-like vessel for the crab dish. This is Maryland blue crab with garlic, butter, Chef Kwame's mother's house spice recipe. We found that blue crab, for the price point as well as the flavor and the nod to the area, was a much better product. A little more seasoning, so we'll do lemon salt in the crab, and then aji verde, I think is good where it is. Plantain cakes, I think are great. Wait, yes, I would like Twizzlers, and then my favorite. Thank you, thank you. That's Michael right here, GM, aka my work husband. Now we're about to transition into the two-chef meeting that we have right up front. If I had to do all this by myself, this restaurant would have dropped a while ago. And with that being said, barbecue chicken set was a success. I have a few notes. Bitterness in the barbecue spice, and that just came from the pink peppercorns. So we'll drop pink peppercorns in the barbecue spice. How about, like, people coming in on time, calls and things like that? Same exact. I feel like everybody has been coming in on time. Yeah. We're looking good all over time. Obviously, we got one call out with Jamila pastry, but me and Susana pretty much knocked out all the bread. Let's have her cure some holes in the rum cakes, and then soak them. Yesterday, when Jeff was trying it, he noticed that it wasn't as moist. So we'll poke holes in it, we'll drop it, see if that helps out. Poke and soak. Yeah, poke and soak. HR. So besides that, it's service as usual. Keep everybody set. We'll start rolling and start pushing them now. So by the time we get to, like, that 415, and everybody isn't, like, running with their head cut off and whatnot. So something in between gentle push and spartakick to get them to service. Thank you, Jeff. Thank you, Jeff. Thank you, Jeff. Thank you, Jeff. It's time to get moving. I have to set up my pass. At any point in time, this board will be full from top to bottom. And it's very difficult to read all these tickets and also relate information to all the cooks. So the Sharpies and the markers allow me to do just that. Blue, that's for chicken. I can now look at the board and go five chicken all day because I have five blue tags on the actual tickets. Hey, yo, chef. Hey, let's get those tasters ready, y'all. We taste everything last minute before service, and we go right into service knowing everything is seasoned right, everything is cooked correctly, and we have exactly what we need for this 220-person service for the night. Peri-peri is probably one of the most important dishes because it is a staple of Chef Kwame's. It blends Caribbean flavor, West African flavors to make, like, this very beautiful, fresh salad. Bebo, slide over, my boy. So this is our jollof rice, another West African staple. You can see each individual grain in the rice, but the rice also isn't dry. It looks moist. For this one, we use the pilaf method. We add in all the rest of our ingredients, so the red stew, the habanero, the shrimp stock, and then we throw it in the oven. So we're basically roasting the rice, and what that does is it allows all the preparation to go into the rice so that we know when we take it out, it's that perfect texture of rice. You get beautiful grains. Every time I taste it, it's a pleasure for me because it's that good. So no, no, chef. This is great. I usually taste in a certain order, so I'll taste something that is real fatty. Right behind that, I'll taste something that's, like, really acidic to kind of clear my palate off to go into whatever's next. That's really good. That's really good. Everything tastes great. A few adjustments here and there, but that's just always, right? If anybody needs anything, let's get in front of it now so that by the time service starts at five, we call that first ticket, we already locked in and ready to go. By the time we get into that nine o'clock hour, we're going to get hit. No parties tonight, so all we have to do is concentrate on putting out the best dishes every single time, every single day. All right, let's have a good f***ing service. So I'm expediting tonight, and I need to get myself ready to rock. Loved you guys. Thank you so much for coming, but you kind of got to go unless you're willing to hop on the line with the rest of the cooks, which I don't think that's happening. This is Teresa, and this is my slicer named her Tracy. I think it makes it personal. My favorite knife, which I don't use often, is named after my wife. It's Talisa. It also was one of the knives that has been with me through every single stage of my career. Just like, honestly, just like Talisa.