Cooking With Fire At The Dabney

(upbeat music)

The way that we source for our menu,

instead of writing a menu and then asking farmers for those

ingredients, we ask farmers what they have,

and then we write the menu.

We really want people to get excited about the way we cook,

more so than the dishes we cook.

The whole idea behind it is,

you know everybody sees the big flames and assumes

that's what we're cooking off of.

We usually don't cook anything over there.

We hang things over it to slowly fry out,

mainly what we do is just get the embers out of it.

We want all the wood to cook down into these

wonderful little embers, and then we'll throw

a basket on top.

I always joke that this is our temperature knob.

So like, this is low heat right now,

this is high heat.

All the cooks you'll see all have one tucked

in the back of their apron during service.

It is hard, it is difficult,

and you have to want to do it,

so we definitely had a few cooks come through that

you know, it's not for them.

You take a cook who's grown up his whole life

working with an oven and a range,

and say this is what you have to work with,

and it's a scary proposition.

So it takes a little bit of time,

and it takes someone that has a lot of passion,

a lot of interest in it to really do it.

I look in books that are 150 years old to get ideas,

to get inspiration.

Books like this and other really old

Virginia, Maryland kind of cookbooks,

you can think that you're the coolest chef in the world

and you've got all these great ideas,

no one's ever done this dish before and all those things,

and then you read that book and it'll be like

this dish that sounds like it's off of a modern day

three Michelin star menu, but someone made it

for supper, 140 years ago, with no tools,

no nothing, and a hearth like that one,

and to me that's amazing.

I want you to be enamored with the way that we

season, or the freshness of our products,

or how many herbs were on a dish,

or how the dish kind of pops,

so that no matter what it is,

you can always find something that

fits within that same zone, to satisfy you

when you come back here.

Those are the two major pieces.

As local as we can be without compromising flavor,

and as supportive as we can be of

our history and heritage here.

For me it's something I believe in and I think

it's a better, healthier way of life.