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On The Line
Season 1
Episode 69

America’s Best New Restaurant is Afro-Caribbean

Bon Appétit spends a day on the line with Chef Martel Stone, Chef de Cuisine at Dōgon, an acclaimed Afro-Caribbean fine dining restaurant in Washington, DC. Open for just 10 months, Dōgon is the second restaurant from James Beard Award-winning Chef Kwame Onwuachi and has quickly gained national recognition as one of America’s best new restaurants.

Read more about Dōgon and the rest of 2025's best new restaurants here: https://weightloss-tricks.today/story/best-new-restaurants-2025%3C/em%3E%3C/a%3E%3C/div%3E%3Cp data-testid="AboutDate" class="BaseWrap-sc-gzmcOU BaseText-eqOrNE AboutDate-inSEXx deqABF bXTGwe kvmUSw">Released on 09/16/2025

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 DC.

This is a Kwame Onwuachi restaurant,

one of the best chefs in the country.

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 were recognized as one of the best new restaurants

in the country.

[bright music]

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 DC.

It's 11:00 AM, I gotta go meet with the team.

[upbeat music]

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.

Ah, welcome, Chef Taji, he's the old man of the kitchen.

[Taji] This guy, keep saying that.

Second oldest person here.

Yeah, you first.

[laughs] 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, raining, raining today.

Tonight we are at, any guesses?

Any guesses? Any guesses?

Chef Eric got it, we got 220.

Oh yeah. Yes.

All right, all right, all right.

Biggest projects today will 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 timeout,

and it offers the opportunity for us to spread projects out.

So we do like a break or something?

Do we put our hands in?

Do we day one?

I'm busy. All right.

Every day, day one. Day one, day one.

We'll work on it, we'll work on it.

We'll work on it, we'll work on it.

[lively music]

What you doing rice kits?

Heard that, I love that.

Swinging hot.

Ooh, so today, I'll be testing corn egusi 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 dry fish

or crayfish or things like that.

I have a special love in my heart for canned corn.

It works 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,

and then let's try something different, right?

Here I have a little bit of confit 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 also from New York,

but he has a strong tie to Nigeria.

When I think about R&Ding dishes and change of menu,

I don't wanna 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 curds 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.

Ooh, don't burn it.

[pan hissing]

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 hotspots, 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 heating up my stew.

It is a combination of corn, toasted egusi seed,

a little bit of cumin in here,

I have ginger, garlic paste, onions.

I cooked all that down

with a cornstalk 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 see egusi,

you're gonna 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 want it to be cool.

I want it to be cool, you know?

You wanna 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 confit garlic.

We confit 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 gonna have

in a lot of West African stews as the base,

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.

But we talked about it a couple weeks ago,

so I'm excited to try it.

Yeah. So we're serving this

with fufu or no? Yeah.

I think we should.

No, it's really good.

You get the egusi coming through,

but it's not like in your face.

It's a little spicy.

When I'm tasting egusi stew or egusi 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. Yep.

Make it smaller, like everything is a bite.

And then, before you know it,

the dish is gone. Yeah.

Definitely wanna incorporate some baby corn

'cause it'll be in corn season.

But, yeah, this is beautiful.

It's really good. Yeah, Chef.

So Dogon is a celebration of the cultures

that make DC special.

It tells its own story of 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.

But 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.

So here is the confit lamb.

It is marinated with a little bit of curry

and green seasoning,

and then confited in 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 gonna hold the bowl.

Okay. And then,

I'm gonna 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 only gonna 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 Ali.

She is the founder and owner of Ben's Chili Bowl,

it's like a DC staple.

He was Trinidadian,

so this dish starts off with a Trinidadian base

of green seasoning and curry.

We also wanna can 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.

[people applauding]

Thank you, thank you.

It's nice and firm,

so now I am just scoring, so that when I cut it,

I know every single piece will be the same exact size.

The striations of confited meat

maintained this color because we cured it

and we also confited 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 flavor in here.

So when we go to fry this,

the fat's just gonna melt inside of it,

and when you take that bite, it'll be unctuous,

so it'll be everything you really want

inside of a fried piece of lamb, honestly.

I want it 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's luxury,

the hotel's five star,

we wanna be luxury, we wanna be five stars.

Shoot, if there's a sixth star, I'll take it.

I'm gonna let the team finish

portioning out the rest of this for service.

But we are getting really close to dinner time

and I gotta start tasting some of these dishes.

Today we're gonna try the hoe cake dish

and that is a two part dish.

There is the butter crab with a little hoe spice,

and we also have the plantain hoe cakes,

which is one of those sort of last minute hit and misses

trying to figure it out.

So Chef Cato,

who we affectionately call Cake King,

King Cakey, Young Cakey,

Maestro at Cakes,

there's a few names that are revolving around cakes.

Essentially this recipe was developed through pancakes.

So pancakes is something that I make for my daughters,

pancakes are also how I got my wife as well.

So 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 hoe 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 tool, the hoe,

so it'll 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 they're my favorite,

thank you, thank you.

That's Michael right here,

Jim AKA my work husband.

Now we're about to transition

into the sous chef meeting that we have right up front.

If I had to do all this by myself,

this restaurant would've 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,

called and things like that?

Yeah, I feel like everybody have been coming in on time.

We're looking good on the overtime.

Obviously we got one called out with Jamil on pastry,

but me and Susanna pretty much knocked out all the bread.

Let's have her pierce some holes in the rum cakes

and then soak 'em.

Yesterday, when Chef 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, heard.

Yeah, poke and. [laughs]

Yeah, so besides that,

service as usual, keep everybody set.

We'll start rolling and start pushing them now.

So by the time we get to like that 4:15

and everybody isn't like running

with their head cut off and whatnot,

so something in between gentle push

and Sparta kick to get them to service.

Thank you, Chef, thank you, Chef, thank you, Chef,

thank you, Chef. Ow.

Forgot the second part!

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 relay the 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 tacks on the actual tickets.

Hey, oh Chef. Yes, Chef.

Hey, let's get those tasters ready, y'all?

[Cook] Yes, Chef.

We taste everything last minute before service

and we go right into service

knowing that everything is seasoned right,

everything is cooked correctly

and we have exactly what we need

for this 220 person service for tonight.

Piri piri's 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.

Hey Bevo. Yes, Chef.

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 we throw it in the oven,

so we're basically roasting the rice.

And what that does is it allows all the evaporation

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 'cause it's that good.

So no notes, 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.

Mm, 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 start at five,

when 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 gonna 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 [beep] service, y'all.

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 gotta go

unless you are willing to hop on the line

with the rest of the cooks,

which I don't think that's happening.

This is Theresa

and this is my slicer, I named her Tracy.

I think it makes it personal.

My favorite knife,

which I don't use often, is named after my wife.

It is Telisa.

It also was one of the knives that has been with me

through every single stage of my career,

like, honestly, just like Telisa.

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