It’s 8:30 on a Saturday night, and Grapeseed, the contemporary American bistro and wine bar on Bethesda’s Cordell Avenue, is in a state of controlled chaos.
A young busser in basic black appears at our table with ice water. A server in plum—it matches the décor—takes our order. The carnivores in our party are having the pan-roasted filet mignon and the root beer-braised pork shank, starting with the grilled Caesar salad and the slow-roasted pork belly. The vegetarian orders the fricassee of wild mushrooms and the quinoa-stuffed acorn squash. The omnivores order the mussels, gnocchi and pan-seared scallops. We opt for wine by the glass, following the suggestions that accompany each listing. Crusty French bread appears and is gone in seconds.
Two and a half hours later, we leave, sated. The food was quirky and imaginative; the wine pairings intriguing. For us, it was an excellent culinary adventure.
For them, well, we were table 82, a five-top on a busy night—not too much trouble, no irksome requests for substitutions or sauces on the side, decent tip. We were what happens not only after a long day (or three) of preparation—of peeling and chopping and braising and baking and sautéing—but also after years of business planning, development and marketing, of design and construction, of hiring and firing, of skill-honing and training and, of course, of cooking (and tasting and adjusting). 
Spend a very long day with Jeff Heineman and the Grapeseed staff of 30 and you learn a few things about the restaurant business: The customer is always right, however wrong he or she may really be. Don’t sit down, even if you’re exhausted—because you’ll never get back up. There is one universal law, Murphy’s: Anything that can go wrong probably will.
For the chef-owner of an upscale, if studiedly casual, establishment, with its focus on matching fine food with fine wines—the list runs to more than 80 wines by the glass and 300 by the bottle—Heineman is refreshingly unconventional. At 6 feet 4 inches tall and 300-something pounds, he looks like the college football and rugby player he was at The College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Va., which is where he started cooking, for his off-campus roommates. (They’d pool their money; he’d buy the ingredients.)
From there, it was cooking school at L’Academie de Cuisine, then located in Bethesda, a year in France and stints at Kinkead’s and Cashion’s Eat Place in Washington, D.C. In 1996, he and two partners started the Rhodeside Grill in Arlington, Va. In 1999, he sold his share and, with his father’s help, renovated the Ricky’s Rice Bowl space on Cordell before opening for business in April 2000.
Ten years later, Grapeseed has doubled in size and capacity. Reviews in local media range from positive to rave. Heineman refers to himself as the 800-pound gorilla terrorizing his staff, but the workplace atmosphere is notably egalitarian. Dishwashers who work hard earn a place on the cooking line; bussers become servers. Heineman takes his cooks on periodic field trips to hole-in-the-wall taquerías and hot dog joints on New York’s Lower East Side. He has a thing for Korean chicken wings. At age 44, he suffers from gout, a consequence of his willingness, when it comes to food, to try anything.
Asked about his vision for Grapeseed, his answer is modest: He’d like people "to be pleasantly surprised that the food is a little better than they thought it was going to be, and they’ll keep coming back."
A lot more goes into making that happen than you might think.
It’s 10:30 a.m. on a Saturday, weeks after our meal, when Jason Ramos, Grapeseed’s chef de cuisine, unlocks the front door. (Although the real start was the night before, when Adam Jakins, the 28-year-old sous-chef, finalized the next day’s order of seafood, meat, poultry and produce.) Second only to Heineman in the kitchen hierarchy, Ramos, 37, is responsible for the day-to-day operation of the kitchen.
The evening’s bread (several large French loaves from the Panorama Baking Co. in Alexandria) has been left by the front door. Jakins arrives a few minutes later, followed by someone to change the hood filter. The seafood delivery is brought to the back door, from Congressional Seafood in Jessup. Monkfish, rockfish, calamari, mussels and oysters packed in ice. "When it doesn’t smell like anything," Jakins says (and this batch doesn’t, just pleasantly briny), "that’s fresh."
Heineman talks to Congressional daily, usually on his way into work from his home in Frederick County. They chat about what’s in season, what’s coming up, what’s going out. It’s complicated, keeping track of fish. Seasons end abruptly; there are quotas to consider.
The kitchen lights have been on only a few minutes, and already there are sizzling sounds from the stoves. Seemingly out of nowhere, Ramos, whom everyone calls J-Bob, has produced the piles of roughly chopped vegetables that make up the mirepoix, a mix of onions, celery and carrots that is a staple of French cuisine and used liberally in Grapeseed’s stocks, soups and stews. 
Ramos is preparing pork shanks and oxtail for braising, which is standard operating procedure on a Saturday morning. A rich, oniony, garlicky scent rises. On the back of the stove, a tall, 30-quart pot of chicken stock cools after an overnight simmer. It will be gone within a day and a half. A pan of veal bones, left to roast overnight, is set aside. The bones will be used to make stock. The veal stock and oxtail are for oxtail mushroom ragout, an accompaniment to the filet mignon, an entrée that has been on the menu since Grapeseed first opened. It takes a minimum of three days to make—one to roast the veal bones, one to make the stock from the bones, one to braise the oxtails in the veal stock, plus time to reduce the resulting sauce. Which is why it makes the cooks crazy when patrons send back their filets because they forgot they wanted the sauce on the side or decided they didn’t want the sauce at all.
Mornings are to be savored, Ramos says, as he stirs a pot of grits for a spoon bread to accompany the rockfish entrée (pan-seared with braised greens and lemon-thyme cream). It’s quiet, and he gets a lot of basic cooking done. Which is important because after that, "things happen very quickly."
Next on the morning’s list are that evening’s desserts. Grapeseed has no pastry chef, so Jakins makes a roulade, a sponge cake to be filled with a passion fruit curd. Meanwhile, Ramos starts on the devil’s-food cake in the brightly lit space that doubles as the pastry kitchen in the morning and the "cold station," where salads are prepared, during dining hours. A peek over his shoulder reveals tidy mounds of ingredients. "I forget how many cups of sugar," he says, and laughs.
Raising their voices to be heard over the sounds of their work, the buzz of the electric mixer, the swish of a wire whisk on a stainless steel bowl, the overhead fans, the chefs explain the primary law governing restaurant kitchens.
"If you prep it, it won’t get ordered. If you don’t prep it, you’ll get, like, eight orders," Ramos says. "It’s all because of this guy Murphy."
"Murphy lives," Jakins agrees. "Last night at 8, I started running out of roulade. I busted my [butt] in the middle of a busy Friday night to make another one, and I sold one more for the rest of the night. That’s just Murphy."
"But if you hadn’t made it…," Ramos says.
"Oh, if I hadn’t made it, I’d have had 10 orders in five minutes."
The sponge cake is spread thin on an enormous baking sheet. "Eight minutes," Jakins says. Ramos presses a button on his watch. The battery on the professional kitchen timer ran out a while ago, Jakins says, "so J-Bob’s been timing everything with his watch ever since."
Ramos, who has an economics degree from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, was working for Merrill Lynch when he decided, 15 years ago, to go to cooking school. "Why?" he asks. "The great unanswered question. I couldn’t solve the problems of the world." As the chief cook under Heineman, he’s also the timekeeper, the organizer and the worrier. Right now, he’s worried about the produce, which hasn’t arrived.
At noon, Esteban Ramos arrives. Ramos, a Honduran immigrant, is in charge of the back of the kitchen. He’s not related to Jason Ramos, but he is the father of Elias, one of the servers, who started as a dishwasher. He is also the father-in-law of one of the two Honduran line cooks, Guillermo Bueso and Guillermo Ramos. Known as "Memo 1" and "Memo 2," they also started as dishwashers.
It’s impossible not to marvel at the melting pot that is the Grapeseed staff, a cross section of contemporary America. The radio in the back kitchen is tuned to a Spanish language station. When the two Memos arrive later in the afternoon, they bring a dance CD for everyone’s listening pleasure.
It’s nearly 1 p.m. when the produce finally arrives. Boxes of red onions, spring onions, fresh oregano, red grapes, green grapes, horseradish roots, 50-pound sacks of baking potatoes and red potatoes—plus 15 dozen eggs. One of Esteban Ramos’ many jobs is to organize the produce in the walk-in by the "first in, first out" rule, so that everything is used in the order in which it has been received, ensuring maximum freshness.
Jason Ramos is finishing his spoon bread (he’d been waiting for the eggs) when Heineman emerges. He has been in the restaurant office, where he spends the first part of most days "figuring out how to be a businessperson."
He starts to work at the cold station, making "something with cucumber, shrimp and preserved lemon." Daily cooking duties are delegated to the team of cooks. ("The captain isn’t the one driving the ship," he says.) But Heineman does, on occasion, produce a special chef’s "tasting menu," a prix fixe array of interesting things to eat, usually on request. This evening, he’s producing a tasting menu for two parties of four. As he works, he challenges the staff to come up with the names of athletes from the 1984 Summer Olympics.
