The Chef
Noah Museles
Senior, Sidwell Friends School
On an average weeknight, Bethesda’s Noah Museles gets home around 6:30 or 7 p.m., then throws together a “quick dinner” for the family. That might mean roasting a chicken, sautéing some squash or spinach, and whipping up a batch of double-chocolate chip or peanut butter cookies for dessert.
Nothing unusual for an ambitious home cook—except that this particular home cook is a 17-year-old senior at Sidwell Friends School in Washington, D.C., who has been preparing most of his family’s meals and catering dinner parties since sixth grade.
Last year, Noah’s culinary talents were displayed on a grand scale when he appeared on the Food Network cooking show Chopped. The process started in late 2011, when a family friend suggested that Noah apply to compete on an all-teen episode. Less than 12 hours after he filed his application, a casting agent got in touch with him.
The contest was filmed last April. Noah incorporated “mystery ingredients” such as gummy bacon, frozen lima beans and movie theater popcorn into an appetizer of salmon fillets over a lima-bean purée, a chicken dish with Brussels sprouts and fried onion strings, and a deconstructed ice-cream sundae for dessert. He finished second among the four teens participating.
“I had no idea I would have to put in so much effort,” Noah says, “but it was a fun thing to be a part of.”
Noah grew up helping his mother, Elise, a nutritionist, in the kitchen, and he was such a quick study in a cooking class for kids at L’Academie de Cuisine in Bethesda that his instructor, Robyn Alexander, started sneaking him into advanced classes with students twice his age.
“Noah just zoomed through the classes,” Alexander says.
Noah’s culinary chops are even more impressive when you consider the rest of his résumé: He’s a competitive equestrian who spends a couple hours a day riding at Centurion Farm in Poolesville; he’s a National Merit Scholarship semifinalist; and for the past few years he has spent most summer days and one afternoon a week the rest of the year in a lab at Georgetown University’s Lombardi Cancer Center, researching zebra fish in an effort to develop a model for brain cancer research.
Noah hopes to continue studying life sciences in college with an eye toward combining that passion with finance and entrepreneurship. No matter what the future holds job-wise, though, he knows he’ll always be experimenting in the kitchen.
“Cooking and baking are definitely what I’m most passionate about,” Noah says. “It’s just part of who I am.”
