Flor de Luna
When Juan Acevedo and his mother and stepfather, Ana and Jorge Goicochea, partnered to open Flor de Luna, which debuted in November on Woodglen Drive in North Bethesda, they put Ana Osorio in charge of the kitchen. The 55-year-old Salvadoran, a Rockville resident, has a quarter of a century’s worth of professional experience learning and perfecting the Latin American cooking in which the eatery specializes. We checked in with her recently.
Have you always cooked?
I cooked all of my life in El Salvador. I learned how to make traditional Salvadoran food, like tamales and pupusas, from my mother. I took my first cooking class in El Salvador at 28. I learned how to make other foods—Mexican, Peruvian, Spanish—from working in restaurants.
What brought you to the United States?
I became a widow and I wanted to help my family. I wanted to give my three children an education and a better life. I visited this area and decided to stay here.
When did you start working in restaurants in this area?
In 2001. Two years at El Andariego in Ashton, [Maryland], and then eight years at El Nopalita Grill in Silver Spring. That was my first chef’s job. Then La Plaza in D.C. and La Fogata Grill in Silver Spring. That’s how I met Jorge [Goicochea]. It was his restaurant. [Peruvian-born Goicochea sold his stake in La Fogata to open Flor de Luna.]
What are your specialties on the Flor de Luna menu?
Lomo saltado [a Peruvian stir-fry of beef and peppers], tamales, chicharron [pork morsels] with yucca with a tomato sauce we make here. Camarones locos [grilled shrimp with bacon]. Tres leches [three milks] cake—mine is more spongelike than most so it soaks up the leches better. Also, picarones. They’re Peruvian doughnuts made with butternut squash and sweet potato. I serve them with a pineapple, apple and orange salsa with honey. The customers love them.
11417 Woodglen Drive, North Bethesda, 240-242-4066, www.flordelunamd.com
Tyler Stout, Macon Bistro & Larder
In November, 26-year-old Tyler Stout took over the chef’s job at Macon Bistro & Larder in Chevy Chase, D.C. (he lives across the street), where his short rib Bourguignonne and his pork chops served with black-eyed peas and collard greens now rub elbows. His bona fides? Education (he’s a 2008 graduate of L’Academie de Cuisine in Gaithersburg), experience (at Bethesda’s Chef Tony’s Fresh Seafood Restaurant, Newton’s Table and Barrel + Crow) and provenance (he spent his early childhood on his grandparents’ farm in Pembroke, North Carolina.) We caught up with Stout to find out more about his approach to food.
How did your Southern upbringing inform your cooking?
My mom had a big, huge family. They grew up poor, so everyone knew how to cook and it was fresh, right from the farm. My dad’s family had a huge garden. People around the DMV would call it a farm. So I always knew farm fresh.
What were some of the foods you grew up with?
Country-fried steak was my favorite thing my mother made. Also brown sugar ham and chicken pastry—poached chicken inside pastry with butter—I ate that with rice. We also ate a lot of mustardy, vinegary barbecue. I cooked with my mother, always helping out shelling beans, shucking corn, cleaning collard greens. I spent a lot of time with the produce.
How did you start cooking professionally?
All throughout high school I was cooking two to four days a week [at the Comus Inn in Dickerson, Maryland, where his parents had relocated]. I went to college to keep my parents at bay, but I knew that wasn’t for me. I went to West Virginia University for half a semester and realized I wanted to go to culinary school. [My parents] are very traditional, to say the least, and they thought that wasn’t the best route to go.
How did you wind up at Macon?
I was the sous-chef at Barrel + Crow [in Bethesda]. It was a very interesting period in my life. I was a year clean from drugs. I was addicted to opiates. I needed to get away from where I was living and who I surrounded myself with. I ate at Macon once and always had it in the back of my mind. I saw an ad for a job here, did a stage with [then-chef de cuisine] Jenna Pool and it worked out.
5520 Connecticut Ave. NW, Washington, D.C., 202-248-7807, www.maconbistro.com
Chefs Handry (left) and Piter Tjan offer a new chef’s choice dining experience at Sushiko six nights a week. Photos by Tyler Darden
Good Taste
At Sushiko in Chevy Chase, creative director and co-owner Daisuke Utagawa has devised a restaurant within a restaurant, having reconfigured the sushi counter to create space for up to eight diners to partake in 12- to 15-course tasting menus. He calls the concept Ko¯bo¯, meaning atelier or workshop in Japanese. Co-executive chefs (and brothers) Piter and Handry Tjan designed the vegan and non-vegan kappo-style (“cut and cooked” in front of the guests) menus as highly stylized culinary experiences made up of multiple-component dishes and sushi fashioned from high-end ingredients. The chefs’ intention is to take omakase (chef’s choice) sushi dining, which has become all the rage in D.C.-area Japanese restaurants, to a higher level.
Menus change seasonally, but recent ones included such items as house-made tofu with black seaweed “caviar”; smoked Hama oyster with red shiso foam and sea grape; A5 Wagyu (the highest quality of prized Japanese Kobe beef) with sea urchin and black truffles; fatty tuna belly (ototo aburi) with foie gras; smoked Arctic char with truffle sauce; fluke sushi with monkfish liver, gold leaf and yuzu (a Japanese citrus fruit) gelée; and candied chestnuts with sweet potato and black sesame seeds.
