Well Done: A Conversation with Chef Robert Wiedmaier

Before Food Became Content

A few weeks ago, I wrote about a brotherhood of chefs who came up together in Washington, D.C. in the early ‘80s.

They worked ridiculous hours, pushed each other, pissed each other off, learned from each other, and, without really knowing it at the time, helped inspire what each of them would become.

Forty-some years later, after careers and restaurants and families and scattering all over the map, they're finally getting around to having a proper reunion.

That story came from my husband’s world, which I have always admired from a comfortable distance.

Preferably from a dining table.

Then Robert Wiedmaier, chef, restaurateur, and one of the original brothers, agreed to talk to me.

I began the interview by dialing the wrong number, because of course I would. That’s pretty much how my days go.

Once I actually got him on the phone, we talked for the better part of the morning.

And what began as a conversation about the old days turned into something much deeper: what it takes to become exceptional, and what happens after you get there.

Robert is 66 and lives on an island now.

He gets up around six, drives to his favorite coffee place, circles the island, and if the weather's right, gets on his boat and goes fishing.

He also works out for an hour and told me, with no small amount of satisfaction, that he’s in the best shape of his life. Not bad for someone who spent decades almost entirely inside restaurants.

Robert was on the cover of magazines. He ran Marcel's in Washington for 25 years. He was executive chef at the Watergate, then the Four Seasons.

And before all of that, he cooked in a little French restaurant alongside my husband and a handful of other young chefs back in the early '80s, making food Robert says, without hesitation, would earn a Michelin star today.

I believe him.

But before the television appearances and the restaurants that made his name, there was a kitchen, a saddle of veal, and about thirty seconds to prove he knew his stuff.

The restaurant was called Le Chardon d'Or.

Robert walked into its kitchen in 1983 already different than most American cooks at his age. He’d trained in Michelin-starred restaurants in Belgium.

The chef at the time, Bill McNamee, handed him a saddle of veal and said: butcher this.

He did so, quickly and cleanly.

McNamee looked at him. “You’re hired.”

That was the interview.

That's how it worked.

Not four rounds of interviews with a personality assessment and asking where you could see yourself in five years.

You either knew what you were doing, or you didn't, and the kitchen crew could figure it out pretty damn fast.

Jim Papovich became the chef not long after, and by Robert's account, what happened next would be almost impossible to reproduce today.

"Back then, in the D.C. metropolitan area, you had maybe five French restaurants that were doing anything serious," Robert told me. "The Maison Blanc. The Sans Souci. Jean-Louis at the Watergate. Au Bouchon at the Four Seasons."

He paused.

"It was a very small league."

For a city that was supposedly the center of American power, Washington in the early '80s wasn't exactly Paris when it came to food.

You didn't have twelve chef-driven neighborhood restaurants serving 'elevated' or 'deconstructed' anything.

It was basically Mickey D’s or haute cuisine.

"We weren't playing around," Robert said. "Everything had to be exact."

They made foie gras flan, squab, lobster and asparagus, and sauces made from scratch using techniques a lot of commercial kitchens don't even bother with today.

And they obsessed over ingredients.

One of Robert’s primary jobs was sourcing, something he was still doing decades later at Marcel's: finding the best mushrooms, veal, duck, truffles, the best anything he could get his hands on.

He built relationships with local farmers growing extraordinary herbs and produce you’d never find at Giant or Safeway.

Twenty years later, someone stamped farm-to-table on a menu and made it a movement.

To them, it was just cooking. And almost none of it was photographed.

That bothered Robert because, if it had been, he said, you could just look at it and know what kind of kitchen that was.

Instead, you have to take his word for it.

Having eaten at several of his establishments, I do.

There is a certain irony in all of this; I'm a writer trying to create something on the same internet that has made nearly everything they had to hunt down, earn, or learn from someone else accessible in about five seconds.

Art's funny that way.

Yesterday's revolution eventually becomes something a Gen Alpha explains badly with too much vocal fry on TikTok.

“Today, if you’re a young cook, there’s no excuse for not knowing anything,” Robert told me. “You can go right to YouTube, type in torchon foie gras, and you’ll have chefs like me and a million other top chefs showing you exactly how to make it.”

Back then, foie gras was exotic, like kiwis.

Shiitake mushrooms, now sitting right there beside portobellos at any grocery store, required sourcing, relationships, and a lot of legwork.

The knowledge wasn’t online; it was in kitchens. In people.

Robert alluded to a certain sharpness that came from having to figure things out for yourself, especially when the knowledge you sought was rare.

I mentioned that now you can watch almost every step of pro cooking on TikTok and Instagram.

He just said, "Yep." Frankly, there wasn't much else to add.

Most people think restaurants are primarily about food.

I'm here to tell you they're not; at least, not entirely.

A serious kitchen is as much a psychological operation as a culinary one, and Robert explained that through a couple of stories.

Every night, before service, he'd gather his staff. And it didn’t matter what had happened the night before; maybe they'd packed the place and nailed every dish, and everyone went home feeling like gods.

Welp, that was yesterday, and nobody cares now.

Robert would stand in front of the team, say Alright, it’s showtime, and snap his apron.

That snap meant one thing: yesterday is gone.

“I don’t care what we did yesterday,” he said. “All that matters is what we’re going to do tonight. You’re only as good as your last dish.”

Every single night.

People remember failure. Robert even pointed out that people love to deliver bad news, which is depressingly accurate.

Have a crap dinner somewhere, and now you're Paul Revere on Yelp shouting "Oh, don't go there!"

One overcooked fish becomes someone's story of your restaurant for the next five years.

"All that matters," he told his cooks, "is the time you do it wrong."

Which sounds brutal.

Also explains a lot.

I don't drink, but I'll probably remember this every time someone at my table orders wine for the rest of my life.

At a truly great restaurant, Robert said, order the least expensive bottle on the list.

The sommelier tasted fifty wines to choose that one; it's there because it belongs there.

But most people are terrified of looking cheap, or not knowing what they're doing, so they'll spend another hundred dollars or so.

Robert trained his staff for that. If someone ordered the inexpensive bottle, they were to present it like it cost a thousand dollars.

Tell them it's one of the chef's personal favorites and make them feel like they made the smartest choice in the room.

Because they did. That's hospitality, making them feel good about being there, not squeezing an extra fifty bucks out of them.

The experience is the thing; Robert understood that, and he built a career on it.

I asked Robert what kept him in a profession that takes so much out of people who choose it.

When he hired cooks, he said, he made sure they understood exactly what they were signing up for. “Look, this isn’t for everybody,” he’d tell them.

“You work late nights; you’re back in the kitchen early in the morning. You’re going to work every Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Eve. It’s a life that you’ve got to really, really love.”

And his advice to young cooks is equally plainspoken: don't start at the bottom. Start as high as someone will let you.

Get your foot in the door at the best restaurant that will take you and see what happens. You'll get your ass kicked every day. If you can take it and still want more, keep going. If not...now you know.

So what kept him going?

"I used to get a high off every night," he said. "When we did a perfect service, and people loved the food. It's amazing. We like to please people. We like people to eat our food and go, wow."

That I understood immediately because I married someone wired the same way. My husband’s love language is food.

Not just cooking, but the entire process from selecting and preparing ingredients to watching someone's expression after their first bite.

It’s how he communicates love without words, and it's how he's always known what he was put here to do.

Robert was describing the same thing, and that's part of why these men succeeded. Talent, technique, and discipline sure as hell all mattered, but the act of feeding people was never a transaction to them.

It was an act of care executed at a crazy-high level, night after night, for decades.

You know someone who would love this. Send it to them.

Robert believes a palate is something you're born with. You can refine and develop it, but the substance is either there or it’s not.

"If you don't have a palate," he said, "forget it. You're never going to be a great chef."

I told him I found out I had perfect pitch the same way a cook discovers their palate: someone with experience noticed.

His voice lit up at that. “That’s exactly it.”

Everything else can be taught, but first there has to be something there to teach. My own cooking has improved dramatically since I married Jim, but I will also never cook like him.

He didn't argue, but what he did say was that the real tragedy isn't trying something and failing, but never discovering what you could have done because nobody encouraged you.

Robert was, by his own admission, a terrible student. Hated school, barely graduated high school. He didn’t get into cooking with some sort of backup plan – food was it.

“A lot of people had families like I did: ‘there’s no money in that, don’t waste your time with something you’re obviously good at, stick to safety.’” He recalled.

I loved what he said next:

“It takes a lot of balls to say no to that, if you don’t have a parent who says, ‘Hey, go for it. Be the best at whatever it is. I don't care if it's bricklaying. Be the best one out there, and people will fly you around the world to work on their mansions."

The Depression-era parents who raised his generation was heavily influenced by scarcity. Safety and security were everything.

I think our understanding of safety has changed, and I think the pandemace had a lot to do with that.

A lot of us learned pretty damn abruptly that the 'dependable job', the 'life plan' that you had laid out could all disappear like that.

Robert sees that change. That freedom for the younger generation to find their talent and be more fully what they already are.

Robert has known Jim for 43 years. They don't talk constantly, but when they do, he said, it's like no time has passed.

Their friendship started in a kitchen but grew in a little Irish pub whose name Robert can no longer remember.

After twelve to fifteen-hour days, they’d finish service around 11:30 at night still far too wired to simply drive home and go to bed. So they'd sit together, decompress, and eventually make the long drive home.

In the kitchen, they were professionals.

At the pub, they were just exhausted young men who understood each other in that ‘battle-hardened’, exhausted camaraderie that they still feel to this day.

"You're kind of out of the same mold," he said. "I can just say something to Jim, and he would know exactly what I mean because he's been there."

Tom Kee, another one of the brothers, is turning 72.

Robert is 66.

Jim isn't far behind.

All of three chose that gloriously impractical profession together and came away with careers, stories, and more than four decades of friendship still intact.

Some of us will never have that, and the brothers know exactly how rare that is.

You can hear it whenever they talk about each other.

And now, for Robert, the ‘after’ is just as interesting as the ‘during’.

"I never in my wildest dreams thought that being a cook would turn into what it did," he told me. The magazine covers and television shows. Walking into a restaurant and being recognized.

“It was fun,” he said. “But now, I just want to lay low."

He lived what he calls the rock star life for too long. It takes a toll, he added.   

He's still cooking and taking care of people, but in his own way now. That high he used to get from a perfect service, he still gets, but on a much different scale.

Four decades of making people happy, but for people like Robert, that was never really a job – it’s who he is.

You can’t retire from that.

So, the long-awaited reunion is coming soon. Robert says there will be cooking, wine, fishing, and lots of stories.

Jim will remind Robert of something, and Robert will remind Jim of something else. Tom will say oh my god, remember that cook, and everyone will laugh at some long-remembered inside joke.

I asked Robert to please send pictures. He invited me to come see for myself, same as my husband had. I told them I assumed nobody wants wives at a guy's trip.

They disagreed, and I’ve been convinced. So, fair warning to all involved, I'm bringing my recorder for the stories (and already wondering how many will actually make it into print).

I can’t wait to meet Polly, because if anyone knows what it’s like to love one of these beautifully insane chefs, it’s the woman who married one.

We’ll have plenty to talk about.

Heather Papovich is the voice behind Unfinished Business. She's seen some things. She'll tell you about them.