Well Done: A Conversation with Chef Robert Wiedmaier

Before Food Became Content

A few weeks ago, I wrote about a brotherhood that started in the best kitchens of Washington, D.C.

These men 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 families and scattering all over the map, they're finally getting around to a proper reunion.

Then Robert Wiedmaier, chef, restaurateur, and one of the original brothers, agreed to talk with me. Once I got him on the phone, we talked for the better part of the morning.

What began as a conversation about the old days turned into something much deeper: what it takes to become exceptional at your craft, and what happens when you do.

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 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 around food and restaurants.

Robert's been on the covers 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 that, he cooked in a little French restaurant alongside my husband and a handful of other young chefs, making food Robert says without hesitation would earn a Michelin star today.

But even before all that, there was a saddle of veal, and about thirty seconds to prove he knew his stuff.

The restaurant was 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. And Robert did it so quick and clean that McNamee simply said, "You're hired".

That was the interview; that's just how it worked.

They didn't do the whole 'four rounds of interviews and a personality assessment before asking where you could see yourself in five years' thing.

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 back then would be near-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 - essentially it was 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.

They also 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 quality herbs and produce you’d never find at Giant or Safeway.

Twenty years later, farm-to-table would be considered the gold standard, but to them, it was just cooking.

And almost none of it was photographed, which 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 these men once had to hunt down, earn, or learn from someone else available in about two seconds.

Art's funny that way.

Yesterday's revolution eventually becomes something Gen Alpha explains with 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 still exotic to most Americans, much like a bipartisan dinner party.

Today, shiitake mushrooms sit right beside portobellos at your typical grocery store, but back then they required a lot of legwork.

Robert alluded to a certain sharpness that came from having to figure things out for yourself, especially when the knowledge you sought wasn't exactly common.

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. In all actuality, a serious kitchen is as much a psychological operation as a culinary one.

Robert explained that every night, before service, he'd gather his staff; it didn’t matter if they'd packed the place and nailed every dish, and everyone went home feeling like gods the night before.

Robert would face his team and say, "Alright, it’s showtime!" before snapping his apron.

He said that snap signified 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.”

People remember failure. Robert 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 "Beware the Coq au Vin!"

One bad meal can last in a diner's mind for years, because "All that matters," he told his team, "is the time you do it wrong."

Which sounds brutal, but 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, which means it belongs on that menu. But most people are terrified of looking cheap, or not knowing what they're doing, so they'll spend another hundred dollars or so in an effort to impress.

Robert trained his staff for that; whenever someone ordered the inexpensive bottle, it was presented to the table like it'd cost thousands.

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

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

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

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 warn 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...then 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."

I understood immediately because I married someone wired the same way. My husband’s love language is food. From finding and preparing the ingredients until the moment it hits the taste buds, it's how he communicates love without words.

It's how he's always known what he was put here to do.

That's part of why these men succeeded. Talent, technique, and discipline sure as hell all mattered, but the act of serving people was never a transaction to them.

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

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 told me so.

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

Everything else can be taught, but there has to be something in there to teach to. My cooking has improved dramatically since I married The Balkan Storm, but I will also never cook like him.

He didn't argue, but he did say that the real tragedy isn't trying 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 a 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

“It takes a lot of balls to say no to that, if you don’t have a parent who says, ‘Hey, go for it, " he continued. "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 were heavily influenced by scarcity. Safety and security were everything.

I think our understanding of safety is different, and I further believe the pandemic had a lot to do with that.

A lot of us learned pretty damn abruptly that the 'dependable job' and 'life plan' you were working on could disappear like that.

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

Robert has known The Storm 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 cram into a booth, decompress, and eventually make the long drive home.

In the kitchen, they were consummate professionals.

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

"You're kind of out of the same mold," he said. "I can just say something to Storm, 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.

The Storm 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 they 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 admitted.

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 feeding and serving others, 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, of course, 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 Robert's wife, 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.