Here We Are Now, Entertain Us

By DCist contributor Spencer Ackerman

It's pretty appropriate for a cooking expo so near the Chesapeake Bay that the first olfactory experience greeting a visitor to the Metropolitan Cooking & Entertaining Show is a powerful blast of salty, baking fish. No one is going to mistake D.C.'s answer to the New York Fancy Food Expo -- a 100-stall extravaganza of middlebrow-to-high-end cooking, oenophilia, celebrity chefs and cheap wares -- for the food-porn original. But with the District's dining scene experiencing a recent resurgence, what's the point? Today at noon, the MC&ES featured the rising star of Alexandria: Cathal Armstrong, the fenian beast behind Restaurant Eve and the brand-new Eamonn's who was named one of Food & Wine's ten best new chefs. He demonstrated his skills at holiday cooking -- no doubt, hearty and rustic delicacies from Dublin by way of Normandy. You can't get that on the Hudson.

Even better for the locals than the demonstration stage is the interactive cooking pavilion. If you've never known the proper way to juice a lemon, you can get quick remedial instruction from the likes of JaNea' Owens, who's going to be one of the District's culinary superstars in the next 15 years. Owens, a preternaturally sunny senior at Ballou High School, represented D.C. at the National ProStart Student Invitational last year in Charlotte, N.C., and stole the show with her sautéed rockfish ("No flour," she says, "just salt, pepper, and you want to cook it in a really hot pan"). Chef Glenn Walden of the School of Culinary Arts and Hospitality Management at Stratford University gushes over Owens while she politely instructs ladies three times her age how to prepare seed-free lemon juice. So what's Owens' approach to cuisine? She's going gourmet all the way: "I love creativity, lots of different styles," Owens says, suddenly serious. "I really like herbs -- tarragon, parsley, cilantro. You know as soon as you smell it that that's cilantro." Watch for the Herbal Chef to light up Penn Quarter over the next decade.