For most D.C.-area food nerds, any mention of Eric Ziebold brings the sound of excited titters. As the executive chef of CityZen, Ziebold brings to our area the thoughtful, service-oriented cooking of the world-renowned French Laundry, where he was the restaurant's first-ever sous chef. He also spent time in the kitchens of Spago and Vidalia, and staged in France. In 2005, he was named one of the country's best new chefs by Food & Wine Magazine.

The lore of Chef Ziebold has spread further through this rather amazing account of his taking extreme charge of the line during his tenure at The French Laundry, which he is decidedly modest about – chalking it up to the “dance” of the kitchen and knowing its layout.

This year Chef Ziebold is nominated for a James Beard Award for Best Chef in the Mid-Atlantic Region. He took some time to sit down with DCist and talk, at length, about what influences his cooking.

You've traveled extensively through Europe and many parts of Asia. How has this influenced you?

You don't need to travel to learn new things, but I’ve had many eye-opening experiences. At Spago in 1992 we were doing the salad everyone was doing with the spinach, bleu cheese, candied walnuts, and sliced pears. The candied walnuts, sometimes I got right and sometimes I didn't. I went to Hong Kong for the first time in 2001 or 2002. They were making the candied walnuts, and you saw them at every Chinese restaurant. And they were always perfect. So I asked this guy who spoke about 15 words of English - and I don't speak any Chinese - but I got it. They come out perfect 10 times out of 10.

Photo courtesy of the Mandarin Oriental

I think when you understand enough of the principles of something, and you can be somewhere with another person who understands what they're trying to do and if you speak with the person and you want to communicate and convey, you figure out a way to make that happen. And I think that's pretty amazing. That took a lot of the fear out of traveling.

We don’t do Asian food, but I took a lot from my trip to Hong Kong. We had this dish, where they stir-fried the leaves of a plant that was like a fava bean with Chinese brown sauce and dried scallops. These bean leaves were great because they had the freshness of haricots verts, but it had the richness of a flageolet.

Across the street from The French Laundry, during the winter months we planted beans and peas as cover crop in this big open field. I would send the guys out in the morning to pick the tops. We did creamed fava bean leaves with roasted hen-of-the-woods mushrooms and red wine sauce. I would never have thought to use that if I wouldn't have gone and seen that in Asia.

America is still a very young culture and there's an enormous amount of opportunity, but it allows us to be extremely wasteful. Here there are only three things that come from the pig: ham, bacon and pork chops. There are so many other things like tête du cochon, pied du cochon. Don’t waste anything. Again, you look at what seafood you see in restaurants in the U.S., and then you go to Tsukiji fish market. What's that fish? It frees your mind a little bit.

So clearly, you've taken a lot of your inspiration from your travels. What other inspirations did you have growing up?

Michel Richard said, "You're clearly the true American chef - you're born American, you're raised American. You might have learned a lot of French food, but you worked for an American chef. That's something I'll never have because I am French." I take a lot of inspiration from that.

We do corned beef tongue, and we've done it a number of different ways depending on the time of year. When I was growing up, my mom used to do her own corned beef. She always did it in the same earthenware bowl and she would put the brisket in there and she'd pour the brine over it and always put a rock on top of it - it was always the same rock. She would put it down in the basement, and she would let it age for 30 days. About day 20, you'd have a film of mold growing on top of this, because this is wrapped in plastic wrap, loosely. Now, when you're eight years old, it's pretty exciting to bring all the neighbor kids over and they'd be like, "You're going to eat that. Eww..." It's pretty crazy, but the corned beef was super good.

I like the unctuousness of tongue. So we took my mother's corned beef recipe and applied that to tongue. I’m from Iowa. I didn't realize tongue was a big thing in delis and in the Jewish community until we had somebody in one night. He couldn't eat something so we asked what would he like instead. So, he asked for the tongue. I thought this was a very bizarre request. He took a bite and he was at a table that was right in front of the kitchen, so I could see him. He was going on and on about this tongue. "And I'm Jewish, and I know tongue." Once you build that emotional attachment to something, that's where you build another level of excitement for people.

Certainly, there's a lot of things from being American and growing up in Middle America. There's the obvious like the chicken and dumplings we've done. We use my mother's dumpling recipe. We do a lot of canning, because seasons aren't as forgiving on the East Coast. By the time December hit, we had 200 jars of canned vegetables in dry storage. We did pickled green tomatoes, as a defense mechanism, because we had a large number of cases of them. If my mother hadn't canned vegetables when I was growing up and done all these things, it's not something I would ever have come up with.

How do you think your cooking has changed over the years?

I think what we take from my travels to Asia, especially Japan, is the way they use acid and salt. They hardly ever just put salt on something. What they'll do is put a salted or pickled vegetable with it, or something that's marinated so they'll have a component that has acid or a component that has salt. I think it adds so much more dimension that way than just lemon juice, especially because the food in Japan is bright, super fresh, clean, natural flavors; we take a lot of that in our cooking. I find part of it is myself getting older and wanting to eat lighter. I use much more olive oil than I use butter.

You were nominated for a James Beard Award this year for the first time. How are you feeling?

It's very exciting. The first thing was that I got called to cook for it. Now that I'm nominated, I'm going have to pull a James Bond - being in a tuxedo at the awards and on goes the chef jacket when I start cooking for 800 people. But to get asked to cook for that when the topic is "Artisanal America" is very flattering. And just to be nominated; especially with the other people who are nominated, the people who haven't been nominated, and being so new to the scene here. It's good to know that people are embracing what it is you're trying to do. I'll keep my fingers crossed.

So, if you don't mind sharing, what dish are you making for the dinner?

Well, we are going to do a dish that we did a long time ago, because it's a fun story. We're doing tempura soft shell crab with green rhubarb gazpacho. They want you to focus on local ingredients. Obviously, soft shell crab is from this region, and they picked two chefs from every region. So from the mid-Atlantic, it's me and Nora Pouillon.

I want to do the green rhubarb gazpacho because we get the rhubarb from Path Valley, which is this group of Amish farmers. At the end of April, they put rhubarb on the availability sheet. When we got it, it was green as spinach, not ripe. My pastry chef, Jewel, asked me what she should do with it. I wanted to send it back, but she was told it was from Path Valley. They’re not like the big produce company who can turn around and sell it to somebody else.

So Jewel, my sous chef, Aaron and I started playing with it as a salad, drink garnish, and condiment. It was super sour. I grated it, and there was all this juice coming out. That's where we came upon the idea of the green rhubarb gazpacho. We did it with the soft shell crab, because the crab needed some acid. We made a traditional gazpacho and changed the garnish. It was bright, clean, flavorful and fresh. This fluke, it made it to the tasting menu because we cared about this farmer. That's why we're doing that dish at the James Beard Awards. Because when you're talking about Artisanal America, that's our job.

In this industry you beat up your cooks to work harder, faster, and cleaner. You beat up your waitstaff to pay attention and sell more. You beat up your purveyors to give you a better product at a lower price. That's not necessarily the best approach. If you get someone who feels like they're in it with you, they're ultimately going to give you an infinitely better product than if you were just trying to beat them up. I think when you talk about artisanal and sustainability that's the role the restaurant needs to play.

Do you have any more information do you want to add about the Parker Roll controversy?

Growing up we didn't have bread with dinner unless it was a special occasion. Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter. We would have these yeast rolls, like a Parker House roll. The idea of having them with the entrée, as a treat, is trying to conjure up an emotion. It's the fact that they're baked to order and proofed to order. We don't do them through the course of the whole meal. And there is no second box. I'm kidding. We do a second box when we can. We don't order them from Sysco, believe it or not.

You're frequently described as the chef who came from The French Laundry. I imagine you want to have your own identity. So how is your vision different from Thomas Keller's?

I take an enormous amount of philosophy from Thomas. The biggest difference is I have a different desire as far as emotion goes. The French Laundry is much more of a global restaurant. I want to do high-end food, but I also want it to be the kind of place where if you're celebrating an anniversary or a birthday, you can have a great experience whether you care about food or not. If you're a foodie or know someone who is a foodie, you can be challenged. I want the city to have a sense of pride in who we are and what we're doing.

I think you need to find a common ground with people. I don't think Thomas needs to find a common ground with people. He can just say this is who I am, like it or not. It comes back to that emotional attachment. When he did Per Se, he wasn't trying to do a New York restaurant. He was trying to do a world restaurant.

One of my favorite dishes we did was this foie gras stew, [it] was the way we found a common ground. If you're going to have hot foie gras, poached foie gras is my favorite way to have it. For me you don't taste as much of the foie gras when it’s sautéed.

Since we wanted to do it poached, we Cryovac-ed it for a stew with a piece of bay leaf. And then we cooked it sous vide. When it cooks the fat renders out and combines with the bay leaf flavor. We did vegetables à la Grecque with foie fat. And then we drizzled on some 30 year old juniper vinegar, because it gives you a woodsy, sweet flavor. The kicker that brought it together was we put a piece of duck confit that we sauteed underneath the foie gras. The duck confit is hot and crispy with this unctuous foie gras, and that's the connection factor for me. Not everyone wants the poached foie gras that I like, so how do I get the buy-in?

I don't think Thomas needs to or has to think about that anymore. I think there have been enough articles written about the temple of haute cuisine that he can say, "This is it. This is how I see it. Thank you very much."