Chef Francisco Ferrufino serves guests fresh corn flan at the Embassy Chef Challenge. (Josh Novikoff)
People come to D.C. from all over the world, bringing lots of flavorful food with them. The 2016 Embassy Chef Challenge on Wednesday provided a platform for 18 diplomatic missions to the United States to show off their local cuisine. The event is a food-lover’s dream, and a step up from the Embassy open house weekends that also take place in May each year, where you pick out the ones likely to give out the best free samples and get stuck standing in a 30-minute line for a cube of imported cheese.
The dishes at the Embassy Chef Challenge are larger, more refined, and all under one roof—and a good value at $65, which includes booze in the form of paired cocktails at individual stations along with a full open bar, making it one of the cheaper tasting events around. Mark your calendar to check it out next year if you missed it this go around.
The Judge’s Choice Award went to a rum-infused Barbadian seasoned pork, which also got my people’s choice vote. The thinly sliced pork was tender and flavorful, but it was the saucing of Chef Creig Greenidge, a caterer in Barbados who had been flown in for the event, that put the dish over the edge.
“Oh, it’s just salted cod,” said Greenidge when asked about the intense red concoction he was ladling out of a foil pan, “that’s boiled down, then taken out. Then you add curry, cumin, tomato sauce, or ketchup. And then other stuff.” Thanks to that “other stuff”, Greenidge is returning home with a blue ribbon.
One of the longest lines at the event was at the Embassy of the Philippines station. Folks wanted to pose for photos with Chef Claude Tayag, who became a social media darling after Anthony Bourdain featured him and his Bale Dutung restaurant on “No Reservations”. Tayag now serves a 10-course Anthony Bourdain menu in his kitchen when he’s not being jetted across the world to serve Washingtonians a special seafood and rice dish. The Filipino-style paella won the crowd over for the People’s Choice Award, paired with a ginger cocktail garnished by a lengthwise-cut slice of the fresh root for a winning combination.
Some of the best bites of the evening came from the El Salvador table, a popular cuisine in D.C., where we are spoiled for choice when it comes to Salvadoran food. Chef Francisco Ferrufino did his country proud with crispy, puffy tostadas topped with a flavorful beer-braised beef and accompanied by a silky sweet corn flan. Ferrufino, who emigrated to Washington from El Salvador, trained at the Carlos Rosario International Career Center in Columbia Heights and is now leading the kitchens at the popular craft beer-focused restaurants Meridian Pint and Brookland Pint (while there’s no specifically Salvadoran food on those menus, their nachos are rated by DCist as some of the city’s best).
While the Embassy Chef Challenge started as a competition between the embassy chefs on staff, it has become more common to bring in celebrity and restaurant chefs as “ringers” for the event, but that’s not for lack of talent in the diplomatic kitchens. The buzzy Peter Chang, chosen as a prestigious James Beard Award finalist this year, famously got his start in the United States by cooking at—and defecting from—the Chinese embassy. This year there were at least a few chefs who cook at actual embassies, and we’d like to offer a shout-out to the Embassy of Poland’s Chef Andrzej Bielach and his rich pierogis stuffed with duck and boletus mushrooms.
Top-notch cooking like Bielach and Ferrufino’s served as a reminder of the talent that immigrant chefs bring to our city. Embassy chefs: the D.C. dining scene welcomes you all to stay and open new restaurants of your own — in fact, we could use a good Polish place.
