- 4 months ago
Bon Appétit spends a day on the line with Chef Martel Stone, Chef de Cuisine at Dōgon, an acclaimed Afro-Caribbean fine dining restaurant in Washington, DC. Open for just 10 months, Dōgon is the second restaurant from James Beard Award-winning Chef Kwame Onwuachi and has quickly gained national recognition as one of America’s best new restaurants.Read more about Dōgon and the rest of 2025's best new restaurants here: https://www.bonappetit.com/story/best-new-restaurants-2025
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00Dogan is a restaurant redefining what it means to eat a fine dining meal.
00:05We serve an Afro-Caribbean cuisine that is also inspired by the diverse culture of Washington, D.C.
00:12This is a Kwame Nwachi restaurant, one of the best chefs in the country.
00:17As the CDC, I'm responsible for managing a staff of 40-plus.
00:22I also need to create dishes that push the cuisine forward.
00:26We opened this restaurant 10 months ago. In our first year, we're recognized as one of the best new restaurants in the country.
00:37Welcome to the Salamander Hotel. We are headed into Dogan. Amazing lobby.
00:46What's good, y'all? It's Chef Martell. I'm CDC here at Dogan in Washington, D.C.
00:50It's 11 a.m. I gotta go meet with the team. Follow me.
00:54Tonight, we're gonna do about 200, 210 covers, which is an average for the restaurant.
01:00Open kitchen concept. You can see everything the cooks are doing.
01:03You can hear me yelling from the back of the dining room.
01:06I have to run downstairs and meet with the team so we get this day started off well.
01:10So, we're in the production kitchen right now.
01:13This is where all our bases, all our sauces get started.
01:16Welcome, Chef Taji. He's the old man of the kitchen.
01:21This guy. Keep saying that.
01:23Second oldest person here.
01:24Yeah, you first.
01:26I have to get changed and get ready to meet with the team. I'll see you on the set.
01:33Let's hit that morning lineup and see what they got going on.
01:36Yo, yo, yo, yo.
01:38Two, three, four.
01:39Ring it in. Ring it in today.
01:40Five.
01:41Tonight, we are at, any guesses? Any guesses? Any guesses?
01:46165.
01:47120.
01:48208.
01:49Chef Eric got it. We got 220.
01:50Here we go.
01:51Oh, yeah!
01:52Yes!
01:53All right, all right, all right.
01:54Biggest projects today would be a little me's we're doing for the ribs.
01:57Okay.
01:58Each member of the team has a prep list, their name on it, time in and time out, and it offers
02:02the opportunity for us to spread projects out.
02:05So, we do like a break or something?
02:07Do we put our hands in?
02:08Do we get day one?
02:09I'm busy.
02:10All right, every day?
02:11Day one.
02:12We'll work on it.
02:13We'll work on it.
02:14We'll work on it.
02:15We'll work on it.
02:18How you doing, rice kids?
02:19Heard that.
02:20I loved it.
02:21Swingin' hot.
02:22Corner.
02:26So, today I'll be testing Corn Ngoosey Stew.
02:29It's a riff on a classic Nigerian stew, traditionally served with dried fish,
02:34crayfish, but today I want to do a vegan or vegetarian version.
02:40Haven't decided, honestly.
02:41So, Chef Kwame, the executive chef of the restaurant, is here today.
02:45And he'll give it the nod, he'll give a little feedback, and, you know, he'll like it.
02:51He'll like it.
02:52It'll be great.
02:53I wanted to use corn because corn is a little sweeter, and it offers me a good starch content,
02:58which will allow me to thicken the stew, which is normally thickened with some dried fish
03:03or crayfish or things like that.
03:05I have a special love in my heart for canned corn.
03:08It worked well, but fresh corn is so much better.
03:11It's so much sweeter.
03:12It's so great you can even eat this raw.
03:15When it comes to making a dish for Dogon, the first thing I want to think about is,
03:19will it be effective on the line?
03:21I may think it's beautiful.
03:22I may think it tastes great, but if we can't execute it at a high level,
03:27or it's not something that everyone can do, then let's try something different, right?
03:31Here, I have a little bit of comfy ginger oil.
03:34It's spicy, has savory notes, but it also lends very well to corn.
03:39Doing different flavored oils and doing different flavored vinaigrettes
03:44offer me the opportunity to add flavor without adding a completely different ingredient.
03:49So I'm scoring the king oyster mushroom to allow it to cook evenly
03:53and to allow the seasoning to penetrate all the way through.
03:57Pepper soup is also another West African traditional stew,
04:01but I'm using it today as just a seasoning.
04:04There's some allspice in there, a lot of calabash nutmeg as well,
04:08which is a cross between nutmeg and pepper is the best way to describe it.
04:12Oyster mushrooms give me umami, a little funk,
04:15also offer me opportunity for replacement for my dry fish.
04:19This dish speaks to the different pillars of Chef Kwame's culture.
04:23Caribbean, he's also from New York, but he has a strong tie to Nigeria.
04:28When I think about our Indian dishes and changing menu,
04:30I don't want to do it all at the same time.
04:32I don't want everything to kind of drop at the same time.
04:35It's a lot for me, but it's also a lot for the cooks to sort of retain all that information.
04:39I try to change one or two dishes every three months.
04:44I was in the Navy prior to starting to cook.
04:47I met this woman who was a chef prior to her enlisting,
04:50and she made me a French omelet.
04:53It was folded perfectly. It had amazing courage on the inside.
04:57It sparked my interest immediately.
04:59From that point, it was learn, learn, learn, learn, learn.
05:02And I fell into being a cook.
05:05Probably one of the best decisions I've ever made.
05:07It offered me structure. It offered me opportunity.
05:11Ooh, don't burn it.
05:15So a French stop is basically a circular stove.
05:19It allows us to utilize as much surface area as we can.
05:23There's a coiled stove in here that has flames shooting from everywhere.
05:28So there's hot spots, right?
05:29You work it similar to a grill where the center is the hottest,
05:32and as you move out, it radiates heat.
05:36A lot more powerful and a lot more expensive than a regular stove.
05:39So now I am eating up my stew.
05:42It is a combination of corn, toasted goosey seed,
05:45a little bit of cumin in here.
05:47I have ginger garlic paste, onions.
05:49I cooked all that down with a corn stock that was made from roasting the cops.
05:54R&D is probably the best part of the job.
05:56Being at CDC, you don't get the opportunity to cook as much.
05:59It's more about managing. It's more about mentoring.
06:02But at the end of the day, I'm still a chef.
06:05If you don't cook as much, you won't have the same sort of balance.
06:08You won't have the same feel for the kitchen.
06:11When you see a goosey, you're going to see two things.
06:13There's a little spinach and maybe a little bit of pumpkin leaf.
06:17So I have Chinese water spinach.
06:20I also have some baby mustard.
06:23So it's peppery.
06:24And I'm splitting with ginger oil, which offers me spice.
06:27So now I'm just bringing all the dish together.
06:30A little bit of tamarind, which adds sweetness, which adds acidity.
06:35So every time I have to R&D a dish for chef, I feel a lot of things, right?
06:38I feel nervous.
06:40His name is on the wall, so I have a responsibility to uphold the integrity of not only the flavors,
06:47but also I wanted to be cool.
06:49I wanted to be cool, you know?
06:51You want to hear your chef say, oh, this is great.
06:53Anything less than that is a failure.
06:55I'm trying to craft a bite for the guests.
06:58Here is the comfy garlic.
07:00We comfy the garlic in garlic oil.
07:02Bread and butter jalapenos, that's a nod to my Philly roots.
07:06Toasted palm oil here.
07:08So palm oil, you're traditionally going to have in a lot of West African stews as the base.
07:13It has savory notes, and it will give me a beautiful look, right?
07:18And we finish off with a little nasturtium.
07:21Accents the mustard, accents the pepper.
07:25Ready to rock, yeah.
07:28All right.
07:29We talked about it a couple weeks ago, so I'm excited to try it.
07:33So we're serving this with fufu or no?
07:35I think we should.
07:38Mmm, it's really good.
07:40You get the agoussi coming through, but it's not, like, in your face.
07:44Spicy.
07:45It's a little spicy.
07:46When I'm tasting agoussi stew or agoussi soup, I'm definitely looking for that deep umami flavor.
07:52I'm looking to see some palm oil in it, and then some sort of green element.
07:57This is a great vegetable dish just on its own, just to tighten it up.
07:59Yep.
08:00Make it smaller.
08:01Like, everything is a bite, and then before you know it, the dish is gone.
08:04Yeah.
08:05Definitely want to incorporate some baby corn, because it'll be in corn season.
08:07Come on.
08:08But yeah, this is beautiful.
08:09Yep.
08:10It's really good.
08:11Yeah.
08:12So Dogon is a celebration of the cultures that make D.C. special.
08:15It tells its own story of the Dogon tribe from Mali and a descendant of that being Benjamin
08:21Banneker, who created the borders of D.C.
08:23We try to tell the story of all the cultures within these quadrants.
08:27So we'll run this dish about two or three more times before we actually make it on the menu.
08:31I think the bare bones of the dish is right there.
08:34Now it's time to work on that terrine for the Ben's Bowl.
08:37Here we go.
08:40So here is the confit lamb.
08:42It's marinated with a little bit of curry and green seasoning, and then confit and lamb
08:47fat, some garlic, some thyme, got some bay leaf in there, a little ginger.
08:52Next to me is the lamb terrine king.
08:56This is a two-man job.
08:58I'm going to hold the bowl, and then I'm going to let the professionals profession.
09:01Lamb fat still allows us to impart flavor, and it allows us to reutilize a byproduct that
09:08we would normally just throw away.
09:09We decide to drop it into the mixing bowl, and we mix it so that the fat and the meat is
09:16distributed evenly.
09:17Pulling up, pulling up.
09:19Now we step back, and I let the youth do all the hard work.
09:23Huge part of the job of a CDC is less about the cooking and more about the training and
09:27the mentoring, and also overseeing.
09:29So I'm only going to pulse it a few times just to get it shredded out.
09:33Thank you, chef.
09:35This is a dish inspired by the late husband of Virginia Ali.
09:39She is the founder and owner of Ben's Chili Bowl.
09:42It's like a DC staple.
09:44He's Trinidadian.
09:45So this dish starts off with a Trinidadian base of green seasoning and curry.
09:51Boom.
09:52We also want to press the meat into a nice, tight terrine so that it doesn't break apart
09:58inside of the fryer.
09:59The fat creates a glue.
10:01Here is the terrine that we prepped yesterday.
10:04Come on now.
10:07It's nice and firm.
10:09So now I am just scoring so that when I cut it, I know every single piece will be the
10:15same exact size.
10:16The striations of confit meat maintain this color because we cured it and we also confit
10:23it so it doesn't go brown, doesn't go dark.
10:25You have some curry notes that you see highlighted through here.
10:29But all these white and off-colored pieces, that's all fat.
10:34Fat is definitely flavoring here.
10:36So when we go to fry this, the fat's just going to melt inside of it.
10:39And when you take that bite, it'll be unctuous.
10:41It'll be everything you really want inside of a fried piece of lamb, honestly.
10:45I want to be a restaurant that people want to treat like a destination and match the
10:50aesthetic of Chef Kwame and the food and the legacy that he's creating, but also match
10:55the aesthetic of the hotel.
10:57The hotel's luxury.
10:58The hotel's five-star.
10:59We want to be luxury.
11:00We want to be five-stars.
11:02Shoot, if there's a six-star, I'll take it.
11:04I'm going to let the team finish portioning out the rest of this for service, but we are
11:08getting really close to dinner time and I got to start tasting some of these dishes.
11:13Today we're going to try the whole cake dish.
11:16And that is a two-part dish.
11:18There is the buttered crab with a little hot spice.
11:21And we also have the plantain whole cakes, which is one of those sort of last-minute
11:25hit and misses trying to figure it out.
11:27So Chef Kato, we affectionately call cake king, king cakey, young cakey, maestro cakes.
11:35There's a few names that are balling around cakes.
11:37Essentially this recipe was developed through pancakes.
11:41So pancakes is something that I make for my daughters.
11:44Pancakes are also how I got my wife as well.
11:47So she was a member of the private club.
11:50She would come in and have breakfast every single day.
11:53And one day I leaned against the wall and reached over and asked,
11:57are these the best pancakes you've ever had in your life?
12:00And from there she said, will you marry me?
12:02Whole story, start to finish.
12:05So the last thing you want is a flat hole cake.
12:08And because we add plantain, we have to add a little extra bacon soda in order to get that rise that we're looking for.
12:14Traditionally, in the south, the cakes were cooked on the actual garden tool, the hole.
12:21So it would be dropped right into the fire.
12:23And they would drop the batter right on top and that would be used as a side for beans, hoppin' john, anything like that.
12:30So following the tradition, we just wanted a pancake-like vessel for the crab dish.
12:37This is Maryland blue crab with garlic, butter, Chef Kwame's mother's house spice recipe.
12:43We found that blue crab for the price point, as well as the flavor and the nod to the area, was a much better product.
12:53A little more seasoned.
12:54So we'll do lemon, salt in the crab.
12:56And then ahi verde I think is good where it is.
12:59Plantain cakes I think are great.
13:01By the way, yes, I would like Twizzlers.
13:03And then my favorite.
13:06That's Michael right here, GM, AKA my work husband.
13:09Now we're about to transition into the Two Chef meeting that we have right up front.
13:13If I had to do all this by myself, this restaurant would have dropped a while ago.
13:19And with that being said, barbecue chicken set was a success.
13:22Nice.
13:23I have a few notes.
13:24Bitterness and the barbecue spice.
13:26And that just came from the pink peppercorns.
13:29So we'll drop pink peppercorns in the barbecue spice.
13:32How about like people coming in on time, call out and things like that?
13:36Same exact.
13:37Yeah.
13:38I feel like everybody has been coming in on time.
13:40Yeah.
13:41We're looking good on the overtime.
13:42What are you saying?
13:43Obviously we got one call out with Jamil at Pastry, but me and Susana pretty much knocked
13:47out all the bread.
13:48Let's have her gear some holes in the rum cakes and then soak them.
13:53Yesterday when Jeff was trying it, he noticed that it wasn't as moist.
13:59So we'll poke holes in it, we'll drop it.
14:02See if that helps out.
14:03I'm poking so perfectly.
14:04Yeah, poking.
14:05HR.
14:06So besides that, it's service as usual.
14:09Keep everybody set.
14:10We'll start rolling and start pushing them now.
14:13So by the time we get to like that 415 and everybody isn't like running with their head
14:17cut off and whatnot.
14:18So something in between gentle push and Sparta kick to get them to service.
14:23Thank you Jeff.
14:24Thank you Jeff.
14:25Thank you Jeff.
14:26Thank you Jeff.
14:27I forgot the second part.
14:28It's time to get moving.
14:29I have to set up my pass.
14:30At any point in time, this board will be full from top to bottom.
14:34And it's very difficult to read all these tickets and also related information to all the cooks.
14:40So the Sharpies and the markers allow me to do just that.
14:44Blue.
14:45That's for chicken.
14:46I can now look at the board and go five chicken all day.
14:50Because I have five blue tacks on the actual tickets.
14:53Hey yo, Chef.
14:54Hey, let's get those tasters ready y'all.
14:56Yes, Chef.
14:57We taste everything last minute before service.
14:59And we go right into service knowing that everything is seasoned right.
15:03Everything is cooked correctly.
15:05And we have exactly what we need for this 220 person service for the night.
15:11Peri-peri is probably one of the most important dishes because it is a staple of Chef Kwame's.
15:16It blends Caribbean flavor, West African flavors to make like this very beautiful fresh salad.
15:22Hey bevo.
15:23Yes, Chef.
15:24Slide over my boy.
15:25Yes, Chef.
15:26So this is our jollof rice.
15:27Another West African staple.
15:29You can see each individual grain in the rice.
15:32But the rice also isn't dry.
15:34It looks moist.
15:35For this one, we use the pilaf method.
15:38We add in all the rest of our ingredients.
15:40So the red stew, the habanero, the shrimp stock.
15:44And then we throw it in the oven.
15:45So we're basically roasting the rice.
15:47And what that does is it allows all the reparations to go into the rice.
15:52So that we know when we take it out, it's that perfect texture of rice.
15:55You get beautiful grains.
15:57Every time I taste it, it's a pleasure for me because it's that good.
16:00So no no, Chef.
16:01This is great.
16:02I usually taste in a certain order.
16:04So I'll taste something that is real fatty.
16:07Right behind that, I'll taste something that's like really acidic to kind of clear my palate off to go into whatever's next.
16:13Mmm.
16:15That's really good.
16:16That's really good.
16:17Everything tastes great.
16:18Few adjustments here and there, but that's just always, right?
16:21If anybody needs anything, let's get in front of it now.
16:25So that by the time service start at five, we call that first tickle, we already locked in and ready to go.
16:31By the time we get into that nine o'clock hour, we're going to get hit.
16:33No parties tonight.
16:34So all we have to do is concentrate on putting out the best dishes every single time, every single day.
16:40All right, let's have a good service, Chef.
16:42So I'm expediting tonight and I need to get myself ready to rock.
16:47Love you guys.
16:48Thank you so much for coming.
16:49But you kind of got to go unless you're willing to hop on the line with the rest of the cooks, which I don't think that's happening.
16:56Peace.
16:57This is Theresa, and this is my slicer, named her Tracy.
17:06I think it makes it personal.
17:08My favorite knife, which I don't use often, is named after my wife.
17:12It's Talisa.
17:13It also was one of the knives that has been with me through every single stage of my career.
17:19Just like, honestly, just like Talisa.
17:22Thank you so much.
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