Chef Rusty Holman, the chef at Eatonville

My tablemate and I are sitting at a two-top by the large picture window at Eatonville, which provides a semi-comfortable, climate-controlled view of the parade of mini-skirts and flesh that walks up and down the bustling 14th Street NW corridor.  We're half way through our appetizers when the food runner brings our entrees. She seems oblivious to the fact that we're still eating our first course; she's also a little slow on the basic laws of physics. Our tiny table barely contains all the plates she has just unceremoniously dropped off, her job here done.

The fact is, I really want more time to savor chef Rusty Holman's cheddar tart, this precisely executed savory pastry crammed with white cheddar, roasted tomato, and Vidalia onions, all topped with a weedy garden of microgreens. The tart is the perfect appetizer — balancing flavors and textures and temperatures with the kind of verve seen by circus bears on bicycles. (I mean that in the best way possible, really.)

The tart gives me hope that owner Andy Shallal, better known for his playpens for bleeding hearts, has indeed picked the right person to lead Eatonville's kitchen following his ill-fated chef-search contest. But then we dig into those entrees waiting for us on the table's edge. My "crispy chicken breast" is an odd almalgamation of fried and smothered chicken, a hulking piece of breast meat, dry and flavorless underneath its thick coating, which is not redeemed by its mushroom gravy. The "fish and grits" is a plate brimming with fried catfish, bland and muddy, which provides little satisfication without a generous scoop of jalapeno-cheddar grits to accompany it.

I would like to report that I could wash away the bad taste in my mouth with my Blue Lemon Drop, but I can't stomach another swallow of the cocktail, which goes down like sugary, blueberry-scented serum. Instead, I'm left to drink in the wild ambiance of Shallal's Eatonville, an homage to Zora Neale Hurston, which feels like Tobacco Road meets the antebellum charm of Gone with the Wind meets the post-radical elements of commercial graffiti art. I have to say, I'm quite fond of the interior-design mashup.

A pre-saved Shallal chatting with Top Chef-er Carla Hall

For those who thought the protracted chef competition for Andy Shallal's new Eatonville project was a sinful act of pride, you might be happy to learn that the Busboys & Poets owner was saved yesterday. Fittingly enough, Shallal's salvation came in Eatonville, Fla., the town for which his forthcoming Southern eatery took its name.

Earlier this week, Shallal and his recently hired chef flew down to Eatonville, the first all-black town to be incorporated in the United States, to understand the culture and food that influenced its most famous resident, Zora Neale Hurston. Their travels took them to St. Lawrence AME Church, a house of prayer that dates back to the late 19th century.

The church, according to Shallal, has only 90 members, but they must make a seriously holy noise. When the minister asked who wanted to be saved, not only did Shallal raise his hand but so did Brian Evans, a Busboys employee who accompanied his boss on the tour.

The minister rubbed olive oil on Shallal's forehead, pounded on his chest and head, and prayed that the restaurateur's body and soul would "unite," Shallal said this morning as he and the crew were headed to New Orleans. "It was actually a moving experience," Shallal said. "I'm not religious, but culturally, it was very rich."

So do you feel any different today?

"Alas, no," Shallal said.

Note: Busboys & Poets owner Andy Shallal is taking an Iron Chef approach to hiring the chef for his forthcoming Eatonville, a Southern-oriented restaurant that pays homage to Zora Neale Hurston. This is the second in a series of blog posts chronicling the competition. This series will not announce the winner; it will be revealed later in the City Paper.

After four previous rounds and God knows how many tastings in CulinAerie's smaller classroom, the competition for Eatonville's chef had come down to two men. Both had grown up in the South, which no doubt helped them grasp the cuisine they were expected to prepare, but both chefs also had dramatically different personalities. One had the gift of gab, the other a gift for silence.

Tasked with making the final decision, the judges began to dissect the intangibles—the chefs' personalities, their potential management styles, even their ability to chat up a customer in the dining room. The intangibles had become paramount. When evaluating the two cooks by their food alone, the judges were all but deadlocked. Some liked the talkative toque, some liked the quiet one.

For the final cook-off, owner Andy Shallal asked the men to prepare a signature appetizer, entree, and dessert for Eatonville. The quiet one prepared some stuffed hush puppies, a fried rockfish over greens and vegetables, and bread pudding. The talkative one produced barbecued and fried oysters, blackened flounder with tasso ham and crab, and gingerbread tea cakes with warm pears.

But the talkative one also had stories to share. For his "sweet and spicy" barbecued oysters, he told the judges, "I think we all know that Zora [Neale Hurston] was a sweet and spicy person." He went on to talk about Hurston's connection to the Southern coast, where the sea would offer up its bounty to satisfy her appetite. His dessert was even inspired by the character, Tea Cake, in Hurston's novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God.

The judges ate that stuff up.

The stories would prove important in the final analysis of the chefs. "I loved the story," said Carla Hall, the former Top Chef contestant. "Can you imagine having little stories on the menu?"

Besides,  dining out is "an experience," Hall added. "How will I be different after I come to this place?" She thought the talkative toque's stories would show people "what happens in the chef's head," a sort of inside look into the creative process.

Fellow judge Mike Curtin, CEO for D.C. Central Kitchen, also picked up on the stories. Curtin felt they showed the chef was putting the Eatonville concept before his own ego. "It's clear that [the chef] is cooking for this restaurant. He's not cooking to show off."

But the true turning point likely came when Pamela Pinnock, director of marketing for Busboys & Poets, pulled a flip-flop worthy of John Kerry. Throughout the contest, Pinnock had supported the quiet one. No, in fact, she had done more than that. She had sang his praises throughout the competition.

She changed her tune.

"This was more than a competition of cooking," Pinnock said. This was a contest in which the chefs were supposed to be inspired by Hurston's life and, specifically, by her novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God. The talkative chef "followed the assignment and executed the assignment best," Pinnock added. "So I'd have to say it's [that chef] for those reasons."

Shallal had made up his mind. He called the two chefs into the judges' room and apologized for "slightly" misleading them in his initial employment ad, which didn't offer specifics about the grueling contest. Then he dropped the final bomb.

The quiet chef was toast.

The quiet one showed poise in defeat. He shook the winner's hand and even placed his hand on the victor's shoulder, a sign of friendship in loss.

As for the winner, he mostly felt relief. He had been searching for a gig "for a long time."

"I have a job," he said matter-of-factly. "That's good."

[Note: The winner's name and more details on the contest will be revealed later in the City Paper.]

Note: Busboys & Poets owner Andy Shallal is taking an Iron Chef approach to hiring the chef for his forthcoming Eatonville, a Southern-oriented restaurant that pays homage to Zora Neale Hurston. This is the second in a series of blog posts chronicling the competition. This series will not announce the winner; it will be revealed later in the City Paper.

Christina Giallourakis, a former lawyer who now does health counseling, had nothing bad to say about the chef's dishes. "I think his whole array of food is like two notches above the others' food," the judge said, refering to the other two chefs competing last Friday in the semi-final round of Andy Shallal's hunt for an Eatonville chef. Giallourakis could, without much doubt, see herself driving across town for this guy's cooking.

The array of food that Giallourakis loved included a chicken/chicken sausage po' boy, a beet risotto with peas, a potato cake topped with smothered onions and shiitake mushrooms, a shrimp-and-okra dish, and a "coffee and doughnuts" dessert in which the drink was a multi-layered "parfait"-like creation with java-flavored granita in the middle.

Carla Hall, the almost-but-not-quite Top Chef, could not share her fellow judge's enthusiasm. "It's all really technically good," Hall said, but it was missing a certain warmth. Besides, Hall added, the chef didn't follow directions. He made extra dishes beyond the required three: a dessert, a po' boy, and an entree that included two of Zora Neale Hurston's favorite ingredients, shrimp and okra.

He was playing a numbers game, Hall said. The chef "made so much that you could put two aside and still have favorites," she said. "Hell, he did like 40 dishes, but for me, he's missing heart."

And if the food is missing heart, then it's missing the point of Hurston's writing, which Hall believes is essentially nurturing.  "You want this food to hug you when people are eating it," she said.

Shallal zeroed in on another concern about this technically gift chef with no apparent heart: He "will be a major challenge to work for." Shallal worried that the chef, with his restless creative spirit, would never be happy making Southern dishes in the $12 to $20 price range.

Finally, another judge chimed in and stated the obvious: If the chef "is not where you want to go, let him go now."

And so it was decided.

Shallal called the three semi-finalists into the room and handed each a check for $1,000—not a bad day's work—and told them that "this was probably the hardest round, because you're all very, very good."

Finally, he gave one the boot. It was the chef whose food caused one judge to swoon and another to feel no warmth. "I'd say you're probably the most talented [chef] we had, but that's not all we're looking for," Shallal told the odd toque out. "I'm not sure we're going to be a great fit, and that's why I think we need to move on."

The chef looked crushed at the news.

Note: Busboys & Poets owner Andy Shallal is taking an Iron Chef approach to hiring the chef for his forthcoming Eatonville, a Southern-oriented restaurant that pays homage to Zora Neale Hurston. This is the second in a series of blog posts chronicling the competition. This series will not announce the winner; it will be revealed later in the City Paper.

The chef, one of five left standing in Andy Shallal's unorthodox hiring process, didn't waste a second letting the judges know that he had absorbed their criticisms from the previous round. He had taken the fuss out of his Southern-minded food. "The tutu came off," he told the judges.

Then he rolled out his menu for this third round of competitive cooking, which required the chefs to plate some vegetarian dishes. Mr. No Tutu served up a vegetable pot pie, creamed corn, a root-vegetable gratin, a casserole, and a salad with grilled shrimp and green goddess dressing. These descriptions, however, were just rough outlines.

Mr. No Tutu's gratin, for example, was this gorgeous, puff-pastrylike stack of mandoline-sliced turnips, parsnips, potatoes, and sweet potatoes. His casserole was a delicate combination of yellow squashes and wild mushrooms. His creamed corn was creamless. His salad included tiny golden cubes of spiced peach gelee. But it was his pot pie that truly confounded the judges. It wasn't traditional at all. His vegetable-loaded liquid came with an accompanying piece of sweet-potato flatbread, a thin plane that rested on the edge of the bowl, where it was easy to overlook as a vital part of the dish.

"I think he would have done better to call it a hearty vegetable stew," one judge noted while the chefs loitered in the kitchen at CulinAerie, the downtown cooking school where the Eatonville competition took place. "It's not a pot pie."

"Maybe he doesn't know what one is," another judge chimed in.

Two other judges thought the pot pie was too thin and watery; they apparently wanted more thickeners. Some also wanted to see a real, honest-to-goodness crust on that baby.

It was around this time that I broke with all professional decorum and expressed my admiration for the chef's work. I told the judges who cared to listen that it was a sort of deconstructed pot pie, and while it may be too fussy for a place like Eatonville, it was absolutely delicious. The liquid was closer to a delicate, creamy bechamel than a pot-pie gravy; it had none of the usual heavy-starch content of such a pie. Plus, I thought the sweet-potato flatbread thingy added just the right amount of sweetness to the savory soup.

My thoughts really didn't change their minds much, which was good. I should have just shut up, but I couldn't help it. That poor pot pie needed a defender.

When the chefs entered the judges' room for the final verdict, one of the arbiters echoed her earlier comment and told the chef that he should have called his pot pie a "stew or soup...or a take on pot pie."

That's when the chef said the single smartest thing of the day: "I've never had a pot pie that I actually enjoyed," he told the judges. "It always seems like a glutinous bowl of glop."

In the end, the chef didn't need anyone's help. He was at the top, or near the top, of every judge's scorecard. He, along with two other toques, made it to the semi-final round tomorrow, when they will have to prepare a po' boy sandwich as well as a dish (other than gumbo) that incorporates both shrimp and okra. The last two ingredients were apparently favorites of Zora Neale Hurston.

As the day's contest came to an end and the winners were packing up their gear, I stood there with two of the semi-finalists. They were excited. They were also stressing about where to find good okra, since it's not exactly season for the Southern vegetable.

Andy Shallal, the man behind the concept-bending Busboys & Poets chain, loves food shows. It's no surprise, then, that Shallal has taken a reality-show approach to hiring a chef for his forthcoming Eatonville, a southern-food restaurant located across V Street from the original Busboys & Poets location. The owner's requiring his top candidates to compete in a week-long cook-off to land the gig.

The first stage of the contest begins tomorrow when 10 finalists prepare a meal, however they envision it, based on Zora Neale Hurston's novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God. (Not coincidentally, Shallal pays homage to Hurston with Eatonville, which is named after the writer's hometown in Florida.) Shallal and Top Chef finalist Carla Hall helped narrow down the field from the more than 200 chefs who originally submitted resumes via Craigslist; to those 10 finalists, Shallal and Hall Michon Boston, a project director for the Humanities Council of Washington, DC, provided details on Hurston's life (and her D.C. connections) as well as a synopsis of Their Eyes Were Watching God to help them with tomorrow's competition. Each finalist was also sent home with a copy of the book.

The 10 candidates were each awarded $100 to help cover the costs of their meals. Five chefs will move onto the next round on Monday, March 2, which will narrow down the field to three candidates, who will then compete on Wednesday, March 4. The final two chefs will challenge each other on Thursday, March 5, to find out who gets the gig. Hall will be a judge for the final challenge, Shallal says, and money will be awarded to the winning chefs at each stage.

Chefs, Shallal says, typically "work under pressure. That's how you judge a good chef....I wanted to put them in a little pressure cooker situation."

Shallal, of course, will also reap some publicity from the stunt. He doesn't plan to announce the winner until about six weeks after the contest ends, he says. Why? Because Shallal's filming the competition and plans to put each challenge on the forthcoming Eatonville Web site to build excitement about the restaurant and its new chef.

Shallal was telling me this story as background to his new southern-food eatery, Eatonville, which is an homage to Hurston and her D.C. connections, including her undergraduate studies at Howard University, where she co-founded The Hilltop. As others have already reported, Eatonville is named after Hurston's hometown in Florida; the eatery is also a collaboration between Shallal (owner of the mini-Busboys and Poets chain) and Michael Babin of the Neighborhood Restaurant Group, which includes Rustico, Vermilion, and other operations.

But here's the interesting thing: Eatonville, scheduled to open sometime early next year, will be located on 14th Street NW, just across V Street from the original Busboys and Poets, which itself is an homage to Hughes. So is the placement of the two restaurants a sort of symbolic healing to the historic rift between Hughes and Hurston?

"Absolutely," says Shallal. "I want to put some artwork on the street that connects the two places." The artwork, he adds, could be something as simple as footsteps between Eatonville and Busboys and Poets.