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E-mailIrish chef Cathal Armstrong cooking up a storm in Washington, D.C.
Cathal Armstrong cooked for Julia Child. Twice.
The normally unflappable chef remembers the day when Julia Child turned up unannounced. He was working at Bistro Bis, a popular brasserie on Capitol Hill.
“I had nothing ready,” Armstrong says. “So I cooked for her off the cuff.”
A certain gleefulness enters his voice as he recalls that she came back the next day with celebrity chef Jacques Pépin and signed a book for him. “To Cathal, a great chef,” it read. “From Julia, a home cook.”
That was seven years ago, before Armstrong and his wife and business partner Meshelle had opened his first of three restaurants in Virginia.
The Armstrongs and partner Todd Thrasher also own and operate Eamonn's A Dublin Chipper; PX, the upstairs speakeasy lounge; and the historic eatery the Majestic, all within five blocks from Restaurant Eve.
Sitting at a table at Restaurant Eve, a quaint yet sophisticated 100 seat dining experience located in Old Town, Alexandria, Armstrong talks about some of the celebrities he has cooked for.
He cooked a private dinner for George W. Bush in the White House residence, and hosted a fundraiser at the Majestic “for a very little known senator from Illinois about two years ago, at the beginning of a presidential campaign.” Michelle Obama came back to eat there once she was first lady.
His favorite guest to cook for, however, was the late Senator Ted Kennedy, who he cooked for “at least 100 times at Bistro Bis.” As soon as Kennedy heard Armstrong’s accent, he realized he started introducing him to all of his Senate friends as “our chef.”
“He liked his liver and onions,” Armstrong says.
Armstrong grew up in a suburb of Dublin called Killiney, “Which is where Bono's house is, actually,” he notes with a chuckle. “But we didn't live in that neighborhood. We lived on the other side of town.”
He went to a small, all Gaelic-speaking school, played hurling for the Dublin minors and moved to the United States in 1990, just two weeks short of his 21st birthday. He landed a job at Murphy's Irish Pub in Woodley Park, and the plan was to “earn some fast cash and get out of the restaurant business” and head back to London to attend culinary school.
“That was about 19 years ago,” laughs the man who got his U.S. citizenship about five years ago but still thinks in Irish.
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