Irish chef Cathal Armstrong cooking up a storm in Washington, D.C.

Armstrong describes his life as the “quintessential American dream story.” He applied for a green card in the Morrison visa lottery, eventually landing one of the visas aimed directly at Irish immigrants.

It would not be the only time his Irish heritage would help him out. He met his wife when he was making pizzas part time at a restaurant she managed, and they “went out dancing one night and one thing led to another.”

“The movie The Commitments had just come out and she had just seen it, and everybody was all enthralled with Irish at the time and horses in elevators and that sort of thing,” Armstrong says. “So I think she was a little smitten with me because of the movie.

Now his wife, who was born in the Philippines, is “close enough to Irish citizenship,” and Armstrong is teaching his young kids, Eve, 10, and Eamonn, seven, a few Irish words.

“Seas suas,” he says in an airy accent. “Stand up.”

“Sí sios -- sit down.”

“They're good words to start with kids,” he says, erupting into that easy smile of his.

Talking to Armstrong is bit like pulling up a stool at your local pub and lucking into good company -- there is a passion and excitement underlying everything he says, especially when he's talking now about his own early and unlikely introduction to food.

His dad was a tour operator, and had people working for him “who lived in Benidorm, the Canary Island and Costa Rica and Costa Brava, Tunisia and Greece.”

His father, “a great natural cook and a hobby gardener,” was always learning from his friends how to cook paella and couscous and “all this crazy stuff no one in Ireland ate.”

“We would be sitting at the table on six out of seven nights, and he'd say, 'No one in Ireland is eating this dish,' and it was true,” Armstrong says.

Even the fish they ate on Fridays, “because that was the Catholic rule,” received special treatment. “My friends, all of them, had frozen fish fingers,” he says.

“But that would be sacrilegious to my father who went to the fish market on Friday to buy fresh fish, caught from the sea that day.”

Armstrong has stayed true to his father's ideal.

“Cathal Armstrong really cares about the provenance of the food he serves at Restaurant Eve,” says food priestess and Chez Panisse impresario Alice Waters. “He serves local, organic fruits and vegetables, grass-fed beef, and even has a kitchen garden growing out back.”

Waters came to Washington, D.C. shortly after Obama's inauguration. She came to visit the gardens at Monticello and also cut a straight path across the Potomac to Armstrong’s Restaurant Eve, in Alexandria, Virginia’s Old Town.

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