ARLINGTON, Va. – Sometimes friends or customers will ask Tracy O’Grady for the recipe for one of her wonderful dishes. This always gives her pause.
“I don’t read cookbooks,” she says. “And I don’t use recipes.”
A small smile passes over her face.
“I am the recipe,” she says.
That isn’t a boast. It is simply a fact. O’Grady, 54, is known as one of the finest chefs in Washington, D.C. She earned her acclaim by hard work, of course, but also with an innate sense of what works. It is something that came naturally to her while growing up in South Buffalo, where her mother’s mother served soul-filling clam chowder on cold winter days.
Her father worked as a brakeman on the railroad and her mother as an instructor for the city’s parks department. Her father died when Tracy was a teen, and her mother made sure to keep her and her younger brothers, Patrick and Michael, at their neighborhood Catholic schools.
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“I went to St. Thomas Aquinas and Mount Mercy,” O’Grady says. “My brothers went to St. Tommy’s and Timon. I walked three blocks one way to grammar school, and three blocks the other way to high school. Caz Park was nearby, too. It was really a great place to grow up.”
She knew by junior year at Mount Mercy that she wanted to go to culinary school, but her family had other ideas.
“We were working-class people, and they thought going to college to learn how to cook was like going to college to learn to be a maid. And I guess maybe years ago it was like that. They couldn’t see where the culinary arts were going. So we decided I would go to Canisius. It was Catholic, Jesuit and local.”
She majored in communications and, in her last semester, moved to Washington for an externship that fell through. That was January 1989, with the inauguration of George H.W. Bush days away. And it turned out the best French restaurant in town at the time – Le Pavillon – needed extra help, so she took a job there.
“I told them, ‘I don’t know how to cook, and I don’t speak French,’ ” she says. “They hired me anyway. They said they could teach me.”
But she needed the credits from her externship to graduate, and this was not a job in communications. She discussed that with her adviser – Marilyn Watt, chair of the communications department – who decided to bend the rules.
“I knew in my heart that I wanted to cook,” O’Grady says. “And Dr. Watt said, ‘Well, then maybe this is what you should do.’ God bless her, because this is what I have been doing ever since.”
O’Grady was a quick learner, and she liked her new gig so much that she told Yannick Cam, the celebrity chef at Le Pavillon, that she wanted to go to culinary school.
“He said, ‘Why would you pay for that? You can just keep learning on the job.’ What I didn’t know at the time was that I could learn way more working for him than I could at any culinary school.”
She stayed at Le Pavillon for a year, then moved to Galileo, another top D.C. restaurant, and then to Kinkead’s, a newly opened fine-dining seafood restaurant. She worked there for 10 years under Robert Kinkead Jr., another of Washington’s top chefs.
As it happens, a fellow by the name of Brian Wolken worked for her at Kinkead’s, but they didn’t much like each other, so he soon left for another restaurant. Then, a few years later, at a Fourth of July boat party on the Potomac River for Kinkead’s staffers, O’Grady and Wolken met again. He was there as the guest of another staffer – and this time they hit it off. They talked for hours that day, and started dating soon after.
They got married a few years later. Kinkead walked her down the aisle. This was at Willow, the restaurant that O’Grady was opening later that same day. They had 125 guests, a three-course dinner and a four-tier cake. She was bride and caterer all in one. And then she opened the doors to customers, still in her white satin-and-chiffon wedding dress. Who else has ever had a day like that?
Willow was a hit, but the restaurant business can be brutal. Rising rents caused it to close after 10 years. O’Grady and Wolken next ran Campono, an Italian restaurant in the Watergate complex, steps from the Kennedy Center. But Campono closed, too, when theaters went dark during the pandemic.
O’Grady next worked at 1789, a venerable restaurant near Georgetown University that is named for the year that the school opened. She had come from the Jesuit college in Buffalo to the Jesuit college in Washington.
And then came a call from the owners of Green Pig Bistro, a restaurant in suburban Arlington, Va., not far from where Willow had been. O’Grady is now its executive chef and her husband its director of operations. The bistro’s website says it features “classic rustic French cooking with a decidedly American push.”
Imagine their surprise last month when Tom Sietsema, the Washington Post’s exacting food critic, named Green Pig one of the best restaurants in the Washington region.
“Talk about a good neighbor,” Sietsema writes. “In the short time she’s been the chef here, Tracy O’Grady has reached out to Arlington” with steaks, house-made breads and pastas, and a long dessert list. “A stack of high chairs in the dining room rolls out the welcome mat for young families.”
As it happens, a young family is moving in next door this week. Our son and daughter-in-law and their two kids just bought a 100-year-old house with a stone wall in the backyard. On the other side of that wall is the patio of their favorite restaurant.
“I’m happy to know our new neighbors have a Buffalo connection,” O’Grady says.
The Post’s opening line cited her as a good neighbor. Small wonder in that. She is from Buffalo, city of same.
