Rock star chef Kwame Onwuachi is making his much-heralded return to D.C. this week, opening a luxury restaurant on the banks of the Potomac.
By Warren Rojas
Dogon’s official debut inside the lush Salamander Hotel near the Wharf on Monday night marks the latest peak in Onwuachi’s roller-coaster ride of a career. Other highlights of note: a breakthrough appearance on season 13 of Top Chef (2015); the rocky launch of Shaw Bijou (late 2016) and its spectacular flameout 75 days later (early 2017); a defiant comeback bid at Kith and Kin (late 2017); publishing a critically acclaimed memoir (early 2019); winning a James Beard Award (mid 2019); dabbling in fast-casual dining (late 2018-late 2019); leaving Kith and Kin (summer 2020); becoming an executive producer for Food & Wine (early 2021); co-creating the Black chef-centric annual event Family Reunion with hospitality maven Sheila Johnson (summer 2021); opening Tatiana in New York City (late 2022); having the New York Times hail Tatiana as the city’s best restaurant of the year twice in a row (2023, 2024); and, now, introducing D.C. diners to Dogon.
Johnson, founder and chief executive of Salamander Collection, isn’t interested in tempering the hype around the Afro-Caribbean dishes Onwuachi will serve at Dogon.
“People are going to be talking about the flavors that come out of every single one of his dishes from now to eternity,” she said in an interview. Johnson compared a meal at the restaurant to the experience of “going to the opera.”
Kith and Kin alum Martel Stone, who will serve as chef de cuisine at Dogon, was no less exuberant. “I expect Dogon to hit like a wave,” he said, before switching his meteorological metaphor to “a typhoon.”
Onwuachi, a 34-year-old Nigerian American who grew up in New York City, is more understated — if not with his cooking, at least with his words — and isn’t interested in making comparisons to any of his other restaurants. “I think it’s going to be its own thing,” he says of Dogon.
He said that while existing fans may spot “some through lines” at the new restaurant, “This is definitely a brand-new menu, a brand-new soul, a brand-new energy. A new story that I’m trying to tell.”
Which is not to say to there’s no connection to previous stories.
At least not as Stone tells it. Even four years after the fact, Stone says the shuttering of Kith and Kin still haunted him.
“I feel like there was a huge void left in the Afro-Caribbean fine-dining space,” he said of the pandemic-era closure that came, per his recollection, “just as we were hitting our stride.”
Stone discovered he wasn’t alone in mourning that loss when Onwuachi pulled him aside at the 2022 Family Reunion. “The idea was to bring the cuisine of the diaspora back to D.C. — in a bigger way,” Stone says of their shared goal.
Part of the motivation, according to Stone, was ensuring that their preferred cooking style didn’t fall off the map. He said that while some D.C. diners cherish Afro-Caribbean as their comfort food, one rarely encounters a pure distillation of the cuisine in high-end restaurants.
“You can get curry goat from a carryout. But sitting down and seeing a bowl of that goat and the roti next to you on the table creates that sense of home that you don’t normally get at restaurants that are of that level,” Stone said.
The last few years have seen a spike in interest in Afro-Caribbean food. While local mainstays like Teddy’s Roti Shop and Sunrise Caribbean Restaurant have served homier Afro-Caribbean dishes for decades, culinary trailblazers have cropped up all over town. Some of the up-and-comers include Chef Trini’s in Spring Valley, Spice Kitchen in Brentwood, St. James on 14th Street NW, Bammy’s in Navy Yard and Cane in the Atlas District.
“With the boom of lots of Afro-Caribbean restaurants having the spotlight, it’ll just help add to that,” Onwuachi says, adding that he’s delighted to help “fuel the movement.”
Certain dishes have followed Onwuachi throughout his career, a culinary calling card featuring ever-evolving versions of piri piri-spiked salads, multilayered mushroom dishes, spicy Mom Duke’s shrimp, curry-drenched proteins, whole fish preparations, Jollof rice and assorted rum cakes.
Also, Johnson orchestrated one encore performance, according to Onwuachi: “She loved the coco bread from Kith and Kin,” he says, “So that’s definitely making a guest appearance.”
But even that’s been massaged a bit, Stone said, explaining that Dogon’s Jamaican-style treat is now laced with coconut fat and malted sorghum butter. “We just wanted to have a more unctuous sort of bite,” he said of the upgrade from the crispier version available at Tatiana.
Other adaptations Stone is excited to send out to customers’ tables include a steamed branzino swimming in a coconut curry made with Cajun shrimp stock, kombu [Japanese kelp], bonito and fresh herbs, as well as a blue crab and plantain hoecake pairing plucked from deeply personal experiences.
“There’s a depth of flavor in this curry that I haven’t had in anything that I’ve eaten of Kwame’s before,” Stone said of the former.
Award-winning cocktail guru Derek Brown crafted a drink menu that showcases Black-owned spirits, African-made gins, low-alcohol Caribbean liqueurs, zero-proof Mexican tequila substitutes, traditional American whiskey and experimental mixers. He stressed that almost every cocktail has a nonalcoholic corollary.
Dogon was designed to honor Benjamin Banneker, the cartographer and mathematician who helped survey D.C.’s boundaries in the late 1700s. Banneker’s Malawian grandfather was an enslaved man believed to have come from the Dogon people of West Africa.
Johnson said the wholesale renovation of the Salamander, her debut D.C. destination, is all about cultural immersion — whether patrons choose to beeline for Dogon, peruse the curated showpieces and photographs sprinkled throughout or linger outside to watch the Potomac River roll by.
“What you’re going to see is just the whole history of Washington, D.C., its art and how we’ve been able to collaborate in bringing the culinary, the architectural and just the art storytelling of Washington, D.C., there,” she said.
And she fully expects that the buzz around Onwuachi’s return will have a ripple effect around town.
“I think we’re going to be able to even promote more dining experiences throughout the city,” Johnson says. “We want it to become the culinary capital of the world.”
For his part, Onwuachi didn’t mention anything about world domination. He offered instead: “We just want to add to the already beautiful array of restaurants that are here in D.C.”
