D.C. chef Rob Rubba of plant-based Oyster Oyster nabs top Beard award
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The top honors at Monday night’s James Beard awards — the most prestigious in the United States’ food industry — went to a chef whose elegant cuisine doesn’t include a bit of meat or poultry or a drop of heavy cream. Wp Get the full experience. Choose your plan ArrowRight Rob Rubba, the Washington-based chef behind the sustainability-focused and (mostly) vegetarian restaurant Oyster Oyster in the Shaw neighborhood, took home the title of “outstanding chef,” an accolade that adds more luster to his acclaimed cooking: Oyster Oyster earned the No. 1 slot in Post food critic Tom Sietsema’s 2021 dining guide and in the same year was given a Michelin star.
Rubba, 41, said the recognition is validation of his approach — which initially had prompted “tilted heads” among his industry peers and some potential investors to tell him “I was out of my mind.” He credits a broadened perspective from diners and from the James Beard Foundation — which has recently overhauled its awards program to focus on diversity and equity, and has demonstrated to commitment to ideals including “environmental sustainability” — for making it possible.
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“It doesn’t have to be all luxury items on a plate to be recognized,” he said. “You can cook with plants and impress the world.”
Rubba hopes the award — which has previously gone to luminaries such as Tom Colicchio, José Andrés and Suzanne Goin — will show other restaurateurs what’s possible, even when so many of the traditional hallmarks of fining dining are off the menu. “It makes me want to keep focused and inspire others to do this,” he said. “I hope the thing I got recognized for is no longer novel a few years from now.”
Rubba’s reputation was built, in part, on a carnivorous foundation. After cooking in restaurants from New York to Las Vegas, he launched his career in Washington with the Neighborhood Restaurant Group, helming the kitchens at Tallulah and then Hazel, where he was known for elaborate duck-themed tasting menus, citrus-glazed ribs and foie gras-accented zucchini bread.
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He gave up meat himself in 2017 while still turning out pork-kimchi ragu and sausage dishes at Hazel as part of what he calls a later-in-life conversion. It began, he said, when he started scrutinizing the restaurant’s deliveries. “I was looking at the all this product coming into the kitchen, and I started to do the math,” he said. “It wasn’t sustainable, it wasn’t humane — and I knew I needed to make a change, and not just for myself.”
He started noticing what went into the restaurant’s trash cans. “I just started seeing all this stuff that was just going to go into a landfill,” he said. “It creates a closed loop.”
Eventually, Rubba paired up with restaurateur Max Kuller, who was behind the now-shuttered Spanish tapas spot Estadio, to build a restaurant from the ground up that reflected his newly evolved ethos. Oyster Oyster opened in 2020, amid the pandemic shutdowns, its name taken from oyster mushrooms as well as the bivalve that constitutes the only animal on the menu. The restaurant now operates with a tasting menu, a $95-a-head selection of eight or more courses starring locally sourced produce and oysters (because they don’t have central nervous systems — and therefore don’t feel pain — oysters are fair game for some vegetarians and vegans).
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And Rubba has morphed into a sustainability obsessive who waxes on about composting and the virtues of biodynamic farming with the same enthusiasm as he does his latest delivery from a Virginia farm. There’s no sous-vide in his kitchen (the baggies involved are a no-go) and you won’t find single-use plastic anything.
Oyster Oyster is among a growing number of upscale plant-forward restaurants, such as Manhattan’s Dirt Candy and ABCV, Philadelphia’s Vedge and Los Angeles’s Crossroads Kitchen. Eleven Madison Park, considered one of the world’s best restaurants, made headlines in 2021 when chef Daniel Humm — who is also a previous winner of the award Rubba took home on Monday — announced he was moving to a nearly all-vegetarian menu.
Monday’s black-tie awards show in Chicago took place during a tumultuous stretch for the Beard awards, which has drawn questions over its handling of investigations of at least two chefs who were considered for awards and then became the subject of ethics complaints following accusations of misconduct.
“With growth, there’s always some struggles,” Rubba said. “It’s like how I call myself an ‘imperfect environmentalist’ — I don’t always get everything right. But if the effort is there, you’re doing the right thing.”
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Source: The Washington Post
