No.68 Project

Robert Egger is the Founder and President of the DC Central Kitchen, the nation’s first “community kitchen”, where unemployed men and women learn marketable culinary skills while donated food is converted into balanced meals. Since opening in 1989, the DCCK has distributed over 20 million meals and helped 700 men and women gain full-time employment.

Robert served as the Co-Convener of the first Nonprofit Congress in 2006, and was the founding Chair of the Mayor’s Commission on Nutrition, and Street Sense, Washington’s “homeless” newspaper.

Robert has been on the Non Profit Times “50 Most Powerful and Influential Nonprofit Leaders” list in 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009. He was the recipient of the Restaurant Association of Metropolitan Washington’s 2007 “Lifetime Achievement” award and the 2004 James Beard Foundation “Humanitarian of the Year” award. He has also been named an Oprah Angel, a Washingtonian of the Year, a Point of Light and one of the Ten Most Caring People in America, by the Caring Institute. He is also a 14-gallon blood donor to the American Red Cross. Read More…

Barton Seaver has been at the helm of some of Washington, DC’s most acclaimed restaurants. He brought the idea of sustainable seafood to DC at Hook restaurant in Georgetown. After Hook, he opened Blue Ridge restaurant, where he was named as Esquire’s 2009 Chef of the Year.

His focus now is on larger issues of ocean sustainability as it relates to eating. He was recently named a Fellow with the Blue Ocean Institute, to help link the environmental community with real-life, delicious applications of an eco-friendly ethic. He works with the Ocean Now program at the National Geographic Society to influence the practices of large corporations and consumers alike toward a more responsible and sustainable sourcing ethic. Barton is an appointed member of the Mayor’s Council on Nutrition in Washington, DC, where he is helping to craft a wellness policy for District residents.

For as long as he can remember Eric Weiner wanted to be a foreign correspondent. So he could hardly believe his good fortune when, one day in 1993, NPR dispatched him to India as the network’s first full-time correspondent in that country. Weiner spent two of the best years of his life based in New Delhi, covering everything from an outbreak of bubonic plague to India’s economic reforms, before moving on to other postings in Jerusalem and Tokyo.

Over the past decade, he’s reported from more than 30 countries, most of them profoundly unhappy. He traveled to Iraq several times during the reign of Saddam Hussein. He was in Afghanistan in 2001, when the Taliban regime fell.

He’s also served as a correspondent for NPR in New York, Miami and Washington, D.C. Weiner is a former reporter for The New York Times and was a Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University. He was part of a team of NPR reporters that won a 1994 Peabody award for a series of investigative reports about the U.S. tobacco industry.

His commentary has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Slate and The New Republic, among other publications. He is author of the New York Times bestseller The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World .

Owen Thomson is lead bartender at Café Atlántico, José Andrés pioneering Nuevo Latino restaurant in the Penn Quarter neighborhood of Washington, DC. Thomson oversees the bar at Café Atlántico and is responsible for the development of new drinks. In the spring of 2010, Thomson introduced the “Farm to Glass” cocktail, a weekly concoction based on seasonal ingredients purchased at the Penn Quarter FRESHFARM Market. His bar program at Café Atlántico has been featured in Imbibe, Washington Post, and several industry journals.

For the four years prior to joining Café Atlantico, Thomson ran the bar program at Bourbon in Washington, DC a high volume neighborhood bar with a selection of over 200 whiskies and a focus on craft cocktails. His bar program at Bourbon was written up in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, Esquire, Wine Enthusiast, DC Modern Luxury and various other publications. Read More…

Already a star chef when he opened Equinox, Todd Gray is a top culinary talent in the nation’s capital and an avid promoter of local, seasonal mid-Atlantic foods. Known for breathing new life into historical recipes, Gray developed Equinox’s distinct cuisine, enhancing Virginia-Piedmont ingredients and recipes with his classical training. His refined taste, stellar reputation and high standards landed him the culinary director position with BET co-founder Shelia Johnson’s Salamander Hospitality. There he is overseeing development and implementation of an elegant menu of regional Virginia specialty dishes for the 340-acre Salamander Resort & Spa, slated to open in Middleburg, Virginia in 2011.

Gray has earned many awards for his artistry and inspired menu combinations, including the Restaurant Association of Metropolitan Washington’s (RAMW) 2008 award for Best Fine Dining; five nominations for the James Beard Foundation’s Best Chef, Mid-Atlantic award and eight nominations for RAMW’s Chef of the Year. Other honors include top ratings in the ZAGAT Guide Wine Spectator’s Award of Excellence ten years in a row and numerous Awards of Excellence from the Distinguished Restaurants of North America. Read More…

Chef Frederik De Pue is known throughout Washington DC’s dynamic food scene as an international trendsetter. He translates his global culinary experience through an eclectic, yet approachable menu at Smith Commons.

Born and raised in Belgium, Chef Frederik trained at the Hotel School Ter Duinen and worked at several top European restaurants. He worked under Chef Alain Ducasse at Louis XV and later became Sous Chef at Alain Chapel. In 1998, at age 21, he joined Yves Mattagne’s Sea Grill in Brussels and worked there for three years. In 2001, he traveled to Washington, DC to become the Executive Chef of the European Commission Delegation Ambassador. Chef Frederik was highly praised in the diplomatic circles where he would spend the next five years creating one of the most exceptional dining tables in the Embassy world. Read More…

Photo by Tracy Sham

The former Frugal Traveler columnist for the New York Times, Matt Gross now writes the “Getting Lost” series for the paper, the “Voyager” column for GetCurrency.com, and various other stories for Saveur and Afar magazines. Along with two other journalists, he also writes about parenting at DadWagon.com. Born in Concord, Massachusetts, and raised up and down the eastern seaboard, he now lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Jean, and daughter, Sasha.

Defying much of his formal photography training from the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles, Jonas Lara has made a career tilting his camera towards the unconventional terrain of urban landscapes.

Lara strongly believes he shares a visual language with architects, engineers, painters and other artists who challenge the conventionality of gravity and space.

His fascination for and collaboration with other artists is evident in his emerging artist portrait series and his extensive portfolio of architectural photography. Lara’s camera has pointed its unique angled lens at structures on behalf of such clients as Escher Gunewardena, Patrick Tighe as well as Nike. He is now based in New York City.

Genevieve Erin O’Brien is a Vietnamese/Irish/American artist, culinary adventurer, community organizer, and popular educator. O’Brien lives and works in Los Angeles and Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

She holds an MFA in Studio Art/Performance from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has recently been conducting research for a new body of art work in Vietnam as a Fulbright Fellow in 2009. O’Brien uses performance, video and installation to explore notions of “home” and “homeland”. As a mixed race child of Vietnamese immigrant mother and an Irish-American father, she investigates issues such as war and memory, transnational identity and belonging, and multiple identities and its attendant baggage. Using food, humor, narrative and conceptual structures, she develops work that is invested in collective healing from trauma, whether personal or inherited to further social justice and cultural understanding. Read More…

Amanda Hesser is a co-founder of cooking site food52.com. She has been a food columnist and editor at the New York Times for more than a decade, and currently writes Recipe Redux for the Sunday Magazine. Hesser has written two award-winning books — The Cook and the Gardener and Cooking for Mr. Latte — and edited the New York Times Magazines published collection of food essays, Eat, Memory. Her most recent book is The Essential New York Times Cookbook, a compilation of recipes from the New York Times going back to the 1850′s. Hesser is also a founder of Plodt.com.

826DC is a chapter of 826 National. Co-founded by award-winning author Dave Eggers and award-winning educator Nínive Calegari, 826 National is a nonprofit tutoring, writing, and publishing organization with locations in eight cities across the country. Their goal is to assist students ages six to eighteen with their writing skills, and to help teachers get their classes excited about writing. Their work is based on the understanding that great leaps in learning can happen with one-on-one attention, and that strong writing skills are fundamental to future success.

826DC was founded as Capitol Letters Writing Center in 2008 and re-opened as 826DC in October 2010. 826DC serves students from all over the Greater Washington, DC area. The center is based in the neighborhood of Columbia Heights, which has a diverse mix of African-American and Latin-American communities. The neighborhood is also home to about 17 public and public charter schools, putting 826DC at the center of a dense student population. 826DC also opened their storefront, The Museum of Unnatural History, in October 2010. The museum storefront will serve as a gateway to the community and draw in even more students to programming such as after-school tutoring, field trips, workshops, and student publishing.

Opened: October 2010
Serves: DC Public Schools
Neighborhood: Columbia Heights
Number of Volunteers: 250
Most Recent Publication: Get Used to the Seats — A Complete Survival Guide for Freshmen, written by seniors at Woodrow Wilson and Cardozo high schools
Storefront: The Museum of Unnatural History
Staff: Joe Callahan, Mariam Al-Shawaf, Kira Wisniewski
Board of Directors: Holly Jones, Matthew Klam, Steven Oxman, Marcela Sanchez, David Wakelyn

For more details on 826DC, check out 826DC.org.