Restaurateur Jeff Black’s popular 14th Street restaurant, Pearl Dive, has a new chef de cuisine: Austin Ginsberg. The toque most recently cooked at sister eatery Black’s Bar an Kitchen in Bethesda, as well as 1789 and Baltimore’s Woodberry Kitchen.
The majority of Pearl Dive’s menu is constant—that fried chicken isn’t going anywhere—but Ginsberg has found room to play. New dishes include a beet salad with pickled summer peaches, and what Ginsberg informally calls “pig cake.” The kitchen crew marinates and slow-roasts a whole local pig, and then removes the meat and skin, pressing portions together for individual, cake-like servings. The pork is crisped to-order, and served with house-made apple butter, bacon-y Brussels sprouts, and a granny smith salad.
In addition to the Pearl Dive menu, Ginsberg is also adding to the lineup at Black Jack above. Look for new bar snacks like blackened fish tacos in the coming weeks.
Anna Spiegel covers the dining and drinking scene in her native DC. Prior to joining Washingtonian in 2010, she attended the French Culinary Institute and Columbia University’s MFA program in New York, and held various cooking and writing positions in NYC and in St. John, US Virgin Islands.
