By Annie Groer
In August, chef Hamilton Johnson will mark the two-year anniversary of Mallard, his homey Southern restaurant with an unlikely Nordic twist. And he is just a teeny bit anxious.
After all, Honeysuckle, Johnson’s first Washington venture, lasted little more than two years before he reluctantly pulled the plug. “It was in a basement and there was not enough traffic. It was like a death, devastating, and you think, ‘this was my restaurant, and it wasn’t good enough for people.’”
Honeysuckle had replaced the long-running Vidalia, DC’s high-end temple of modern Southern cuisine, founded by Jeffrey Buben, who won the 1999 James Beard award for Best Chef, Mid-Atlantic, and Sallie Buben, his wife and business partner. Johnson’s first job in Washington was at Vidalia, starting as a line cook and rising to chef de cuisine over eight years
“Hamilton wanted to become a leader and be able to practice his craft,” says Buben. “I was a little bit of a mentor, a father figure to him.”
When the Bubens declined to renew their lease, Johnson, now 44, grabbed the chance to be his own boss. He had Honeysuckle’s walls painted a screaming sexy red, hung photos of rock stars, then waited in vain for enough patrons to keep the lights on.
“It was an odd time in Washington in terms of where the puck was moving the energy of the city,” says Buben, 67. “You had the expansion of some of the largest restaurants in DC history. Downtown business lunch was winding down, shifting to The Wharf and City Center. At that time, it was very difficult for an owner-operator downtown,” but easier for a neighborhood small-concept, like the Michelin-starred Dabney in Shaw’s Blagden Alley, and Ris, in West End.
A heartbroken Johnson went home to tiny Inman, S.C., where he says he stayed drunk for quite some time while trying to get his life in order. He returned to Washington and worked at several restaurants but in late 2021, went back to Inman to help his widowed father, a retired textile worker and gifted duck decoy carver, who was battling pancreatic cancer. Two days after Mick Johnson’s final treatment, he died of Covid.
Hamilton Johnson came north once again, this time cooking at several spots around town, including chef Matt Baker’s Michelin-starred Gravitas. In 2024, he became a Neighborhood Restaurant Group partner and chef at the old Birch and Barley, which he renamed Mallard, in honor of his father. Nearly everything on the walls and shelves came out of his childhood home, including nature paintings by his late mother, Carolyn Fowler Johnson, who fulfilled her wish to live long enough to attend his 2003 Johnson and Wales University graduation in Charleston.
In her honor, his first tattoo were her monogram. Today, the six-foot-three Johnson estimates that 80 percent of his 280-pound corpus is tattooed head to foot. “I just really enjoy them. They make me happy.” The largest, most elaborate, and doubtless most painful, is the multi-hued face of Jesus, which occupies the whole of his massive back. (Full disclosure: Johnson is the first interview subject I have ever asked to semi-strip, so I could inspect the waist-up artwork.) There might have been more ink had Johnson not dropped 160 pounds through rigorous workouts, healthy eating and nearly three years of sobriety.
“It’s hard to be a dieting chef because you have to taste everything, right?” he asks with a smile. When preparing a large duck breast for a TV show--first seared in its own grease, then in added butter—he explains simply, “The more fat, the more flavor.”
Over the past 21 months, Johnson has made Mallard his personal sanctuary, and like the body art, its cozy decor evokes memory, loss and hope. “It’s like having my Dad and my Mom here,” he says softly.
But once in the kitchen, Chef--aka Ham or Hambone--is pure beast, as befits a man who honed his craft at Vidalia, Michelin-starred Gravitas and Charleston’s Maverick Southern Kitchens.
In the heart of the eatery-laden Logan Circle neighborhood, Mallard patrons tuck into Sea Island pea dip with duck fat saltines; shrimp and grits laced with pork, ham, scallions and sweet, heat-less Piquillo peppers. Think Chesapeake fried oysters atop creamy deviled-egg aioli, and a chicken-fried confit duck leg encased in a crust so hard it shatters audibly to reveal tender rich dark meat. Dessert, y’all? The Coffee and Cigarettes is a decadent mélange of espresso ice cream, cocoa crusted espresso beans, tobacco caramel, chocolate mousse, macadamia praline, and smoked olive oil, served in a vintage glass ashtray. It’s a tossup whether first to call the dentist, cardiologist or Ozempic prescriber.
Johnson’s love of Nordic food began 13 years ago, when he entered the first of seven Friends and Fun competitions in Finland and Iceland. Last month, Mallard hosted a Taste of Iceland pop-up with Chef Daníel Cochran Jónsson of Reykjavik’s Sushi Social. Three sold-out dinners included arctic char crudo, poached cod loin, grilled lamb fillet and berries with skyr, a tangy Icelandic yogurt-y cheese.
The Southern and Low Country traditions, however, are in Johnson’s DNA. “I grew up in a household where everything was centered around food. My mom was the kind of cook who got recipes from the New York Times and out of books, and always tried new things, whereas my dad was very rustic. For him it was the recipes his mom taught him. I was always around both of those worlds.” To this day, Johnson’s favorite meals draw on the countless variations of his father’s “breakfast for dinner” specialties.
In August, perhaps to celebrate Mallard’s second anniversary, he and Buben will host a Mid-Atlantic Coastal seafood dinner. “Hamilton’s roots are cooking from Charleston and the Low Country, me from Eastern North Carolina and the Outer Banks,” says Buben, who last year joined his protege at Mallard to prepare Vidalia’s greatest hits. In 2024, he and Sallie closed Bistro Bis on Capitol Hill and moved south, where he now helps his son, CIA-trained chef Mac Buben, run a large, casual seafood restaurant in Nags Head, N.C.
But even amidst the sold-out pop-up events, crowded brunches and dinners, something still niggles. “It’s always going to be in the back of my head here. What if this fails? What if Mallard doesn’t make it?”
Annie Groer was a Washington Post staff writer and columnist whose work has also appeared in the New York Times, LA Times, New Republic, and other print, digital, and broadcast outlets. She twice represented DC in the National Chicken Cooking Contest.