FOOD YOUNG & HUNGRY Darrow Montgomery
Fashion Forward D’Angelo Mobley’s journey to landing his first executive chef job is one of passion and perseverance. By Laura Hayes @LauraHayesDC “An Utz potato chip with caviar on it, that’s me,” D’Angelo Mobley says. But the metaphor the executive chef of La Jambe uses to describe himself has less to do with food than it does with fashion. He defines his personal style as refined rugged. “I’ll buy a $600 pair of jeans and put them on with a shirt I have from high school. I spend more time looking at clothes than I do recipes if I’m being brutally honest.” Mobley, 30, fantasizes about one day being able to afford to wear $900 designer shirts in the kitchen and not giving a damn if he stains them, kind of like brides who intentionally trash their wedding gowns. “Beautiful pieces and I don’t care if I get ketchup or tomato sauce on them,” he says. Part of his look is the mosaic of cheffy tattoos that cover his body, among them a cleaver, bluefin tuna bones, a broken plate, kitchen tape, and shot of whiskey. “WELL DONE” is scrawled across his knuckles in a green font that belongs on a retro microwave display. It’s his favorite, even though the first “L” scuffed off after several kitchen accidents. “Oui,” what he’d say while taking an order from a French chef, is inked just below his right eye. Mobley always thought he’d have a future in the arts and was eager to get started when he graduated from Eleanor Roosevelt High School in Greenbelt in 2010. But shortly after he got his diploma, while celebrating in Ocean City, Maryland, with friends, he made a mistake that altered the course of his life. “I got locked up during beach week,” he says. “The offense was a stolen vehicle. A friend of mine took it, but I knew it was stolen when I got in the car. We went to a hotel party and he must have stolen one of the girls’ keys. I was 17 when I got caught and I turned 18 in jail.” He spent those two months reading 10 books and completing 5,000 push-ups. Robert Greene’s The 48 Laws of Power left a lasting impression. Although his incarceration was relatively brief, Mobley walked out with a felony on his record. “Somebody told me that kitchens don’t check your background,” Mobley says. “OK, if you’re not going to check, boom.”
La Jambe Executive Chef D’Angelo Mobley Mobley took a job at Carolina Kitchen in Hyattsville, but was assigned to the dining room. The local chain asks employees to greet customers with an enthusiastic “Welcome, welcome, welcome!” Mobley was having none of that and grew determined to find work in an actual kitchen. About a decade later, Mobley has his first executive chef job at a French wine bar in Shaw where he’s plotting his future and bringing cooks with similar backgrounds up with him. His journey to this point has been a self-led odyssey through some of the District’s most popular restaurants and the kitchens of its most demanding chefs. After his first cooking job at the former Gordon Biersch in Navy Yard, Mobley caught his first break. Without knowing Erik BrunerYang, he walked into Maketto as it was preparing to open on H Street NE in 2015. “I said, ‘Man, I’d love to work in this kitchen,’” Mobley says. Bruner-Yang told him to come back Tuesday ready to work. Soon enough, Mobley was manning the fry station, responsible for the restaurant’s addictive fried chicken with five-spice caramel. “I had in the back of my head that I have a felony on my record now so I have to do a little more so people don’t pay any attention to it,” Mobley says. “I’m trying to make this go away and have my work overshadow the mistake I made at one point. [Bruner-Yang] opened the door for me and I just ran through it. I was coming in early and leaving late.” “For D’Angelo, it was the passion that was really there, but he hadn’t had a lot of
opportunities to work in a kitchen,” BrunerYang says. “He had all that desire. My goal with him was that it’s more than just cooking. It’s about structure. It’s nice to see him work his way through kitchens—he’s always had a lot of potential and I’m excited to see it all come to fruition.” Mobley’s next big job was as a line cook at Arroz under executive chef Michael Rafidi. The downtown restaurant that served inventive Spanish cuisine was short-lived because Mike Isabella owned it. The restaurateur gradually lost all of his restaurants after a top manager alleged “extraordinary” sexual harassment in a lawsuit. “It was probably the roughest year of my life, but I know so much thanks to Rafidi,” Mobley says. Instead of going to cooking school, Mobley learned on the job. “A lot of chefs who went to culinary school suck,” he says. “Those years of school, I promise you, I got a trick from my experience that will cut that shit in half.” If anything, Mobley argues that aspiring chefs should get a business degree. But his education came from “Rafidi, reading, and YouTube University.” “Anything I know gastronomically, like fluid gels and reverse fluid gels, I learned on YouTube,” Mobley says. He gets anxious when he doesn’t recognize terms his peers use. “Back at Arroz, I was still kind of green,” he says. “People were using words I didn’t know what the fuck they meant, so I’d ask to go to the bathroom and I’d go google it and come back and act like I knew what they were talking about. Words
like ‘brunoise’ and ‘confit.’ All these French terms. I knew how to do it, but I never heard the words.” Rafidi is now the chef and owner of Albi in Navy Yard. He says Mobley’s thirst for culinary knowledge reminded him of himself as a young cook. “He had tunnel vision a little and wasn’t always seeing the big picture,” Rafidi says. “Like, ‘Get out of my way, I want to learn.’ He had that same attitude that I did, a little brash at times, but I love that he’s taken the next step.” Mobley worked at a couple other Isabella restaurants, first as a junior sous-chef at Requin at the Wharf and later as the souschef at Graffiato in Chinatown. “I was at Graffiato when they handed everybody the [Washingtonian] magazine and said, ‘Do you see this shit? Yeah, we’re done.’” The 2018 cover depicted Isabella’s face peeking out from behind a fried egg. The story inside took readers through how Isabella’s empire fell. “He’s an idiot,” Mobley says now. Before the pandemic hit, Mobley passed through the kitchens of American Son, Maialino Mare, and Shibuya Eatery. When restaurants closed their dining rooms because of COVID-19, Mobley launched a home popup called Dirty Birds. “One reason I had to move out of my old apartment is because they thought it was drug traffic when it was just me literally selling chicken wings and lo mein and tacos,” he says. “It probably did look a little suspicious, but mind your own business. It’s a pandemic.” Now he lives in Columbia Heights, not
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