CuizineQuest.com About Us

CuizineQuest.com Founder: Chef Richard M. King, CEC, CCE Certified Executive Chef (American Culinary Federation): 11 years experience as professional cook and chef Certified Culinary Educator: 10 Years experience as Chef Instructor at a private cooking school in Northern Virginia Graduate, Philadelphia Restaurant School (1988) Scholastic Degrees and Honors: BA, MA, MPhil, Fulbright Scholar, Woodrow Wilson Scholar, Columbia University Travelling Fellow

My first cooking experience came at the age of 12 when I attempted to make Rice Krispy squares. Before adding the butter, I preheated the pot on high heat for twenty minutes. I then dropped the whole stick of butter into the pot and watched in horror as a thick column of smoke and steam the precise diameter of the cooking pot rose instantly to the ceiling, billowing out and quickly filling the entire kitchen with clouds of dark, noxious gases. The entire stick of butter had vaporized in a flash. I remember grabbing the pot handle with both hands and running out the back door as my mother tore screaming up the basement stairs. Anxious neighbors started appearing in their back yards, asking if they should call the fire department as dense curls of smoke poured from our back door.

The next time I dared to cook anything was about a decade and a half later, long after I had left home. Too bad, because my mother was an excellent cook, and I could have learned tons from her. Well, it took two years living in Paris as a student to inspire me to enter the kitchen once more. Strolling through the open-air markets with their wonderful fresh produce displays, experiencing the pre-dawn mystery of Les Halles, the central Paris market (still in the center of town at that point in time), partying with my French student friends who always made great soups out of next to nothing -- these were the memories that drew me into the kitchen upon returning home from France.

Still, I had no intention of cooking for a living. I read Julia Child, Craig Claiborne, Jacques Pepin, Elizabeth David and Edouard de Pomiane, among many others. As a seasonal antiques dealer, with shops in Maine and Florida, I spent my leisure time cooking, falling in love with kingfish (char-grilled, of course), wahoo, tilefish, wolfish, monkfish, scallops, halibut and lobster (the Maine variety only….). I tried to invent new recipes, froze the wonderful tiny Maine shrimp (79 cents per pound!) that I packed in small plastic bags, grew tarragon (until I found out I had a huge plot of the tasteless Russian variety), and attempted in vain to kill those mint plants that had taken over my back yard. One winter during the early 1980’s, during a lull in the antiques business -- a recession I think we called it -- I took off again for Paris, this time to study cooking. I enrolled for classes at La Varenne Cooking School and at the Cordon Bleu. I also apprenticed for a time with Master Chef Pierre Vedel at his restaurant Chez Pierre Vedel. I visited Rungis, the new market near the Charles de Gaulle Airport, where they had deposited the former Les Halles when they moved it from Paris. (It is now so immense that there is an entire bus route just for the market itself.)

Inspired anew by my six-month cooking sojourn in France, and rapidly tiring of the cutthroat antiques business that I had been involved in for over a decade, I enrolled in a professional cooking school. After graduation I moved to Washington, D.C. and began my career with a two-year stint as grill cook in fine dining restaurants -- namely, The River Club and 1789 Restaurant, nearby Georgetown University. I then entered the catering field, always a very active scene in Washington, and worked for several different companies before becoming Executive Chef of Washington Parties Catering. In the mid-1990s I made the switch to Chef Instructor and I have been teaching cooking in Northern Virginia ever since.

This website is dedicated to the memory of my parents, Sue K. King and Richard M. King.