Tuesday, March 11, 7:00 P.M.
Members $95, guests $120

“Some of the best of the 20th century’s advances in dining are packaged in this one small Adams-Morgan restaurant,” Phyllis Richman wrote about Cashion’s Eat Place in the Washington Post Magazine’s Annual Dining Guide. Not only does it combine “contemporary American-eclectic cooking that relies on the classic techniques of Europe,” “home-grown ingredients,” and “flavors from around the world,” she continued, “it’s the work of a chef who’s both female and Harvard-educated—neither of which would have been possible much earlier in our history.” Richman reminds us that having women run our restaurants and our wineries is still a big deal and a fairly recent development. Both Ann Cashion and Laurence Faller, who will be bringing the wines for this dinner from her family’s winery Domaine Weinbach, offer us culinary and oenological excellence, with a woman’s touch.

Cashion started cooking in the San Francisco restaurant scene while attending graduate school at Stanford. She traveled to Italy to apprentice under Francesco Ricchi outside Florence and then moved to Dreux, France, to study production methods for viennoiserie, which she implemented upon her return to the States at the opening of the bakery chain Oh-la-la! in San Francisco. Cashion traveled east to Washington, D.C., to the capitol kitchen of Restaurant Nora. She was the opening chef of hit restaurants Dakota, Austin Grill, South Austin Grill, and Jaleo, before leaving to open Cashion’s Eat Place. Her empire expanded in 1999 when she opened the casual seafoodery, Johnny’s Half Shell. Her cooking has inspired raves from local critics such as Richman, who loves Cashion’s signature dishes of roasted-to-order chicken and “splendid” gumbo. Tom Sietsema wrote in the Washington Post that Cashion was “One of Washington’s best practitioners of modern American cooking—and one of the city’s most conscientious cooks, period.”

Since taking over the winemaking at her family winery, Domaine Weinbach, in 1993, Laurence Faller has helped to make the estate’s wines some of the best in Alsace. “Weinbach wines possess an elegance underscored by subtle power,” according to Wine Spectator. In the Wine Advocate, Robert Parker wrote that Laurence, who runs the winery together with her mother, Colette, and sister Catherine, “has moved the domaine to an even higher quality level, fashioning fuller-bodied, drier wines with slightly higher alcohol levels…all impressively rich, fragrant and—most importantly—delicious.”