Scott Drewno

CHIKO & Anju

Featured:
Saturday, May 7, 2022 at Grand Tasting Reception

Chef Scott Drewno was raised in the heart of New York’s Finger Lakes wine region, a rural area known for its vineyards and family-owned farms. Watching his mother turn fresh, seasonal produce from local farm stands into bubbling pies and cobblers first piqued his interest in cooking and planted the seed for Drewno’s culinary ambition.

Drewno joined the Wolfgang Puck Fine Dining Group in 1998. At Chinois, he learned to meld French cooking techniques with vibrant Asian flavors, and at Spago, he came to understand the importance of beginning with only the finest ingredients. Drewno then furthered his knowledge and solidified his passion for Asian cuisines at Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s Vong and Stephen Hansen’s Ruby Foo’s.

In 2007, Wolfgang Puck tapped Drewno as the opening Executive Chef of The Source. The restaurant was honored with numerous accolades including three-star reviews from both The Washington Post and Washingtonian Magazine. The Restaurant Association of Metropolitan Washington (RAMW) awarded The Source “New Restaurant of the Year” in 2008 and “Fine Dining Restaurant of the Year” in 2011. Drewno himself received the coveted “Chef of the Year” prize in 2010 and again in 2016 and was twice nominated as a semifinalist for the “Best Chef Mid-Atlantic” James Beard Award.

Drewno has won many culinary competitions benefiting important causes, including the DC Crab Cake Competition, Pig Out for Diabetes, and DC Central Kitchen’s Capital Food Fight. He won the Washington, DC leg of Cochon 555 (twice), a traveling culinary competition promoting sustainable farming of heritage breed pigs, and won the Cochon 555 Heritage Fire barbecue competition.

He also serves on the Board of the RAMW and is an Honorary Board Member of the DC Food & Beverage Collective. Each year, Drewno hosts fundraising events for DCFBC and the George Washington University Hospital Mobile Mammography Unit, two causes he holds near and dear to his heart.

In 2017, he formed The Fried Rice Collective with fellow chef Danny Lee and restauranteur Andrew Kim, and they opened their first restaurant, CHIKO, in Capitol Hill.  Hailed by Zagat as one of “DC’s Most Important Restaurant Openings of 2017,” CHIKO was nominated by the James Beard Foundation as a semifinalist for “Best New Restaurant.”

Tom Sietsema, from The Washington Post, gave CHIKO 3 stars (Excellent), stating “The latest definition of crack in Washington is the “orange-ish” chicken at CHIKO on Capitol Hill.”  This was also the third consecutive year that Washingtonian Magazine named CHIKO one of DC’s top 50 best restaurants, awarding them a prestigious 3-star rating.  Due to their overwhelming success, The Fried Rice Collective eventually opened two other locations in the United States: one in DuPont Circle in Washington, DC, and the other in Encinitas, California.  They also opened their latest restaurant concept, Anju, in 2019.