Wozniuk — a Southerner via temperament, a Malaysia-infatuated chef via selection — was once between analysis journeys in 2013. Hired as chef de delicacies for Maketto on H Street NE, he had already frolicked in Cambodia, digging into dishes that will affect Erik Bruner-Yang’s then-forthcoming eating place. Wozniuk was once headed to Vietnam for the following leg of his shuttle when he discovered himself with a 15-hour layover in Kuala Lumpur. He determined to make use of the time to discover the meals scene of the Malaysian capital, which sooner or later led him to the road seller.
The stand was once little greater than a brick pit layered with smoldering charcoal. Dozens of white meat wings — entire ones, with the information nonetheless hooked up — had been scattered throughout a twine display laid over the coals. Wozniuk remembers the smoke that hung in the air. The wings that glowed “bright, bright red” from their marinade. The locals on motorbikes who would pull up, grasp a bag of white meat and sauce, and greedily pace off with their meal in hand.
Dressed casually, with flip-flops on his ft, Wozniuk recalls how best possible all of it felt as he dug into a meals tradition then unknown to him, even if a drop of sauce landed on his foot. “An ant literally walked over and bit my toe,” Wozniuk tells me. “I was like, ‘D—, even the ant likes this sauce.’”
That sauce is the middle of the universe at Spicebird. It is the shining big name round which the whole lot else rotates and attracts power at this ghost kitchen within Makan, Wozniuk’s fashionable Malaysian eating place in Columbia Heights, which explores the various influences of the country’s delicacies. The sauce was once additionally, for a few years, a puzzle that Wozniuk may no longer resolve.
“I mean, literally, from that first visit, I started testing, just to kind of re-create it,” the chef says. “I just couldn’t get it. It was always slightly off. It wasn’t where I wanted it. It was probably, maybe two months before we started Spicebird, I would say, when I just finally got it dialed in.”
Spicebird is no longer Wozniuk’s try to re-create the grilled white meat he encountered at the streets of Kuala Lumpur. It’s extra of an amalgamation. It’s pollo a l. a. brasa as filtered via an American chef with a jones for Malaysian cooking. It is not like every other roast white meat in Washington.
But first issues first (or 2nd, because the case is also): Spicebird is a idea with out a house, with out a house for you to take a seat down and benefit from the white meat that Wozniuk and group get ready in the Makan kitchen. Spicebird is a migratory invention, designed to be savored anyplace you to find a perch. It might be a desk in your kitchen. It might be the closest bench outdoor the eating place. It might be the driving force’s seat of your car, as you fish out bites from the carryout bag whilst navigating D.C. site visitors, the white meat’s aromas slowly filling the hollow space of your automobile. (I’m no longer confessing to distracted using right here, in case you’re questioning.)
The white meat at Spicebird is cooked in a combi oven, no longer a rotisserie over sparkling coals. So don’t be expecting any smokiness, although the chook does, to start with look, give a outstanding affect of Peruvian pollo a l. a. brasa. Brined for twenty-four hours, the halal white meat is enveloped in a rub whose 15 or so components change into the surface into one thing scabrous, charred and unnerving. But like such a lot of issues in lifestyles, appearances are deceiving. The chook, with out sauce, is an ingratiating chew, aromatic and rather candy with big name anise, cinnamon, clove and cardamom.
Wozniuk calls his signature condiment “KL sauce,” and although it’s one among 3 dipping choices to be had, it’s obviously the only to glom directly to. When I first began speaking with the chef, he was once hesitant to show a lot concerning the sauce, who prefer that buyers get their training firsthand, with the condiment proper at their elbow. But as we settled into the dialog, Wozniuk determined there was once no hurt in unveiling the name of the game that took him years to suss out. The Malaysian sauce’s maximum essential component, he found out, was once a secondary sauce smuggled into the combo: Worcestershire, the British pantry staple that made its method to Malaysia by way of colonialism.
Once Wozniuk disclosed this information, the whole lot kind of clicked into position. Prior to the disclose, I had centered my consideration at the sauce’s maximum conspicuous characteristics: its acid and its warmth, the lime juice and the chook’s eye chiles, which mix to illuminate the white meat like Clark Griswold’s house on Christmas. But after finding out concerning the Worcestershire sauce, I went again for every other chew and understood one thing explicitly that I may seize handiest intuitively ahead of: The sauce deepens the flavour of the whole lot that Wozniuk had added to, or extracted from, this chook. The KL sauce is the wand that makes the magic occur.
Because Spicebird borrows from each Malaysian delicacies and Peruvian white meat, the edges that accompany the principle appeal do the similar. You can’t move improper with any of them, whether or not Peruvian staples equivalent to steamed rice and fried yuca (double fried for a pronounced crispiness) or the Malaysian-inspired aspects equivalent to berempah potatoes (as highly spiced because the Malay identify implies) and the wood-ear-and-pulled-chicken salad, a dish that zigs, then zags, with its programs of fish sauce and coconut French dressing.
Spicebird is a kind of covid-era creations that can have a lifestyles way past the pandemic. It’s a ghost kitchen for now, however Wozniuk envisions a day when he would possibly expand Spicebird into its personal fast-casual. Every chef, after all, has a equivalent dream: to create a counter-service idea tantalizing sufficient to seize the general public’s creativeness — and simple sufficient to duplicate with out a ton of oversight. Spicebird would possibly simply be that more or less idea.
3400 eleventh St. NW, 202-730-2295. spicebirddc.com.
Hours: 5 to ten p.m. Tuesday via Friday, 11 a.m. to ten p.m. Saturday and 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Sunday.
Nearest Metro: Columbia Heights or Georgia Ave.-Petworth, with a quick stroll to the carryout.
Prices: $3 to $33 for all pieces at the menu.