What David Guas Is Cooking Up Next

On an August evening, David Guas hands two plates of pan-roasted, double-thick pork chops with shallot and Creole mustard sauce to the tasting panel seated before him and waits for their reaction.

He’s in the kitchen of his McLean home and his critics are his sons, Spencer, 19, and Kemp, 21. The dish, served with fennel slaw flecked with tarragon and dill, is one he’s testing for Neutral Ground Bar + Kitchen, the full-service American bistro he’ll open in McLean this spring—if the gods of permitting and construction comply. 

Guas, 48, is best known locally as the chef and owner of Bayou Bakery, Coffee Bar & Eatery in Courthouse. Hailing from New Orleans, he’s a first-generation Cuban American whose father, Mariano, fled Castro’s regime with his family in 1959 at the age of 13. 

As a kid, Guas picked up cooking skills from his Aunt Boo in Abbeville, 3 miles west of the Big Easy. His parents sometimes sent him there when he acted out. “I’d hang out in her kitchen,” he explains. “She taught me how to make roux and gave me my first cast-iron pot.”

The same aunt would later put him on the right track two years into his enrollment at Colorado Mountain College—which he’d talked his parents into letting him attend after seeing a ski poster in his guidance counselor’s office. When it became evident he was more interested in skiing than studying, his parents brought him home and cut him off. 

“Aunt Boo told me to go to cooking school,” Guas recalls. “My grandmother set up a call with [famed Cajun chef] Justin Wilson to get advice and I went to culinary school. Grandma paid for it.” 

In 1996, after graduating from the Sclafani Cooking School in Metairie, Louisiana, Guas applied for a position as a savory cook at New Orleans’ prestigious Windsor Court Hotel. He was turned down for that role, but talked his way into a job as an assistant pastry chef. “I had barely ever held a pastry bag before,” he says, “and was piping meringue on 300 tarts all of a sudden.” 

He was a quick study. The hotel’s executive chef, Jeff Tunks, took notice and offered him a job at a restaurant he was opening in Washington, D.C. That’s what brought Guas to the nation’s capital in 1998, to become the pastry chef for DC Coast (now closed) on 14th Street NW. 

He was at the construction site for DC Coast when he met fellow New Orleanian Simone Rathlé, the restaurant’s soon-to-be PR person; the two married a year later. (Rathlé, who owns PR firm simoneink, is now handling Neutral Ground’s marketing and is heavily involved in its design.) 

Guas’ career blossomed in the DMV. In the decade that followed, he helped launch other restaurants for DC Coast’s parent company, Passion Food Hospitality. He wrote two cookbooks—Dam Good Sweet (2009) and Grill Nation (2015)—and in 2010 opened Bayou Bakery as an homage to his New Orleans roots. 

Television appearances, including a 12-episode run hosting American Grilled on the Travel Channel and numerous morning show stints, established his status as a celebrity chef. 

The pandemic was rough for Bayou Bakery, but Guas rose to the occasion by rallying his staff to prepare food for people in need. (The effort earned him multiple accolades, including a 2022 “Covid Hero” award from Arlington County.) In 2021, he launched Community Spoon, a local campaign to provide assistance to Afghan refugees in Northern Virginia. In 2022, he spent two weeks in Poland with World Central Kitchen, cooking for refugees from Ukraine. The importance of giving back was something his family had taught him—a lesson that literally hit home in 2005 when Hurricane Katrina destroyed the house he grew up in.

With his latest venture, he’s aiming to serve the community in a different way. For years, neighbors running into Guas at food events and Little League games had entreated him to open a casual, chef-driven eatery in McLean. Now that he and Rathlé are empty nesters, the timing is right. He is itching for another creative outlet. Pragmatism factors in, too. 

“I can’t afford two college tuitions, do everything we want to do for retirement and secure our lifestyle with one business,” he says. 

He’s found the perfect spot in the former Assaggi Osteria space in the McLean Square Shopping Center. The 4,000-square-foot property is 15 minutes from Bayou Bakery and six minutes from his house. He’s calling the restaurant Neutral Ground because he envisions a place where differences—especially political ones—can be left at the door. 

The moniker is also a nod to his hometown. In the mid-19th century, the green space median on Canal Street that separated rival French Creole and Anglo-American neighborhoods was referred to as “neutral ground.” 

Food-wise, the kitchen will be serving up new-American dishes like grilled skirt steak with chimichurri, double-patty smash cheeseburgers on potato buns, and roasted sweet potatoes topped with Benton’s bacon, caramelized onions and Abita root beer syrup. There won’t be too much overlap with Bayou Bakery’s concept, although a few lagniappes of New Orleans flavor will find their way onto the menu—picture wood-fired oysters topped with garlic butter and Parmesan cheese, and barbecued shrimp in the style of The Big Easy’s Mr. B’s Bistro (head-on and bathed in Worcestershire garlic-butter sauce). 

“Maybe we’ll have custom bibs made for those,” the chef muses. 

In his spare time, Guas likes to fish and hunt with buddies, particularly around the Chesapeake Bay. An avid biker, he owns two Harley-Davidsons. One is almost 20 years old and mostly garage kept. The other is a “bagger” he takes on long road trips with friends to wide-open places like Glacier National Park, Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons. 

“The bike is a great way to escape,” he says. “Being on the open road is part of my mental health, balancing the insanity of the restaurant business and how hard we work. It’s just part of who I am.”

David Hagedorn is Arlington Magazine’s dining critic.