Meet Michael Schlow, Ticos top toque

"Don't look at the columns," said chef/owner Michael Schlow, on a tour of what will soon become Tico, his Latin-influenced American restaurant on 14th Street NW. Construction is underway, and the columns, which have been painted with an abstraction in warm colors, are not to his liking. "It just doesn't fit ... I want the place to feel like it's been here a long time."

Luckily, his wife, Adrienne Schlow, is a mixed-media artist and, for Schlow, a miracle worker. "She's coming down to fix this," he said, and in a restaurant where Schlow has been involved in the smallest details -- from hand-designing the layout of the kitchen, to selecting the perfect tables, handmade in Arizona -- he plans to cede absolute creative control to his wife.

"She doesn't tell me what to do [in the kitchen], and I don't tell her what to do with the art," Schlow said.

Michael Schlow (Credit: Megan Pappadopoulos)

Tico, expected to open in early June, will be Schlow's grand debut in D.C. The chef, a James Beard Award winner, is well-known in New England, where he has six restaurants in Massachusetts, Connecticut and New Hampshire. Like other notable chefs from elsewhere -- Le Diplomate's Stephen Starr, Osteria Morini's Michael White -- he's come to stake his claim in the District.

Schlow has family in Silver Spring, and visited D.C. frequently as a kid. He also began to develop his professional career here, working for Jean-Louis Palladin at the Watergate: "I always looked up to him," Schlow said. He had been eager to return to D.C. and found space in the Louis complex at 1926 14th St. NW -- right next to the Trader Joe's -- through a frequent patron of his Boston restaurants, who also happened to work for the building's developer, JBG.

"This is not an opportunity for me to drop off a restaurant and go back to Boston," he said. "If this is successful, I will absolutely do more restaurants here."

And on a street where food has become the focus, Schlow's laid-back attitude may be seen as a refreshing change. Tico, a duplicate of his Boston restaurant of the same name, aims to be a neighborhood gathering place for simple American food with a Latin twist: Think fried chicken tacos, or breaded manchego with spicy pomegranate dip in place of mozzarella sticks.

"Nothing is authentic," Schlow said. The menu was inspired by his travels throughout Spain and Latin America, but also through the mother of all invention: necessity, of course.

"A lot of the dishes were bred out of me having nothing in my house to eat," he said. A shredded cabbage salad with a spicy salsa verde that he says is among the most popular dishes on Tico's menu was the result of some experimentation when he was faced with a near-empty fridge.

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Meet Michael Schlow, Ticos top toque