Good Taste: Mallard Takes Flight With Ducking Awesome Southern Fare
A restaurant can serve as a reflection point for its chef, a way to honor the past while celebrating the present and looking forward to the future. Such is the case with Mallard, the newly opened bastion of indulgent Southern cuisine from chef-partner Hamilton Johnson, which takes over the Birch & Barley space on 14th Street NW below its sibling operation, beer mecca ChurchKey.
Mallard is a warmhearted salute to the chef’s late father, a passionate cook who loved down-home Southern cooking and was a longtime carver of duck decoys. Johnson grew up outside Spartanburg, South Carolina, and attended Johnson & Wales University in Charleston. He ultimately moved to D.C. and spent a formative eight-year stretch at Jeff Buben’s famed Southern spot, Vidalia. After that, he bopped around town for gigs at American Son, Emilie’s, Glover Park Grill, Michele’s, and Gravitas, as well as at his own restaurant Honeysuckle, a Southern spot with New Nordic influences in Vidalia’s former downtown address, which closed in 2019 after a nearly three-year run.
