familiar faces ■ by David Hagedorn | photo by William Hereford
Home on the Range He’s a beloved local chef, cookbook author and TV personality. Here’s what David Guas is cooking up next. ON AN AUGUST evening, David Guas
Chef David Guas
22 January/February 2024 ■ ArlingtonMagazine.com
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,”
