This is not a recipe you want to try at home.
Johnny Spero uses a small, curved knife to peel cherry tomatoes. Next, he’ll soak them in a calcium bath — a version of nixtamalization, an ancient technique that allows corn to be transformed into tortillas. The fruits will then be cooked down in syrup made from smoked Chinese tea and slow-dried overnight in a low oven. The last process will give them the consistency of Twizzlers.
At some point, they’ll wind their way onto the menu at Spero’s Georgetown restaurant, Reverie.
The tomatoes come from Karma Farm in Monkton, not far from where Spero grew up in Baltimore County. Their journey from raw material to modernist cuisine could be a metaphor for the chef’s own odyssey.
The 38-year-old started out as a hyperactive and rebellious kid in Phoenix — all energy, no focus — who found an outlet working in the kitchen of a local restaurant. Frustrated by Baltimore, he traveled the world, opened his own eateries and became one of the rising culinary stars of Washington, D.C.’s food scene, with a Michelin star to match.
Two years ago, he wanted to walk away from it all.
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Getting to the 2003 graduation ceremony of Towson Catholic was a struggle, metaphorically speaking. One in a set of triplets, Spero stood out as early as junior high for his ADHD and hatred of standard education. “I was really good at failing all my classes,” he said.
He got a job at Henry’s American Bistro, situated between a grocery store and a pharmacy on Sweet Air Road. “There was immediacy” to work in a restaurant, he said, and an instant gratification that appealed to him. There was a thrill in even monotonous actions like double-shucking peas — and being the fastest one to do it.
“Everything fell into place for him” once he began to cook, said his mother, Patti. “He was comfortable in the kitchen.”
Spero began asking for foreign cookbooks for Christmas. Around the holidays, he’d carve the turkey and make crème brûlée to match the season.
He discovered culinary ambitions that extended far beyond the classic crab cake. After a brief stint at Essex Community College, he attended “dirt cheap” Le Cordon Bleu in Florida, coming back to the Baltimore area only briefly to work at Ixia, a restaurant on Charles Street. But he felt stifled in his hometown.
He began working at Washington, D.C.’s Komi and then Town House, a destination restaurant in Appalachia. He “staged,” or took an apprenticeship, at the famed Noma before opening his first restaurant, a short-lived tasting menu concept called Suna. After it closed, he began working at José Andrés’ acclaimed 12-seat eatery Minibar. “The way he is on TV is the same way he is in person,” Spero said of Andrés. “Larger than life.”
Never one to stay still, Spero left to work at Mugaritz in Spain. There, he peeled green almonds, splitting them open to remove the unripe innards. “A lot of cooks and chefs my age were very much influenced by France and Paris,” he said. “I was always more interested in Japan and Spain.”
He was fascinated by the restraint and focus of Japanese chefs who “strive for perfection with a handful of ingredients,” he said. “I didn’t have an example of moderation in anything else in my life.”
He’s the first to say that the chef’s life comes with its own vices. His was drinking too much. “It was almost a badge of honor working hungover,” he said. One month before he opened Reverie, when his wife was pregnant with their first child, he decided to quit.
It was typical Spero. “I’m all in or I’m not,” he said. “My foot’s all the way on the gas or it’s off.”
Today, his six years of sobriety inform every aspect of the restaurant, perhaps most obviously in the imaginative list of nonalcoholic beverage pairings diners can enjoy with their $255 meal. Recent options have included bottles from NON in Australia as well as tea infused with seaweed from Maine.
The burgeoning interest in booze alternatives has given way to drinks like dealcoholized wines and nonalcoholic beers, but Spero is less interested in beverages that are designed to be replacements for alcohol. “There has to be a new definition for it where it doesn’t feel like it’s a substitution,” he said. “It’s its own special thing.”
At the restaurant, quitting drinking informed the way he decided to manage his staff, too. “It helped me realize there was a better culture in the kitchen.”
Avoiding his favorite bars, Spero poured his extra creativity and energy into work. He powered through the pandemic, slinging burgers and pizzas to pay his bills before returning to regular operations. Reverie transitioned to a tasting-menu-only format that allowed the chef’s skills and imagination to shine.
In 2022, the restaurant won its first Michelin star. Spero prepared to open another eatery near Washington’s Union Station.
As Spero left his Georgetown spot one August evening that same year, though, an outlet in the kitchen sparked and started a fire. He returned hours later to find himself wading through ankle-deep water. Spero had survived ups and downs, including the multiyear marathon of being a business owner. And now it was gone, along with his recipe notebooks. “I just wanted to stop cooking,” he said.
He found encouragement from his fellow chefs around the world — and from his hometown. Ekiben co-owner Steve Chu was one of the first people to reach out with offers of support.
Spero said he and Chu talk regularly and have bonded over their shared perspective on running a business. “We both see the bigger picture, but he sees it in a very different way than I do, which is great, it’s a balance,” he said. “I look at the creative side of it, and he looks at building a sustainable business that’s scalable and successful.”
“Like, we always said, learning how to make a dream a reality is the hardest part of our industry.”
Chu said he dreams of collaborating with Spero in Charm City. “I would love to get to work together one day,” he said. It would be a “real dream of mine, bringing the Baltimore kid back to Baltimore.”
When Reverie reopened in D.C. this past March, Spero’s mom brought him one of the cookbooks he’d gotten for Christmas. A couple weeks ago, his parents came for dinner to celebrate Patti’s birthday. The chef opened the door for them, just as he does for all his guests.
But reminders of the traumatic event remain. As Spero prepares to cook, he removes the only knife that survived the fire from a box in the kitchen of the rebuilt space. It was only a few weeks ago that he stopped smelling the harsh, chemical fumes left behind from the blaze.
At home with his wife and their three children in Hyattsville, he finds himself constantly checking to make sure appliances aren’t left plugged in. The fear that something could happen — an errant AC unit igniting — still wakes him up at night.
But Spero tries to push the thoughts aside. He cooks breakfast for the kids. He presses on. He drives to work, where there are guests to greet and tomatoes to peel.
