Timothy Dean was a Best Western dishwasher at age 14, a protege of Jean-Louis Palladin by 18.
Now at 40, he's a contestant on "Top Chef."
His appearance on reality TV, which begins Wednesday night on Bravo, is not so much the culmination of a charmed culinary career as a bid to get it back on track.
Dean's rise — from dishwasher to student of the famed French chef to restaurateur in his own right — was so meteoric that this newspaper described his life as "a fairy tale" full of "good fortune, good timing and a good bit of pluck." That was five years ago, in a feature pegged to the opening of Timothy Dean Bistro in Fells Point.
Since then, Dean has had more than his share of personal tragedy and professional setbacks.
His wife, Michelle, died in June 2007 of breast cancer at the age of 38. The bistro closed and reopened as T.D. Lounge, which also shut, leaving a trail of unpaid vendors, including a bank that won a nearly $1.3 million judgment against Dean and his real estate LLC in May. Days later, the shuttered bistro filed for bankruptcy protection.
Through all this, Dean has pushed ahead. The widower-dad raised his daughter, Chantel, now 20. He opened Prime Steakhouse early this year with some self-inflicted snags but to generally positive reviews. And he managed to land a spot on "Top Chef," the reality cooking show that has launched some little-known chefs to stardom.
"As a chef, we need to focus," Dean said in a telephone interview the other day. "We need to focus more on the food and the restaurant versus personal stuff."
Dean's ability to tune out personal and professional distractions and focus on his food should serve him well on the show, said Nancy Longo, chef at Baltimore's Pierpoint restaurant, who used to live around the corner from Dean's bistro and who had her own turn on the Food Network's "Ready, Set, Cook."
"They stick people in a room and bait them against each other. They begged you to wreck havoc with the other people," Longo said. "But I think Tim has a pretty cool head. … He's very stoic. He's gonna put his head down and do what he's got to do.
"Usually those kind of people, somebody you might call the sleeper, the quiet one — generally they're the ones who are very intense with their food and they drown out the other stuff."
Longo has shared a kitchen with Dean and other chefs at charity fundraisers at Carver Vocational-Technical High School. She found Dean to be generous and friendly toward fellow chefs and outgoing with the young student-chefs from Carver. And it's not always that way, Longo said, even when the cooking is for charity.
"These things can be a little intense when everybody's fighting over sheet trays," Longo said. "I've watched people rape and pillage people's trays. It can be very primal."
Things tend to get pretty primal in the "Top Chef" kitchen, as anyone who has seen the show knows. And this season looks to be no exception, judging by a rough cut of the episode released to the media. Alpha males dominate the first episode, a statement that should require no spoiler alert given the outsized personalities of chefs in general, and aspiring TV chefs in particular.
One of the contestants flatly states that he wants his competitors to size him up and conclude, "This guy is truly the alpha male."
Dean does not come off as biggest ego on that episode, though he is hardly a shrinking violet.
Even before Prime Steakhouse opened its doors this year, he talked about expanding the concept to other markets.
"Emeril and Thomas Keller and Wolfgang [Puck] are doing it," he said. "Why not me?"
Dean displays some of that bravado on the first episode. Before they get down to cooking, he is shown chatting with other contestants at a getting-to-know-you cocktail party. One of those he meets is Angelo Sosa, a chef with an Asian-influenced sandwich restaurant, Xie Xie. Dean recalls in a solo interview spliced into the cocktail-party footage: "Angelo is like, 'I got it going on.' And I'm like, 'This is some bull [expletive].' "
Dean has been on the other end of that sort of assessment more than once.
Fells Point neighbors around his bistro were thrilled to have his upscale restaurant open in 2005, but not so much when the place morphed into a lounge in June 2008 with a disc jockey and dancing. The city liquor board fined the lounge $3,100 last year after one of its inspectors was manhandled by restaurant security. The board also found the club guilty of operating as a dance club in violation of zoning rules.
Last month, Dean's lawyer, Peter Prevas, asked the board to cut the fine in half — in part because Dean would be appearing on "Top Chef." The board agreed to knock $1,000 off the fine if he dropped his appeal. Dean is working out a payment plan with the board.
A previous lawyer for Dean, Frank Boston, took Dean to court last year and won a $975 judgment.
Dean filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in May, listing assets of $0 to $50,000 and liabilities of $100,001 to $500,000. Food purveyors, a trash-hauler, credit card companies, the city and Dean's real-estate LLC are listed as creditors. Not listed is Adams National Bank, which in May won a $1.29 million judgment against Dean.
"I'm not even aware of it," Dean said when asked about the judgment and bankruptcy. "Attorneys and investors are handling it."
When Dean opened Prime Steakhouse in the former bistro location, he made a point of announcing in a news release that he would "remove myself as executive Chef and Owner in order to become a consultant for Prime Steakhouse." But it turned out that Dean did, in fact, own the restaurant. And he's billed as Prime's chef on the "Top Chef" website.
"At the time, I was getting focused on 'Top Chef,' " Dean said. "I didn't want to be disclosed [as owner] at the time. I was focused on 'Top Chef.' It was never relevant, and it's not relevant now."
Whatever doubts have swirled around Dean, they have had little or nothing to do with his food.
"Dean uses A-list ingredients and sophisticated techniques to turn out mostly wonderful food," then-Sun restaurant critic Elizabeth Large wrote in a March 2005 review of Timothy Dean Bistro. "You can sample his mentor's influence by ordering the Palladin chestnut soup, smooth as spun silk, with a whole chestnut and an ethereal, truffle-scented dumpling."
At the new steakhouse in April, Sun reviewer Richard Gorelick found fault with less-than-fresh shrimp cocktail and "lame" lobster mac-n-cheese, but had absolutely no beef with the beef. "[T]he steaks here are about the best I've ever had in a restaurant," he wrote.
Paul Schurick, a passionate foodie who also happens to be communications director for former Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr., met Dean at the Preakness several years ago and became a friend and bistro customer.
"Every time I've left [the bistro], I've said, 'That's some of the best food I've eaten,' " Schurick said. "This is a guy who has cooked and mentored under quite literally the top chefs in the world, and it's unbelievable to sit and talk to this guy."
Whether those cooking skills translate into the strange world of reality TV remains to be seen.
"Training doesn't come much better than Jean-Louis Palladin," Baltimore-based restaurant consultant Diane Feffer Neas told The Sun five years ago, in a profile on Dean as a restaurateur. These days, she wonders how well that classical training can prepare a chef for "Top Chef's" curveball cooking assignments.
"This is really think on your feet — kind of counter-cultural to the classical training," she said. "You make your own stock, you do everything from scratch [in classical cooking]. And this [reality TV] is … instantaneous creation. But I think that his skill set from the classical training — the knife skills and taste level and seasoning — will serve him very well.
"His classical training can say to him, 'OK, surprise, we have monkfish.' He knows the accoutrements that go with monkfish. Given him an herb, he knows the classical combinations. That's a good thing. And he also knows sauces. Sauces can really make or break a dish and in classical training, you do a lot with sauces."
Carla Hall, a Silver Spring caterer who was a "Top Chef" finalist in season five, recalled "an amazing oyster dish" Dean prepared last year for a food and wine festival at Washington's National Harbor. "I remember lemongrass, and the oysters were just beautiful," she said. "I went back for more."
She said Dean had a reputation for being a hotheaded perfectionist in the kitchen, but she found him to be in good humor as he dished out his steamed oysters to the large crowd. "I heard about his strong personality, which a lot of chefs have," she said. But she found him perfectly calm, even jovial.
"I think in some cases that if you're very confident — and I think that he is — his confidence coupled with a calmness would serve him well" on the show," she said. "That's actually a great combination. Confident everything will go your way."
And if everything doesn't go Dean's way?
"I don't know if he'll stay cool," Hall said. But if not, "he'll probably regroup."
On TV
"Top Chef: D.C." premieres at 9 p.m. Wednesday.