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Wozniuk — a Southerner by temperament, a Malaysia-infatuated chef by choice — was between research trips in 2013. Hired as chef de cuisine for Maketto on H Street NE, he had already spent time in Cambodia, digging into dishes that would influence Erik Bruner-Yang’s then-forthcoming restaurant. Wozniuk was headed to Vietnam for the next leg of his trip when he found himself with a 15-hour layover in Kuala Lumpur. He decided to use the time to explore the food scene of the Malaysian capital, which eventually led him to the street vendor.
The stand was little more than a brick pit layered with smoldering charcoal. Dozens of chicken wings — whole ones, with the tips still attached — were scattered across a wire screen laid over the coals. Wozniuk recalls the smoke that hung in the air. The wings that glowed “bright, bright red” from their marinade. The locals on motorbikes who would pull up, grab a bag of chicken and sauce, and greedily speed off with their meal in hand.
Dressed casually, with flip-flops on his feet, Wozniuk remembers how perfect it all felt as he dug into a food culture then unknown to him, even when a drop of sauce landed on his foot. “An ant literally walked over and bit my toe,” Wozniuk tells me. “I was like, ‘D—, even the ant likes this sauce.’”
That sauce is the center of the universe at Spicebird. It is the shining star around which everything else rotates and draws energy at this ghost kitchen inside Makan, Wozniuk’s modern Malaysian restaurant in Columbia Heights, which explores the many influences of the nation’s cuisine. The sauce was also, for many years, a puzzle that Wozniuk could not solve.
“I mean, literally, from that first visit, I started testing, just to kind of re-create it,” the chef says. “I just couldn’t get it. It was always slightly off. It wasn’t where I wanted it. It was probably, maybe two months before we started Spicebird, I would say, when I just finally got it dialed in.”
Spicebird is not Wozniuk’s attempt to re-create the grilled chicken he encountered on the streets of Kuala Lumpur. It’s more of an amalgamation. It’s pollo a la brasa as filtered through an American chef with a jones for Malaysian cooking. It is unlike any other roast chicken in Washington.
But first things first (or second, as the case may be): Spicebird is a concept without a home, without a space for you to sit down and enjoy the chicken that Wozniuk and crew prepare in the Makan kitchen. Spicebird is a migratory invention, designed to be savored wherever you find a perch. It could be a table in your kitchen. It could be the nearest bench outside the restaurant. It could be the driver’s seat of your vehicle, as you fish out bites from the carryout bag while navigating D.C. traffic, the chicken’s aromas slowly filling the cavity of your car. (I’m not confessing to distracted driving here, in case you’re wondering.)
The chicken at Spicebird is cooked in a combi oven, not a rotisserie over glowing coals. So don’t expect any smokiness, even though the bird does, at first glance, give a remarkable impression of Peruvian pollo a la brasa. Brined for 24 hours, the halal chicken is enveloped in a rub whose 15 or so ingredients transform the skin into something scabrous, charred and unnerving. But like so many things in life, appearances are deceiving. The bird, without sauce, is an ingratiating bite, fragrant and slightly sweet with star anise, cinnamon, clove and cardamom.
Wozniuk calls his signature condiment “KL sauce,” and even though it’s one of three dipping options available, it’s clearly the one to glom on to. When I first started talking with the chef, he was hesitant to reveal much about the sauce, preferring that customers get their education firsthand, with the condiment right at their elbow. But as we settled into the conversation, Wozniuk decided there was no harm in unveiling the secret that took him years to suss out. The Malaysian sauce’s most important ingredient, he discovered, was a secondary sauce smuggled into the mix: Worcestershire, the British pantry staple that made its way to Malaysia via colonialism.
Once Wozniuk disclosed this information, everything sort of clicked into place. Prior to the reveal, I had focused my attention on the sauce’s most conspicuous traits: its acid and its heat, the lime juice and the bird’s eye chiles, which combine to light up the chicken like Clark Griswold’s house on Christmas. But after learning about the Worcestershire sauce, I went back for another bite and understood something explicitly that I could grasp only intuitively before: The sauce deepens the flavor of everything that Wozniuk had added to, or extracted from, this bird. The KL sauce is the wand that makes the magic happen.
Because Spicebird borrows from both Malaysian cuisine and Peruvian chicken, the sides that accompany the main attraction do the same. You can’t go wrong with any of them, whether Peruvian staples such as steamed rice and fried yuca (double fried for a pronounced crispiness) or the Malaysian-inspired sides such as berempah potatoes (as spicy as the Malay name implies) and the wood-ear-and-pulled-chicken salad, a dish that zigs, then zags, with its applications of fish sauce and coconut vinaigrette.
Spicebird is one of those covid-era creations that could have a life well beyond the pandemic. It’s a ghost kitchen for now, but Wozniuk envisions a day when he might develop Spicebird into its own fast-casual. Every chef, of course, has a similar dream: to create a counter-service concept tantalizing enough to capture the public’s imagination — and easy enough to replicate without a ton of oversight. Spicebird may just be that kind of concept.
3400 11th St. NW, 202-730-2295. spicebirddc.com.
Hours: 5 to 10 p.m. Tuesday through Friday, 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Saturday and 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Sunday.
Nearest Metro: Columbia Heights or Georgia Ave.-Petworth, with a short walk to the carryout.
Prices: $3 to $33 for all items on the menu.
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