Chef Sarah Acconcia Bio

Sarah E. Acconcia

13.5% Wine Bar’s Executive Chef Sarah Acconcia (Ah-CON-see-ah) honed her broad culinary experience in some of Baltimore’s most eclectic and exciting kitchens. 

The vivacious 25-year-old comes to 13.5% from Woodberry Kitchen where, from July 2009 until March 2010, she worked the wood oven and developed a deep interest—and respect—for our food’s origins.   

From October 2007 until summer 2009, Sarah served as Sous Chef and Pastry Chef at Abacrombie Fine Foods in Baltimore’s Mount Royal section, where she devoted her energy to creating a wide range of talked about confections (her milk chocolate panna cotta and “Breakfast for Dessert” proved popular with Abacrombie diners after a Meyerhoff performance). While at Abacrombie, Sarah participated in a Baltimore Foodies “Celebration of Women Chefs” events and received a favorable mention in the restaurant’s Baltimore magazine review.

It was during Sarah’s tenure at Abacrombie that she began cultivating strong and mutually trusting relationships with local farmers. Because of Sarah’s commitment to the “farm to table” dynamic, she visits three markets every week, and is a vocal proponent of Maryland’s varied and bountiful agriculture industry. Sarah stresses the importance of devoting a great deal of her strategic planning (in purchasing ingredients and menu development) to learning and working with not only what is delicious, but what is in season and sustainable.

Sarah speaks to the day-to-day challenges in her new job, saying, “My 13.5% kitchen is equipped with two convection ovens, a Panini press and one induction burner.” She doesn’t see limitations with this situation, but uses it as a way to challenge her creativity and channel new ideas. “Working with what we have to execute creative and sometimes complicated dishes, is fulfilling when the end product is comparable to, or better than what is often created with ‘normal’ equipment,” the chef says.

Surprisingly, Sarah says she doesn’t let the lack of open flame stop her from cooking dishes such as crispy skin fish, mussels or seared foie gras, often seen as staples on many fine dining establishment menus, but hardly considered typical wine bar fare.

Sarah has no formal culinary training, but has completed successful stages at both Tru and Alinea in Chicago and New York City’s Room4Dessert. 

Sarah Acconcia is a 2007 graduate of the Maryland Institute College of Art where she earned her bachelor of fine arts in sculpture and printmaking. Her senior thesis work, “Melting” plays on her interest and deep connection to food (in this case, sugar) as representative of the evanescence of life. The work is registered with the Maryland State Arts Council’s Visual Arts Registry (http://www.msac.org/registry_disc.cfm?id2=234&id1=161&level=1&disc=12). She spent a semester doing print work at Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts in Kingston, Jamaica, W.I.

Sarah was born in New York City and, as the child of a Foreign Service Officer, lived in Bucharest, Romania; Hamburg, Germany and Croughton, England, before the family settled in northern Virginia.