Coast Guard retiree falls in love with cooking again, bringing locally sourced comfort food to his Blue Crab & Purple Pig Bistro
Photos by Jim Pile
After some soul-searching, he decided to rejoin the service. “I started thinking, ‘When was the last time I actually enjoyed cooking?’ And it was in the Coast Guard,” he remembers. “So, I started working with food, cooking for people, working all over the country, and it was just about the food. Not the drama, not the BS of a kitchen, not all the garbage that comes with the culture. And I fell in love with cooking again.”
When he first arrived in Virginia, Chef Wildman was still single. But that changed when a food and wine blogger reached out to him for an interview and the two immediately hit it off. Now his wife, Mundia Chitambala—a native of Africa who came to the U.S. with her younger sister for educational opportunities—is co-owner and in charge of business operations.
“The goal here is to work with good food, good ingredients, be straightforward, and be technique-driven,” says Wildman. “I’m not trying to create a New York-style restaurant here. It’s about finding a passion for food again and sharing that with new chefs and our patrons. We’ll be building a beautiful herb garden next year. I like working with ingredients that are as fresh as possible. I’m not going to have a farm, but we will be growing specialty herbs that you can’t necessarily get from purveyors around here.”