5 Palena and Palena Cafe ★★★½

3529 Connecticut Ave., NW | 202-537-9250

Cuisine: Franco-Italian dishes both rustic and refined—expert terrines and pâtés, soups of subtle complexity, ethereal pastas—from chef/owner Frank Ruta, a hard-working throwback who shuns publicity, never works the room, and is content to sequester himself in his subterranean kitchen perfecting his compositions. The cafe menu served out front is simpler but no less rewarding.

Mood: The 30-seat cafe has a festive air—you can come dolled up or in jeans and shirttails. The dining room in the back has the feel of a relic—dark, serious, and formal.

Best for: Serious foodies. All food lovers will rejoice in the excellence of Ruta’s cooking, but those who can suss out the nuances of his complex, subtly seasoned dishes will find the greatest reward.

Best dishes: Truffled cheeseburger; roast half chicken subtly flavored with star anise; hand-rolled pastas; house-made pâtés and terrines; any of the extraordinary soups, including a spring consommé with morels, favas, and nettles and a fall consommé made from pheasant; wonderfully light gnocchi; ricotta pie; German apple cake.

Insider tips: You can eat exceptionally well and economically by arriving early and sitting up front—there are no reservations in the cafe—and ordering off both the front menu, where most dishes are around $11, and the dining-room menu, which is offered in three, four, and five courses.

Service: ••½

Open Monday through Saturday for dinner. Restaurant expensive, cafe moderate.

4 CityZen ★★★½

Mandarin Oriental, 1330 Maryland Ave., SW | 202-787-6006

Cuisine: Jaded foodies meet their match at this forward-thinking hotel restaurant, where astonishing discoveries (a slice of monkfish liver impersonating foie gras) and beguiling takes on regional American (an haute version of beef on weck) and classical French cooking are dreamed up daily by chef Eric Ziebold and executed by his well-drilled battalion of cooks.

Mood: The dining room, in the Mandarin Oriental hotel, looks like someone opened an opulent restaurant in the hallway of a palace. Soft lighting creates a sense of intimacy, and the servers—given to long disquisitions on cheese and elaborate explanations of appetizers—are adept at reading diners’ needs.

Best for: Palates looking for the excitement—and shock—of the new.

Best dishes: The menu changes frequently (too frequently—stellar dishes are typically retired and never brought back), but Ziebold, raised in Iowa and trained at the French Laundry in California, excels with preparations of beef, game, and pork. Soups are superb, as are his signature miniature Parker House rolls presented in a hand-stained wooden box. Desserts are precise and light, and the well-kept cheeses make a fine finish, too.

Insider tips: Eating a two-hour dinner while you're perched on a stool might not sound like a great night out, but Ziebold’s $50 three-course tasting menu at the bar is a steal.

Service: •••½

Open Tuesday through Saturday for dinner. Very expensive.

3 Minibar ★★★★

405 Eighth St., NW (Café Atlántico) | 202-393-0812

Cuisine: Some of the nation’s most visionary and rewarding cooking can be found at culinary whiz José Andrés’s restaurant/laboratory, where three chefs concoct 30 or so lilliputian courses—from the amusingly ridiculous (a compressed square of popcorn deep-frozen in liquid nitrogen that lets you blow “smoke” out your nose dragon style) to the sublime (custard-filled brioche bun with caviar).

Mood: Dining at the six-seat restaurant on the second floor of Café Atlántico is akin to eating at a sushi bar—diners sit on stools and watch as food is prepared. But here the morsels are presented with military precision, complete with instructions: “Eat this in one bite.”

Best for: Culinary adventurers; food snobs; anyone willing to see dinner as the entertainment and not the fuel-up before the show.

Best dishes: The menu evolves constantly, but recent tastes included olive-oil bonbons that burst open on the tongue; “tumbleweed of beet”; cotton-candy-swathed eel; faux sun-dried tomatoes made with tomato juice; salmon-pineapple “ravioli” with crispy quinoa; roasted Asian baby corn with sweet-corn purée; Thai frozen yogurt with honey and crushed peanuts.

Insider tips: The reservations process seems designed to weed out all but the most persistent. You have to call at exactly 10 am one month in advance and be prepared to hit the redial button. Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays are nominally easier gets than weekends, and there’s always the waiting list.

Service: •••

Open Tuesday through Saturday for dinner. Very expensive.