From February 2000

Olives was crowded as soon as it opened its doors. A good bet for hot new restaurant of the year, it is a branch of the Boston restaurant where chef/owner Todd English first gained critical acclaim in 1989.

English opened a second restaurant in Boston called Figs; opened an Olives in Las Vegas; entered into a partnership to open Greg Norman’s Australian Grille in Myrtle Beach; coauthored two cookbooks; and will open Kingfish Hall next summer in Boston, featuring a menu of New England and New Orleans specialties.

Olives in DC is an expensive, noisy cafe whose level of dining comfort is not commensurate with its lofty prices. With a large amount of space devoted to an impressive open kitchen and a bar area, the dining room is cramped. Much of the discomfort is created by the tiny, bare-top tables: Once they are set with the kitchen’s oversize plates, bread plates, a bread basket, a dish of olive oil in lieu of butter, a dish of the signature marinated olives and another for their pits, glasses for wine and water, and a bottle of wine, the only space left is the thin edge of the table. One eats in slow motion, fearing that a sudden move will dip the cuff of a sleeve into a plate of oil or send the breadbasket tumbling to the floor. The alternative is a basement dining room that feels like Siberia.

English’s Mediterranean-inspired dishes are more a matter of combination than of creation. At their best, they harmoniously layer the elements of two or three dishes—which in France or Italy would be served as individual courses—on a single plate. In Provence, for example, lunch might begin with a hot chickpea salad—seasoned at table by each diner with chopped raw onions, parsley, olive oil, and vinegar—then move on to an ungarnished plate of fresh-off-the-boat grilled squid and baby octopus. English puts the two seafoods under a chickpea salad to make one of the kitchen’s best first courses.

In Sicily, a splendid lunch might comprise a salad of oranges and fennel, a small portion of the sweet-sour, sautéed caponata, and a main course of grilled swordfish rolls wrapped around a stuffing of bread crumbs, garlic, raisins, and pine nuts. At Olives, the caponata serves as the bed for the swordfish rolls, and the orange-fennel salad is reduced to a relish. The juxtaposition of three separate dishes of a Sicilian meal onto a single plate creates a wonderful interplay of harmonious flavors. In these two dishes, the cuisine of Todd English lives up to its promise.

But more often than not, Olives falls short. The wood-burning oven in the open kitchen tempts one to start a lunch with a shared pizza as a first course. But if the pie topped with spicy tomato sauce, ricotta cheese, and chicken sausage is any indication, Olives doesn’t pose a serious challenge to Pizzeria Paradiso for local pizza laurels: Although its combination of toppings was pleasant, its thin crust was insufficiently crisp, folding under the weight of its garnishes when picked up.

Pizza is absent from the dinner menu, but a goat-cheese-and-caramelized-onion tart, topped with a whole, partially boned quail, provides a similarly bready first course. The tiny bird is perfectly cooked, but the portion is the size of a main course, so diners with normal appetites might plan to share the tart if they want to finish their main courses. And though quail has more flavor than most farm-raised feathered game, the dish would be better if the kitchen exercised a bit of restraint in seasoning it with rosemary and black pepper.

The best beginnings to a meal at Olives are to be found among the pasta courses, which are offered in both half and full portions. If you have the sort of sweet tooth that won’t wait for dessert, the butternut-squash-stuffed tortelli that have been an Olives signature since its opening days in Boston should fill the bill. The pasta wrappers of these triangular ravioli are impressively light—the match of any you’ll taste at our best Italian restaurants—but their filling of pureéd squash and hazelnut cookies is so sweet that it dulls the appetite for the main course. And skip the pasta with a disappointingly dull sauce of roasted tomatoes and herbed ricotta. The “port drizzle”—a thread of wine reduced to the consistency of syrup that circled the edge of the plate—is extraneous to a splendid dish of ricotta-stuffed ravioli showered with a generous shaving of truffles. Similarly luxurious is a plate of Israeli couscous carbonara—meaning tossed with bacon, onions, puréed spinach, and egg, in the manner of Rome’s famous spaghetti alla carbonara—garnished with a poached egg covered with truffle shavings.

By way of contrast, there is the unabashedly rustic agnolotti, not the penitent, Lenten version, filled with ricotta and spinach, but the festive, Piedmontese version, stuffed with braised veal and generously sauced with tomato and cream-thinned ricotta cheese. It’s a dish with boisterous flavors that are more than a match for Olives’ noisy setting.

Main courses are uneven. An overcooked filet of red snapper garnished with prawns and presented on a spinach-topped potato cake was served in a pool of bouillabaisse sauce. The dish lacked a unifying thread to tie its elements together. A crisp-crusted, beautifully moist slab of salmon served in a soup plate half filled with clam chowder was a combination that just didn’t work.

A spit-roasted chicken, served with a bright-green herb sauce, disappointed with its rubbery, unevenly browned skin. Covered with a dark-brown glaze whose flavor called to mind barbecue sauce, an impressively thick spit-roasted pork chop was a technical success, but it was not complemented by its bed of kielbasa-sauerkraut ragoût, whose sausage had the briny flavor of the pickled kind packed in glass jars.

At lunch, a crisp-skinned duck leg was underflavored and seemed an afterthought to the classic spinach salad with chopped egg and hot-bacon dressing on which it was served. Several days later, at dinner, a braised and roasted duck had similarly underflavored flesh and was overwhelmed by vinegary sweet-and-sour cabbage.

A couple of dishes were undone by their sheer richness. Smoked braised lamb shank was suffused with a degree of smokiness that masked the meat’s natural flavor, and its sauce was as dark and syrupy as Bovril beef extract. One night’s dinner special, listed as Old-School Cassoulet, was a quarter of a goose, the skin scorched to the point of bitterness and braised in red wine; a chunk of unusually sweet, sugar-cured bacon; and slices of garlic sausage, all garnishing a steel skillet filled with beans. In the southwest of France, where it originated, and in French restaurants in this country, cassoulet is a dish subject to interpretation. But whatever the permutation of ingredients in the several authentic versions, it is unlikely that it would result in the dish Olives chose to serve.

Six months from now, Olives may well be a better restaurant, one that merits the reputation Todd English earned in Boston. At present, Olives serves to show just how good the best of Washington’s fine-dining restaurants are. By comparison to Kinkead’s, Vidalia, DC Coast, Gerard’s Place, Lespinasse, Michel Richard Citronelle, La Chaumière, Galileo, Obelisk, Osteria Goldoni, Cafe Milano, and the Vigorelli, Olives is just another new restaurant, and not a very good one.