Fahrenheit chef Terence Feury's bold but clearly defined style is exemplified by scallops cooked to a translucency, set atop a pool of roasted-tomato sauce, and capped with a tangle of fried matchstick potatoes. Photograph by Allison Dinner

Hotel restaurants are often thought of as expensive and bland, and most deserve the reputation. Their kitchens have to provide quick meals for business travelers as well as serve banquets for 500.

Then again, some of the world's best dining is found in hotel restaurants. Locally, many people know the Latham, the Mandarin Oriental, the Ritz-Carlton in Tysons Corner, and the Watergate better as the homes of their restaurants--Citronelle, CityZen, Maestro, and the former Jean-Louis--than as hotels.

No hotel company knows these extremes better than the Ritz-Carlton, which sometimes treats its hotel restaurants as exquisite showcases for chefs but sometimes neglects them.

Clearly, the company realizes the power of a name restaurant in making a hotel's reputation. When the Ritz-Carlton was on Massachusetts Avenue, the Jockey Club, under chef Hidemasa Yamamoto, was an institution, a lively point of intersection for political and social Washington. For the Ritz-Carlton in Pentagon City, the company brought chef Gerard Pangaud, a two-star Michelin talent, down from New York in 1991. In Tysons Corner, young chef Fabio Trabocchi has turned Maestro into the area's finest restaurant.

Meanwhile, the dining rooms of the Ritz-Carlton's DC hotels have languished. The Grill at the 22nd and M streets Ritz-Carlton has never distinguished itself. Fahrenheit, which opened three years ago at the Georgetown Ritz-Carlton with a style of cooking more suited to a large resort than to a boutique hotel, has also been disappointing.

With chef Terence Feury's arrival at Fahrenheit in September, the company appears to be following an often-successful strategy of restaurant makeover--tapping a young talent to transform a so-so reputation. Feury's background includes time at two of the nation's best seafood restaurants, Le Bernardin in New York and the Striped Bass in Philadelphia, and his lively but unpretentious style seems at home in Fahrenheit's high-ceilinged dining room located in what was once an incinerator. The floor-to-ceiling windows offer a view of the smokestack and the Potomac beyond.

 A concerted effort has been made to reach beyond the hotel's clientele and woo the kinds of crowds that have been flocking to Penn Quarter. The dining room has been made less formal, with a wine-service table as its centerpiece. The tables are covered, bistro fashion, with white paper. And Feury seems attuned to the way people want to eat these days--the small, appealing menu is heavy on seafood and local produce, and every dish is available in small and large portions.

Feury doesn't crowd his plates with competing flavors or textures--his opening gambits are noteworthy for being clear as well as bold. Grilled octopus, atop a salad of baby arugula and fennel, is very tender. A salad of warm lobster and potatoes is enlivened by a tart citrus dressing. A couple of old chestnuts are given new life: Tomato soup is deeply flavorful and garnished with smoked mozzarella. Roasted prawns are garnished with crisp red lentils, soaked, then quickly fried and dressed with a zippy ancho vinaigrette.

Main courses are distinguished by first-rate ingredients. Scallops are cooked to a beautiful translucency, served on a bed of roasted-tomato sauce and garnished with crisply fried, julienne potatoes. An order of Carolina black bass is a marvel of simple cooking--a piece of fresh fish, its skin crisp and its flesh moist, served with mussels and flavored with basil. Salmon is given new interest by its herb crust and tart lemon sauce.

This degree of attention and simplicity of approach is not limited to seafood: A breast of Amish organic chicken might be the best thing on the menu. This is chicken that makes you remember what really good chicken once tasted like, moist and served on an earthy mushroom stew. There are Niman Ranch pork chops, complemented by sweet and tart Virginia apples.

Desserts lack the finesse of much of the rest of the cooking. The crème brûlée is perfectly textured, but the crust of the lemon tart is heavy. An apple crumble has little to recommend it, being full of crunchy, undercooked apples topped by floury-tasting crumbs.

The restaurant tends to be understaffed at lunch, but that's not to say your service is going to be lacking. The staff is Ritz-Carlton polite and well informed about the menu and wine list--which has a number of interesting bottles in the $30 range.

Is Fahrenheit on its way to becoming another Maestro? Is it as buzzworthy as the kitchen at the Ritz in Pentagon City during Pangaud's time there? No and no. And it remains to be seen whether Feury can sustain the initial excitement. But the Ritz-Carlton has succeeded in nudging the restaurant toward something interesting and maybe, someday, even special.