The best restaurant in Reston Town Center is also one of Washington’s best seafood palaces. Jeff Tunks’s kitchen does well with raw-bar towers, jazzed-up sushi rolls, and an atlas’s worth of appetizers and entrées, from Thai red-curry lobster to cioppino.
Lots of techies, Chardonnay-drinking fortysomethings, and neighborhood families converge at the bilevel space, a sedate antidote to the surrounding chains. Many dishes are inspired by Passion Food Hospitality’s other restaurants, all in downtown DC: Seafood gumbo comes from Acadiana, mushroom-crusted halibut is a staple at DC Coast, and a Yucatán shrimp cocktail is Ceiba all the way.
What to get: Shrimp-tempura-filled Captain Crunch Roll; fried oysters and fried clams; crab-and-shrimp spring rolls; clams-casino-inspired dip; whole crispy flounder with two fabulous dipping sauces; doughnut holes.
Open Monday through Friday for lunch and dinner, Saturday and Sunday for dinner. Expensive.
Ann Limpert joined Washingtonian in late 2003. She was previously an editorial assistant at Entertainment Weekly and a cook in New York restaurant kitchens, and she is a graduate of the Institute of Culinary Education. She lives in Petworth.
