From August 2004

Do the three rules of real-estate value--"location, location, location"--apply to luxury hotels? The new Mandarin Oriental hotel seems to think not. Located in the Portals project just east of the 14th Street bridge and overlooking the Washington Channel and its yacht moorings, the hotel is not convenient either to the marble corridors of Capitol Hill or the office buildings of downtown. The streets nearby are mostly deserted in the evenings.

The hotel's management seems to be counting on the draw of two high-profile restaurants to help to make the hotel a destination. The first, Café Mozu, the hotel's less formal restaurant, opened in March. The second, Cityzen, under the command of Eric Ziebold, formerly at the very highly regarded French Laundry under Thomas Keller, will open for dinner only in September.

Café Mozu belies the Washington rule that restaurants with views don't have very good food. The room is modern, serene, and full of light. Floor-to-ceiling windows look out--across a freeway--to the Washington Channel and the Jefferson Memorial. The hotel's Asian roots are alluded to in the restaurant's waiting area, built to evoke the veranda of a grand colonial hotel and furnished with white rocking chairs.

To run Café Mozu and serve as the hotel's executive chef, the Mandarin Oriental has hired Hidemasa Yamamoto, for many years chef of the Jockey Club on Massachusetts Avenue. Limited by the preferences of the Jockey Club's clientele--a coalition of politicians and cavedwellers who never got much beyond crabcakes, red meat, and chicken salad--Yamamoto never really had a chance to spread his wings. At Café Mozu, the menu is his own.

Yamamoto's style at Café Mozu is less dependent on the sauces of classical French cooking and more ingredient-driven--Modern American in style with Asian accents--than his Jockey Club menu. Food is beautifully arranged on the plate.

Appetizers included a lovely "carpaccio" of thinly sliced red and gold beets accented with sake-marinated scallops, the sweetness of all the ingredients in harmony. Earlier in the summer, a half dozen raw oysters were served in Chinese porcelain spoons, each with a different topping--caviar, cucumber, tomato--that worked beautifully with the salinity of the oysters. Wontons of shrimp and broccoli are complemented by a lobster broth with lemongrass. Tuna tartare with foie gras, ponzu sauce, ginger, and scallions is a wonderful combination of flavors. Sometimes modernizations of traditional Asian dishes miss. The Still Life of Peaches, a trio of white-peach sorbet, peach salad, and white-peach foam, was so subtle as to be nearly tasteless. The Crispy Spring Roll filled with crabmeat, cabbage, and mushrooms was not crisp and not enhanced by its honey-truffle sauce.

The real treats among the main courses have been the fish dishes. Sautéed black cod with miso, thin slices of kumquats, and pomegranate-lemon sauce was very good. The beautifully fried crispy whole fish would have been even better if the accompanying spicy bean sauce had been as good as that found in almost any Chinatown restaurant. Crisp-skinned striped sea bass was nicely accompanied by stir-fried vegetables and an intriguing carrot-coconut sauce.

Rack of lamb has a nicely spicy crust. At dinner, the restaurant features a special menu of domestically raised Kobe beef. The beef lives up to its reputation for tenderness and flavor.

The dessert menu has hits and misses. The Black and White Martini Shake--layers of chocolate, vanilla, and caramel served in a martini glass--is remarkable mainly for its presentation. The spiced baba with roasted pineapple is delicious, as is the chocolate tart with terrific salty pecan ice cream. But why is dessert followed by a complimentary pastry? A nice gesture, but the flavor is lost in the aftermath of a few mouthfuls of chocolate.

Service at Café Mozu has varied from bad--a comedy of missing waiters, wrong orders, and inaccurate checks--to competent. It has improved in the months since the opening, but it still is not up to the standards one expects in a restaurant of this level of ambition or with these prices.