From April 2006

For such a serious-minded place, there's something appealingly scruffy, even raw-edged, about David Craig Bethesda, which opened in December on St. Elmo Avenue and immediately established itself as a beachhead of personal cooking amid a sea of chains and corporate concepts. You won't see it right off. First you'll see the polished front room, with its oak booths, soft lighting, and air of serenity. That's just formal dressing, like the suit that a lot of guys acknowledge is the price of doing business but can't wait to slip out of.

David Craig, the chef and proprietor, is one of those guys. One night he has a black baseball cap cocked back on his head as he works behind the glass of the semi-open kitchen, looking every bit the gnarled line cook instead of a chef who was handpicked by Roberto Donna and Jean-Louis Palladin to run their joint venture, Pesce. A pair of running shoes juts out from under a cabinet full of towels in the men's bathroom. In the cramped back room, the speakers are strung up haphazardly, the cables left to dangle in a way that screams "bachelor."

What's playing? The moody sounds of Mingus and Marvin Gaye--as far from background music as you can get without alienating a wide customer base. The harder stuff comes later. As dinner winds down one busy weeknight and much of the crowd has gone, general manager John Fielding, who worked with Craig at the Tabard Inn, cranks up Keith Richards and struts through the front room playing air guitar.

On the menu, there are no headers identifying appetizers or main courses and no details about which farms you are supporting by supping on the breast of duck. Craig favors the staccato rhythms of a Raymond Chandler novel. Here's the steamed mussels: "Garlic. Shallots. White Wine. Butter. Parsley."

If the lack of niceties sends up a caution flag--an indication, perhaps, of an absence of finery or finish in the kitchen--be assured that Craig is hands-on where it counts. By the time the food arrives, the image of a can't-be-bothered couch potato fades, replaced by that of a tinkering obsessive who is too intent on pursuing his own definition of perfection to make sure his shoes are tied.

His cooking abounds in confidence and generosity, as lavish in its embellishments as his decor isn't. Roast cod brings together caramelized slivers of fennel and cloves of garlic, roasted tomatoes and cranberry beans into a Mediterranean-inflected ragout that you'd be happy to eat as a meatless stew without the square of perfectly crisped fish. Oyster stew has briny bivalves studding a milky, sherry-spiked broth thickened with a hail of minced leeks. The trend to treat duck as a subtle and versatile meat, a Modern American alternative to steak, finds its eyebrow-arched response in Craig's Duck Three Ways, which includes a swoon-inducing liver flan with the texture of whipped butter, knobby links of duck sausage, and thick carvings a juicy, gamy duck breast.

This isn't prissy food. You sense that if the marketplace were not so unforgiving--especially in a Bethesda chockablock with more than 200 restaurants--the Scots-born Craig probably would have opened a gastropub, not a white-tablecloth restaurant. The flavors he gravitates to are big and deep, and although he can turn out an attractive plate, what he really likes to do is present you with heaping portions of food that reveals itself to be more intricate and refined than you could have expected.

Chicken Two Ways looks to be a simple plate of roast chicken with French fries. Not so fast. The drumstick recalls a Thai classic, "angel wing," the meat pushed up, and off, the bone, then stuffed with a wild-mushroom duxelle and carefully roasted. The breast meat is prepared in the style of a classic saltimbocca. The fries turn out to be made of polenta; they're crunchy even after soaking up the wonderful juices from the chicken. Here is the rare instance of a dish that is neither too overelaborated for its own good nor too stripped down in the name of simplicity to be interesting.

If Craig errs, it's on the side of too much richness, as though he were making a point about the right and proper place of indulgence in going out to eat. His inclusion of half portions is not only a concession to the fashionably carb-conscious, it's also an acknowledgement of the glorious excesses of the lobster risotto and the carbonara-style noodles, whose roughly torn bits of bacon signal Craig's intention to emphasize the rusticity of a dish that is too often gussied up beyond its worth.

All the pastas are hand-rolled and hand-cut, a point of pride for Craig, who leaves his noodles unrolled at the tips; the square ends remind you of the presence of a human hand. They're also cooked to a perfect underdoneness. Linguine tossed simply with a rich and fruity olive oil and a couple of handfuls of grilled shrimp show off his craftsmanship. The weakest of the lineup is the pumpkin ravioli--too much amaretti turns a savory into a jarring sweet.

The surprise is that, for all his love of the hearty and immoderate, Craig can turn out a terrific salad--though perhaps it shouldn't be surprising, since many of the best vegetarian dishes are put together by chefs who glory in cooking meat. Aside from a dull Caesar salad, these are tenderly conceived compositions, perfectly dressed and full of surprises. The rocket salad is a joy, with startlingly fresh greens, a rarity in wintertime, along with slices of juicy pear and generous dabs of a tangy cow's-milk cheese. Another salad features excellent manchego cheese, marcona almonds, and thin, crisped sheets of serrano ham.

One of the menu's best dishes is also one of the most carefully wrought. It's called Mushroom Carpaccio. Go ahead and be cynical about the name. I was. I'd imagined a clever way of selling about half of a portobello mushroom for nearly ten bucks. It more closely resembles a mushroom confit, with an earthy, meaty flavor and an almost melting softness. It's a measure of Craig's idiosyncracy that he gives the mushrooms top billing over the gnocchi they come with, and a measure of his talent that the accompaniment is deserving of its own plate. Craig understands that gnocchi is a dumpling, not a thing that dissolves on contact. Generous shavings of Parmesan cheese cover them like a big down comforter.

Cooking this good, this distinctive, deserves a wide audience. But I have to wonder if the restaurant is up to the challenge. I don't mean crowd management--I'm talking about something closer to soul maintenance. Can the place remain true to its idiosyncrasies and intentions and still satisfy the needs of a broad clientele? David Craig isn't for everybody. It's not a fancy, special-occasion place, it's not a place to linger over a glass of wine with a few small plates--the list is too shallow for that kind of grazing, and the bar has no seats--and it's not so gently priced that most people would make it a regular part of their eating-out rotation.

But if you light up at the prospect of dishes that haven't been conceived in bloodless boardrooms or prettified to the point of preciousness in the kitchen, if you're attracted to the rugged individualism of a chef who would dare to open his own place in the heart of a booming restaurant district without benefit of a lot of capital and without copping to either trends or expectations, then David Craig is your man.