Eating on the Edge in DC's Adams Morgan

It's a Tuesday night at Leftbank. Young couples are having dinner in the booths. A single guy meets a couple of friends at the bar. A young married couple, their child occupied with a movie on a portable DVD player, is having sushi with friends at the sushi bar.

The place is casual and stylish--white and glass walls, big splashes of vivid colors. The crowd, like the neighborhood, is young. A state-of-the-art sound system, in combination with the hard, sound-reflective surfaces mean that the place is loud--appealing for groups, less suitable for quiet conversation. It's lively, bright, and friendly and, if a couple of problems are taken care of, it might be a good neighborhood gathering place.

Leftbank is the new incarnation of Cities, a restaurant and bar that changed its menu and decor every six months to feature the cuisine of cities as diverse as Istanbul and Bangkok. At Leftbank, owner Sahir Erozan hopes to renew its appeal for a new generation of diners who eat--and drink--in a more casual fashion than the usual fixed-mealtime format. Leftbank is open from 7:30 am to 2 am (3 am on weekends), serves throughout the day, and features a casual menu with nothing over $15.

Rather than appetizers, main courses, and desserts, the menu is divided into Farm, Garden, Ocean, Sushi, and Dessert. It's an appealing mix of appetizers, sandwiches, salads, and a few main courses. The rule for eating well here is to order simply. The buffalo burger is very good and was cooked medium-rare as ordered, as was the Black Angus sirloin burger, topped with cheese and bacon. Both were accompanied by very good herbed French fries--crisp and not greasy. The same fries come with the New York minute steak, a thin but flavorful piece of meat attentively cooked but overwhelmed with garlic butter. Salads include a simple green salad with a nice pomegranate vinaigrette, and a terrific salad of grilled asparagus with manchego cheese and a poached egg.

If you're ordering seafood, go for the raw variety. The sushi is fresh and skillfully cut. The nigiri sushi, at $5 or $6 for two pieces, is priced a little higher than market price, but the quality is very good. When you get to cooked seafood, the quality goes down. Fried calamari is one of the worst local versions, greasy and tough. Roasted lobster Parmesan is a misguided idea to begin with, and it's accompanied by mashed potatoes that have been turned to glue. Seared rare tuna was cooked far beyond the rare stage.

The problems with the food are not with the ingredients, which are fresh and good, but with inattention in the kitchen. The second set of problems are the service. The restaurant is staffed by pleasant young servers who seem to have received no training. There are long waits for drink orders to be taken, for water to be served or refilled. First courses and main courses were brought to the table at the same time. Checks were delivered to the wrong tables.

It's a puzzle why the owners of Leftbank have put so much money into the decor, sound system, and wireless Internet network and have paid so little attention to the basics of restaurant operation--cooking and service. Do they think their young clientele doesn't know the difference?