Raku An Asian Bistro, Washington, D.C.

After our adventurous expedition to the Shrine at CUA this afternoon and after having to deal with the long waits on the under-repair red line, we were famished and before going home stopped off at Dupont Circle in quest of sustenance. We ended up at Raku An Asian Bistro, a pan-Asian concept restaurant by the noted restauranteur Mark Miller of Santa Fe's Coyote Cafe fame.

What with all the hype and the very passionate reviews—both pro and con—from various local food bloggers, I was actually rather happy with the quiet and peaceful cafe. We were seated at a corner booth with windows on both sides giving us nice views of the Dupont Circle foot traffic, and we were isolated a bit from the bustle of the sushi bar in the main dining room.

Many of the reviewers complained about the service, but I found our servers to be pleasant, efficient, and around when needed, so I had no displeasure there at all. My only "disappointment" was a menu issue: there is no regular iced tea, just some nasty peach flavored stuff.

We started by splitting an order of crispy calimari with Asian chile sauce. The squid was cut into strips instead of the traditional calimari rings. It was lightly battered and fried, but not fried crunchy enough to be "crispy" as it was called in the menu; I had no problem with that, though, as the squid was nicely tender.

For our main courses, Laurent chose the sushi and sushi roll combination platter. He got a nice assortment of sushi nigiri that included some eel, and several pieces of sushi rolls. The pickled gingerroot was fresh.


I had the dan dan noodles made of thick, egg-enriched, Asian-style spaghetti with some surprisingly hot ground pork stewed with Szechuan peppers, peanuts, and sesame topping the noodles and served with cilantro and julienned cucumber.


After the rather standard main courses, where the restaurant really shined was with the desserts. Laurent had a surprisingly tasty croissant pudding (think bread pudding) with ginger ice cream and crème anglaise and raspberry coulis and I had a very, very nice green tea crème brulée. The custard had a nice, intense green tea flavor and deep green color, and I was pleased to notice the caramelized sugar crust was warm, indicating that the dish had been freshly made to order. The top was garnished with a little mound of diced fresh strawberries.