Cooking: Testing a tasty 'Dish'

WASHINGTON, April 30 (UPI) -- This is the tale of the birth of a new restaurant's menu. A tale of intimate intervention, controlled breathing, sudden drama, and, finally, fruitful outcome.

We begin back in the dull days of middle winter. The baby's name has already been chosen: Dish. It is scheduled to emerge in Washington D.C.'s newly renovated River House Inn, a short walk from the Kennedy Center. Menu midwives and doctors gather with the chef to taste his offerings. There's a consultant in food and wine, a star of long standing in the restaurant world; a restaurant food and beverage manager; a food critic; the restaurant's PR; some amateur diners-out, including me. And the anxious father of the project, whose investment it is.

The gist of the menu is comfort food, the kind of stuff we'd like to believe our mothers made us, with a long list of side dishes that ordered in threes and fours could themselves compose a meal.

Builders were still transforming the intended site. So we began our testing elsewhere. A stack of small plates sat in the center of the long refectory table. A dish emerged from the kitchen. We raised our forks, we raised our pencils. (Should you spit out at a food tasting?) Needs more salt, we scribbled, needs less salt. Other samples emerged, the stack of clean plates diminished. There's no such thing as a free lunch, but this is as close as it comes.

The wines to go with were produced. What thoughts on Santa Barbara Winery's Pinot Noir? The Goldwater Dog Point from New Zealand? Were the prices right? (Must we use the spittoon?)

Some days later, the group met again, this time with the restaurant's ultra hip architects added to the critics' circle. In the interim, dishes had been tweaked, some ingredients altered. The general assessment? Goal achieved!

Then almost at once -- drama: the chef was unable after all to take up his post.

Three weeks before opening where to find a new and worthy chef? Ron Reda, a young Italian-American with curving sideburns and two piratical silver teeth, was plucked from running the banquet side of the capital's 15 Ria.

Credentials good: enthusiasm for cooking was imbued not by his mother but his father -- interesting. Oversaw President Clinton's White House kitchen -- great boot camp. Then passage through several Washington area restaurants. And just three weeks to put his own mark on a menu that inevitably the critics would be weighing in their minds against the one they had already approved.

This time the circle gathered in the actual restaurant, the critics alert to every detail. We sat, we noted, under golden linen wallpaper at a pale maple communal table whose inlay of mahogany echoed the outline frame of a backlit rice paper wall. Still to come were the correct chairs, striped napkins, the right glasses, and an 8 1/2 by 4 foot diptych of a Weimeraner by dog photographer William Wegman, one long ear cocked to the 'dish' of gossip.

I can tell you my mother never cooked us a clambake. If she had, it wouldn't have steamed in a white wine broth with tomato-red crawfish lounging on top. Her BLTs -- a lunch menu feature -- never included grilled shrimp and garlic-flavored mayonnaise on toasted ciabatta. Nor did our family's pork chops come double thick with vanilla bean and saffron-baked pears. This was pretty elevated comfort food.

But was the buttermilk chicken a touch too brown? Were the micro-greens that decorated the seared rockfish nestling on a woodsy bed of oyster mushrooms wilting in its heat? If you're a food critic and have no more criticism to level, then that's the end of the tastings ...

Back to the kitchen and a week later the dress rehearsal of the final menu. Out came barbecued lamb chops; blue cheese steak; strawberry shortcake with proper biscuits; a root beer float -- what a lark! Ron Reda had found his feet. Not only was the chicken a perfect gold, moist inside its crunchy armor, but the fussy jus and garnishes had been replaced by a rolled paper napkin, an inducement to pick up the bird in the fingers. The wit! My mother would never have stood for it.

Dish was alive and kicking. The critics cheered. When can I do this again?

Dish, The River House Inn, 924 25th St. NW, Washington, DC., (202) 338-6520.