Oakville Grille (MD - Bethesda)

I had high hopes for Oakville. I have been a fan of the owner's Mendocino Grille in DC for years and hoped that this would be more of the same, in a suburban setting. First impressions were good.

The swanky leather booths and funky light fixtures belied the predominantly octogenarian clientele. Additionally, many of the entrees and the extensive selection of wines by the glass were reminiscent of Mendocino Grille.

Our waiter was very helpful, especially with respect to our wine selection. I noticed an anomaly in their wine list - one of my wife's favorite wines was available by the glass, but not by the bottle. The waiter understood our plight and was able to arrange a price and bring us our own bottle for the table.

[I have no idea why it wouldn't just be on both lists to start with, but kudos to the waiter for thinking on his feet and being accommodating.]

We opted for the three course, $30.05 Restaurant Week menu and the wheels more or less fell off the train.

The grilled scallops with roasted beets and herb butter was the "weekly special" on the regular menu as well as one of the three entree selections on the Restaurant Week menu (and who doesn't love eating scallops that were purchased in bulk at the beginning of the week?).

At 7:00 on Wednesday, they were "out" of scallops. I don't mean to be rude, but if you are out of them at 7:00 on Wednesday, and they were your "weekly special," then what you are telling me is that you were never really "in" them at all.

Unless the Ladies Who Lunch created a mad run on scallops that afternoon, how about re-printing your menu? If it is too much trouble to reprint the regular menu, you could at least run to Kinko's and re-print that shockingly bright yellow Restaurant Week menu. Their solution was to offer up rockfish in the same preparation (more on this later).

Starters were fair. Our trio consisted of one green salad (with champagne vinaigrette, teardrop tomatoes and spiced pecans), one arugula salad (with Bosc pears and gorgonzola) and one chicken kataifi (a mixture of chicken and currants rolled into a phyllo crust).

The salads would have benefited greatly from being served on cool (or at least room temperature) plates. As they were, the hot plates more or less wilted the greens.

The chicken dish, unpronounceable as it was, was a surprising highlight. The chicken and currants were a lovely, though somewhat heavy for a starter, pairing with the crispy phyllo shell.

Entrees featured two orders of grilled salmon with wild rice, mango and cilantro crème fraiche and one order of the rockfish "special." The salmon was actually pretty good. It was seared on the outside and rare in the middle - just as it had been requested. The cilantro in the crème fraiche was there visually, but didn't lend much flavor to the dish, so the mango dominated. The combination of long grain rice, mango and salmon was a bit odd for mouth-feel, but then again long grain rice always feels a bit like eating mulch.

The rockfish was an altogether different story. The herb butter combined with the juice from the roasted beets to create a horrifyingly bright pink and yellow starburst pattern on the plate. The only other way I can imagine this color occurring in nature is if someone unloaded a shotgun into a case of pink highlighters.

Amid all this fanfare, the rockfish just sort of sat there - small, limp and looking completely out of place. Once you got past the presentation, the flavors were good enough, but that sad little rockfish never really had a chance. It was only around a centimeter thick, so it was probably a bit overcooked before it had a chance to sit on the hot plate, where it had the opportunity to cook more while waiting for the beet juice to break the herb butter.

Desserts were a bit of a debacle as well. The Restaurant Week menu offered the choice of crème brulee with seasonal berries or a chocolate angel food cake with caramel sauce. We all ordered the angel food cake and were told that they were, predictably, "out" of that choice.

Thanks to some more fancy footwork on the part of our waiter, we were than offered whatever we wanted from the a la carte menu. We selected a carrot cake and a trio of sorbet (strawberry, raspberry and mango).

The desserts were actually very good. The carrot cake was moist, but a little heavy handed with the cream cheese. The sorbets were a little mixed. The mango was excellent, but the raspberry was a little icy and the strawberry a bit bland. The portions were huge. The carrot cake was close to a three inch cube and the sorbet trio was actually three ice cream scoops of sorbet (not the tiny melon balls you typically see).

Restaurant Week is a terrible time to judge any restaurant, because of the above average demands on the kitchen and wait staff as well as the need to do so much merchandising to get under the $30.05 price tag.

That said, even during Restaurant Week, good restaurants still find a way to shine. Oakville did not.