Soul Cookin' with a Calypso Beat
As Mother Nature seems to have finally relinquished her icy stranglehold on our fair city, DCist figured it was high time to go in search of a restaurant that featured cuisine of a decidedly warm-weather bent. Away with the heavy stews and roasts; we were looking for spice, for fruit, for delicate seafood and tropical drinks. Luckily, Chef Howsoon Cham runs such an establishment. We settled in for some of his down-home Caribbean cooking at Red Ginger of Georgetown.
Chef Cham grew up in Gambia, but after attending college in the States and then working his way through the diplomatic ranks here in D.C., he decided to pursue his dream of becoming a chef. He cut his teeth under the tutelage of Jeffrey Buben and Peter Smith at Vidalia and also spent time as chef de cuisine at Georgia Brown's. The influence of their southern inflected menus runs deep and insistently through the offerings at Red Ginger.
Shrimp and grits, check. Fried green tomatoes, check. Buttermilk fried chicken, check. You can go back and forth between the menus of all three restaurants and see at a glance that they're all cousins. But Red Ginger takes the theme and swings it subtly to a different latitude, incorporating some mango here, some jicama there, and then dashes of curry and flakes of quinoa to underscore the tropical vibe.
An appetizer of sea scallops served over grits with bacon, tomatoes and onions, strikes a familiar low-country theme, but Chef Cham adds a Caribbean lilt with a delicate lobster curry sauce that at once brightens the dish and also adds a deeper layer of richness. So too the plantain crusted oysters harken back to the typical cornmeal-fried variety, but here a hint of sweetness from the breading makes this version more reminiscent of the Virgin Islands than the Sea Islands.
All three restaurants proudly feature shrimp and grits on their menus. The Vidalia version will set you back $30, while Georgia Brown's clocks in at $21. Red Ginger is the steal of the bunch at $18. Chef Cham creates a smoky, paprika-packed pop by substituting chorizo for andouille or tasso as the meaty base of the dish, and again, the lobster curry sauce makes an appearance and elevates the dish by adding that little bit of eastern exotica to an otherwise staid southern classic.
I rarely order pork in restaurants as I invariably find it to be dried out by the time it's served, but I couldn't resist Red Ginger's version of the classic tenderloin. Cured in apple cider and Jamaican rum and served with collard greens and mashed sweet potatoes, it's finished off with lashings of sugar cane whiskey sauce. I ordered it medium, hoping to get a warm and juicy rose-colored center. One piece managed to hit the mark for doneness, but the rest of the slices veered into and past medium-well territory. Lesson learned. To balance out the sweetness of the sauce and the firmness of the meat I dug into a creamy plate of macaroni and goat cheese; a soft, pillowy, funky, creamy twist on the classic comfort food. And to lighten the load I had another side of quinoa and pumpkin salad; the pumpkin cool, sweet and crisp, the quinoa gritty and crunchy.
Red Ginger hits all the right notes for a Caribbean restaurant. It has cool pastel walls, bright seafood and down-home comfort food. The one thing it didn't have was the one thing I had been anticipating the whole day: a great rum selection. How can a Caribbean restaurant not have a stellar rum collection? I asked for their offerings and found to my disappointment that it principally consisted of Captain Morgan's and Bacardi. No Mount Gay, no Pusser's, no Cruzan. Appleton's of Jamaica did make an appearance, but I would have loved to see a small menu of specialty rums designed to compliment the lovingly-created food.
Chef Cham cooks what he knows and cooks it well. There's many a place in the District to get solid southern cooking, but if you're a bit more daring, cruise on over to Red Ginger in Georgetown for a flash of Caribbean style way up here in D.C.
Red Ginger of Georgetown
1564 Wisconsin Ave, NW
Washington, DC 20007
202-965-7009