In a summer of high-profile restaurant openings, the handlers of Urbana — the new restaurant inside the new Hotel Palomar just west of Dupont Circle on P Street — don’t want their charge to get lost in the crowd. And so, last night, they hosted a flashy preview of their eatery to get the word out about the restaurant that replaces the old Gabriel restaurant in the former Radisson-Barceló.

Hotel Palomar is a link in the hip Kimpton chain of hotels — known for its quirkily comfortable rooms and solid hotel restaurants. Far from the first Kimpton entry into the city’s saturated accommodations market, Hotel Palomar joins Kimpton’s Hotel Monaco, Hotel Helix, Hotel Rouge, Topaz Hotel, Hotel Madera, and Hotel George in the District. Indeed, outside of its home base in San Francisco, Kimpton’s largest presence is right here in Washington.

Although Kimpton has already propagated its Hotel Monaco brand across the country, D.C.’s Hotel Palomar represents the first time that Kimpton has opened a branch of another of its properties elsewhere. Indeed, the original Hotel Palomar resides in San Francisco and has an excellent reputation of its own on all fronts. Not only are its rooms spectacular and its location superb, its in-house restaurant — the Fifth Floor — is among the best restaurants in a star-studded culinary town.

Wisely, the Kimpton folks have opted not to replicate the Fifth Floor here in Washington. Perhaps mindful of both Urbana’s neighborhood location and its need to stand on its own, the chain has created in Urbana a restaurant that — like the Dude in Los Angeles in the early 1990s — seems to fit its time and place.