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.