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Very Best Restaurants: Provence

Very Best Listing | Very Best by Cuisine | Very Best by Location

Provence ***
Washington, $$

While the stone, stucco, iron, and weathered wooden shutters used by the designers of Provence create an ambience that evokes the south of France, they also create an acoustic babel that makes it hard to enjoy chef Yannick Cam's cuisine in the comfort that it merits. At lunch, brightened by the sunlight that streams in through its front windows, the setting gains a terrace-like warmth. And, with a reduced clientele, the sound is well within the comfort level.

Yannick Cam's menuits four pages of closely spaced print offer well over twice the number of dishes found at other luxury restaurantscould serve as the outline for a substantial cookbook. As though this were not enough, waiters at dinner recite a seemingly endless list of specials. One of these, recently sampled, reaffirmed Cam's reputation as a culinary genius: a gratin of eggplant, larded with tiny bits of salt-cured anchovies and topped with slices of sea scallops cooked just long enough to make them firm yet not so long as to diminish their natural sweetness.

Yannick Cam has grown restless since the days of Le Pavillon, when he felt that great cuisine could take place only in a dining room limited to 60 patrons. Early this year, he and partner Savino Recine will be opening a restaurant in the burgeoning East End devoted to Cam's interpretation of the exotic Spanish regional cuisine of Catalonia. At Provence, he will leave behind some memorable dishes, including wood-grilled pigeon with a celery ragout, rabbit-stuffed ravioli in a creamy tomato sauce, risotto with mushrooms and fresh snails, a pot-au-feu of veal tongue, and a whole baby chicken roasted with black olives and artichokes. One hopes that his kitchen brigade will be able to replicate the excellence of his work.

Provence , 2401 Pennsylvania Ave. NW, Washington; 202-296-1166. Open Monday through Friday for lunch and dinner, Saturday and Sunday for dinner. MapIt!

QUALITY: ****Excellent; *** Superior; **Very Good; * Good
PRICE RANGE: $$$= Very Expensive; $$ Expensive; $=Moderate; ¢=Inexpensive

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