People who’ve lived in D.C. for any length of time tend to have strong opinions about Rasika, and those opinions tend to be the same: it’s the kind of place you take out-of-towners when you want to impress them without looking like you’re trying to impress them. That’s a narrow target, and Rasika hits it every single time.
The original location is on D Street in Penn Quarter, a neighborhood that has seen a lot of restaurant ambition come and go. Rasika opened in 2005 and has outlasted almost all of it. The West End outpost followed in 2012. Both are run by restaurateur Ashok Bajaj, and both share a kitchen philosophy centered on contemporary Indian cooking — which in this case means wood-fired, precisely spiced, and plated with enough restraint that the food doesn’t have to announce itself.
The palak chaat is the thing everyone talks about, and they’re right to. Crispy spinach leaves fried into something between a chip and a cloud, dressed with tamarind and date chutney and a swipe of yogurt. It arrives looking modest. It disappears in about forty seconds. If you’ve dragged someone skeptical about Indian food to this dinner, the palak chaat is usually where you stop having an argument.
After that, the menu rewards some navigation. The black cod with dill and Kashmiri chiles is the kind of dish that made the restaurant’s reputation outside its usual audience — delicate, not shy about heat, served with a saffron sauce that earns its presence on the plate. The tandoor section is reliably good; the lamb boti kebab in particular has a char-to-tenderness ratio that takes some doing to achieve. Vegetarians won’t feel like afterthoughts here, which still isn’t a given in a lot of D.C. dining rooms.
The wine list is serious and the cocktail program understands that a tamarind reduction belongs in more drinks than most bars are willing to admit. Prices are what you’d expect from a restaurant that has two James Beard Awards on its wall and a reservations system that fills up well in advance — appetizers run $14 to $18, mains from $28 into the mid-forties. It’s not a casual Tuesday dinner, but it’s not a special-occasion-only proposition either, particularly if you’re willing to eat at the bar.
The Penn Quarter dining room is dark and warm in the right way — copper accents, low lighting, booths that give you a little privacy. It’s elegant without being stiff, which took some effort to pull off in 2005 and takes more effort to maintain now. The service reads the table well, which in practice means they don’t explain things you already know.
Reservations open thirty days out on Resy, and the weekend evenings go fast. Weekday lunch service at the Penn Quarter location is worth knowing about — a shorter menu, same kitchen, considerably easier to get into, and a reasonable way to spend a long midday if you happen to be in the neighborhood. The lunch specials hover around $22 to $28 for two courses.
Twenty years in, Rasika is neither a novelty nor a nostalgia act. It’s just a very good restaurant that has kept its standards while the city around it has changed shape several times over. That is, as it turns out, harder than it looks.
