Sensational Seafood, and a View to Match

By Walter Nicholls
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Nabbing a table by the window is easy at Monterey Bay Fish Grotto, whose spectacular and airy dining space opened in early March in the Tysons Corporate Office Center in McLean. With 20-foot walls of glass and steel, the sweeping, 13,000-square-foot restaurant has 30 window tables and additional booths that seat 210 in the main dining room. The best table of all is No. 23 in the cool oriel, a cantilevered box of glass off the main room, offering the ultimate outlook onto the treetops and the sprawling Tysons Corner Center in the distance. The Grotto is easily the most dramatic place to eat in the ever-developing neighborhood.

Owners Glenn and Lisa Hawley have a restaurant with the same name in Pittsburgh and another in Monroeville, Pa. (The Hawley mini-chain is not to be confused with the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California, whose Seafood Watch program tracks sustainable seafood.) She oversees dining room operations. He manages the kitchens. If the Tysons location is an indication of their overall effort, they are doing a terrific job.

With 25 kinds of fresh fish on the menu, the selection is daunting, even with a few not available every day. Going down a list that includes cooking methods and mix-and-match sauces for each fish, there's walleyed pike from the Great Lakes region, mako shark from Florida and black cod from Alaska.

Don't care for the Dijon dill sauce suggested for the swordfish? You can substitute the orange and basil sauce designed for the halibut.

Don't care for fish at all? There are chicken dishes -- teriyaki and parmigiana -- and prime-cut steaks.

At a recent lunch, a friend and I were admiring the 15-foot-long, hand-woven bamboo fish dangling overhead when the real thing was delivered by our friendly waiter. The pretty combination appetizer platter was perfect for two. The main attraction was a beautiful, free-form crab cake of jumbo lump meat that was artfully browned on top and circled by a mellow remoulade. "If you like crab, you'll line up to order this," said my guest, and I couldn't agree more. On one side of the great cake, a pair of plump Cajun shrimp, propped on a spicy orange marmalade, packed a flavor punch. A skewer of little cubes of tuna, salmon and swordfish, marinated in soy sauce and ginger, had its own ancho chili mayonnaise.

I loved the opaka-paka, a buttery fish from Hawaiian waters that you don't see on a menu every day. And the grouper could not have tasted fresher.

So often, restaurants that offer a terrific view fail when it comes to good food. The Grotto successfully delivers both.

Lunch entrees, $10-$25; dinner entrees, $21-$37.

The Food section rated this restaurant's crab cake for a July 2009 story about the area's best.

The crab meat was delicate; the texture, nice and lumpy. The ratio of meat to filler (soft bread crumbs from the interior of a crusty loaf, parsley, seasoning and eggs) was just right. But the flavor of this jewel-toned restaurant's crab cake was slightly bland despite an onion-y remoulade sauce drizzled on the plate. And crunch! We bit into a tiny shell. It's an easy mistake to make but a crab cake no-no.

Two 4-ounce jumbo-lump crab cakes, $36.95

(July 29, 2009)