You walk by and Raku sucks you in. You can't help it. You see the cherry-red umbrellas outside, the crisscross of celery-green bamboo poles in a wall of windows, the twitchy Japanese cartoons playing in a panel of stone, the people biting into dumplings and slurping noodles, tossing back tiny glasses of something clear and cold. And the people -- they're young, old, men, women, alone, in clumps. It looks so intriguing. It looks so . . . un-Washington.
"Exactly," crows restaurant impresario Mark Miller. "I'm creating a little excitement. Washington needs more fun stuff. This is a very serious city."
The last time Miller brought this much over-the-top drama to the D.C. restaurant business was in 1991 when he and his partner, Diana Goldberg, spent $5 million and opened his 14th Street paean to Southwestern food, Red Sage. The bi-level restaurant has had its ups and downs (it's gone through about a chef a year; see Page E3), but Miller's obsessive attention to detail in the decor and authenticity in the food has generally kept the customers coming.
This time, Miller's gone Asian with Raku -- a ceramics term that can also mean comfort or pleasure. Located at 19th and Q streets NW, it's the first of what Miller hopes will be a chain of cool, hip diners that offer "a hit parade of Asian street food" -- dumplings, noodles, skewers, salads and wrappers (or rolls), most priced from $4.50 to $7.50.
A second Raku is scheduled to open in Bethesda this fall, and Miller is considering another downtown D.C. location, maybe even near Red Sage, for a mini-Raku. "It'd have takeout and a little bit of space to stand up and eat," he says. (A giant 6,000-square-foot Raku is in the plans for Las Vegas next summer.)
The restaurant is a clever combination of dramatic decor and simple food. The narrow red-black-and-tan menus have 10 noodle dishes, five kinds of salads (top seller -- Hunan chicken, $7), six skewers, seven dumplings and five wrappers (biggest hit -- the $4.50 Summer Rolls with their addictive peanut dipping sauce). Beverages include two kinds of cold draft sake, Asian beers and seven kinds of tea. Even dessert stays true to the Asian theme, with sweet sticky rice and fresh mango, ginger mousse, passion fruit sorbet or -- Miller's favorite -- a tall glass of Asian fruit gelatin.
Most of the food is prepared (but not cooked) each night between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. in Red Sage's large prep kitchen under the supervision of corporate chef Robbin Haas. The food is then delivered in the morning to Raku, where four to six line cooks steam or fry the dumplings, grill the skewered meats, heat the broth and noodles and toss together the salads as the lunch and dinner orders pour in. Sauces are kept in plastic squirt bottles that are easy to shake and squeeze.
"We want the food to come out fast -- about 12 minutes from the time you sit down to when you get your food," says Haas, a no-nonsense former Miami chef who spent two months traveling throughout Southeast Asia, China, Hong Kong and Singapore to develop the recipes for the restaurant.
Haas admires the noodle houses and street-food vendors in Asia, where a steaming bowl of soup or a grilled skewer of meat is considered fast snack food.
"In Japan, you want a quick bowl of noodles, you're in and out in five minutes. In Bangkok, you want a skewer or some pad thai, you just do it," says Haas.
He'd like people to view Raku the same way. On your way to an appointment? Stop in for some iced tea and a Saigon Satay (chicken or shrimp on sugarcane skewers) or some Green Curry Shark Bites. If you sit at the counter, you'll even get your check before the food arrives so there's nothing to slow you down.
But Raku's distinctive decor does slow people down. Despite the hard stools and narrow-backed chairs, people do want to linger. Groups of friends want to order some cold-draft sake or maybe the Woodchuck cider and six or seven finger foods and just sit and gab and people-watch. Maybe White House hot shot George Stephanopoulos, who lives nearby, will drop in.
Celebs or not, at night the place is jammed and the cooks are jamming -- hustling at their stations to serve 1,000 Peking duck dumplings, 300 shark skewers, 50 pounds of shrimp and 100 pounds of noodles.
And Mark Miller couldn't be more pleased. "If you take a risk and do something with a little more edge, people will gravitate toward it," he says with an obvious note of pride.
Miller, whose Coyote Cafe in Santa Fe, N.M., in the '80s helped make Southwestern-style cooking a national trend, says this Asian fling is a natural for him. He points out that he studied Chinese art history at the University of California, Berkeley, and taught Japanese culture in the school's anthropology department in the early 1970s. Even his college roommates were Asian, he says. "I've been involved with this a large part of my life."
To the question of why he's not sticking to Southwestern food, he snaps, "My last name's not Martinez, ya know?" A few beats of silence follow and then he laughs and adds, "Of course, it's not Yamaguchi or Chung either."
The point, he insists in the rapid-fire way he has of speaking, is that Asian food is the food of the future. "The meals are more balanced. More healthy. Smaller amounts of protein. More vegetables. More broth. More flavor. Lots of condiments. Spice it the way you want."
Ironically, he came to this conclusion about six years ago while opening a Southwestern restaurant in Japan.
"I had to be there a solid month, and I noticed how people going to work or home would be eating street food. There I was, in the most expensive country in the world, and I could get healthy fresh food made in a minute for $5 to $6. Why can't we do this, I wondered?"
Miller's idea was to compete with the delis, the fast-food joints and the sandwich places that Americans normally turn to for a quick meal.
"Why is our choice only burgers, pastrami sandwiches or a salad?" he rails. "This isn't food I want to eat. This isn't healthy." Even something as benign as bagels get him riled. "Why is this society so obsessed with boiled white bread with a hole?" he grouses.
The former teacher considers his Asian restaurants not only a place to eat, but a place to educate customers. "Food is a social bridge. It's a way to relate to a culture and a people. It's really raising consciousness, like in the '60s."
As for comments that his food isn't "really authentic," Miller is typically blunt: "If I gave you really authentic food, you wouldn't like it."
Dishes in Thailand, for example, he says, have much more fish sauce than most Americans like. "There are even foods in Japan that I don't like -- too fermented, too sour, too yucky," Miller admits.
Instead, he has picked flavors and textures that he feels Americans will like. But, he stresses, "this is not fusion food. This is not masa-dough dumplings with wild mushrooms. All these ingredient combinations are authentic."
This, however, doesn't mean he won't continue to tinker with the menu. He's considering vegetarian sushi, adding a few more salads and maybe a few combo plates (two skewers, two dumplings).
He's also working with Sony to develop Asian videos for the restaurants, but he's being careful not to include anything too far out on the edge. "In the beginning we played avant-garde Asian rock, but it was too weird for people."
Still, he's attracting the kind of publicity -- and business -- that most restaurateurs crave.
A news crew from one of the Japanese networks -- "impressed that we're using the right product for the Namban U-don (a Japanese noodle dish)," Miller says -- is doing a story on Raku. The Frommer's guide is spotlighting the restaurant, Metropolitan Home is said to be interested in doing an article on the restaurant's design, and several other newspapers and magazines are considering stories on the food.
They just can't help it: Raku has sucked them in too. CAPTION: Asian food - here one of Raku's noodle dishes - is the food of the future. CAPTION: Mark Miller's newest venture is Raku, a diner with an Asian flavor.