Chez Mama-san offers smooth translation

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Chez Mama-san, the new Japanese home-style restaurant in Georgetown, is a beauty.

Cozy and elegant, the little brick town house, built about 1900, with a graceful mural of a bouquet of poppies on the outside wall repeated inside the house as a single flower (the work of Ivo K. Koychev), retains its Victorian charm. Polished old wooden floors reflect exposed red brick walls and narrow ceiling beams.

The tables and booths are of wood, with comfortably upholstered benches. Table settings, in the Japanese style, are minimal: elegantly placed chopsticks encased in pastel-colored paper atop white napkins and Western silverware.

Chez Mama-san seats about 50 diners on two floors, and despite the intimate size, kitchen aromas never intrude into the dining room. Service can be a trifle slow at times, but the gentle smiles of the sweet-faced waitresses, endearing and eager to please, make the wait seem quite bearable.

Chez Mama-san is a new concept in Japanese cooking for Washingtonians. There is no sushi or sashimi menu; nor is there a grill table. This is no Japan Inn with teppan yaki cooking and a sushi bar, but Japanese comfort food, Westernized dishes as interpreted for the Japanese palate, called "yo-shoku," the creation of Izumi Yoshimoto.

Mrs. Yoshimoto, who owns Chez Mama-san with her daughter Miki, owned the now-closed Japan Inn on Wisconsin Avenue. Miki Yoshimoto is responsible for the exquisite narrow paintings on the wall of the new restaurant.

Japan Inn, which opened almost 40 years ago in a tiny space on Connecticut Avenue just above Dupont Circle, originally featured classic Japanese cooking, such as teppan yaki and sukiyaki. When Mrs. Yoshimoto moved the inn to the much larger premises on Wisconsin Avenue, she expanded the menu to include a sushi bar. Chez Mama-san is Mrs. Yoshimoto's latest dream -- a small, modest Japanese restaurant where the dishes reflect her childhood in Japan.

The menu is a mix of soups and salads, small plates, entrees and a few desserts. At lunch, a sukiyaki beef sandwich and pork cutlet sandwich are added to the menu as well as a few side dishes of stuffed rice balls. Salads include a cold noodle salad with shredded chicken and vegetables over egg noodles; ahi tuna salad with a soy sesame dressing; and salmon salad.

Our serving of the salmon salad proved to be a layer of delicious thin-sliced beets covered with mache, topped with two pieces of somewhat overcooked salmon. The salad was topped with a mound of sliced red onions and a handful of little capers. Unfortunately, the greens were drowned in a sea of vinegar and the heap of sliced onions was overwhelming.

But tempura of shrimp and scallops over rice was delicious. The shrimp and the small scallops remained tender in their light batter coating. Tempura is deep-fried by definition, but Mama-san's tempura is neither greasy nor heavy, but a delicate rendering of a classic Japanese dish. It is served over rice and could use a dipping sauce. The serving easily can be shared. Scallops and shrimp also appear in an au-gratin version.