Ellington

Description

You enter into a cozy atrium stocked with couches and magazines, including Wine Spectator, which has given the restaurant an Award of Excellence the past three years.
Through the double metal-clad doors and you're in the big, inviting bar area where you also have the option to dine. To the right is the main dining room, with solid, unclothed hardwood tables and comfortable, partially upholstered chairs.
The lighting is just dark enough to make it difficult to determine what shade of earth tone is the paint job, but around the walls are a series of about two dozen backlit "art boxes," one containing a collection of wine-bottle corks, another a collection of seashells, others watercolor paintings. Two subsidiary dining rooms/party rooms branch off the eastern wall.
Bordino's menu, too, has changed. No longer strictly old-school Italian, it has added an eclectic range of Italian-accented offerings at, perhaps unfortunately, prices to match, including grilled Tasmanian salmon and dill creme fraiche with grilled red bell peppers and sauteed spinach and grilled Ahi tuna and pecan lime butter with braised leeks and roasted baby carrots, $34.50 each, and grilled lamb chops and a sweet fig reduction with spinach and bell peppers, $45.50.
The good news: You can still get very good food for a comparatively modest outlay. Bordino's does an excellent job when it comes to portion sizes and plate presentation. And although the black-clad, white-aproned staff looks very young, which in too many other cases also means inexperienced, these employees are all superbly trained. We can't remember the last time we got service this professional that was also genuinely friendly and helpful.