As our lives increasingly tend towards the global, we need a few reminders of home territory. Regional cooking has become ever more valuable.

Washington no longer seems like a Southern city, but its roots are in the South. Georgia Brown’s keeps the old traditions alive even as it invents new ones. How wonderful to find a full-dress expense-account restaurant that offers fried chicken gizzards, fried green tomatoes, grits and gumbo and she-crab soup. It’s a convivial restaurant, its service finely honed with a gracious Southern lilt.

I don’t know anywhere else north of Charleston, S.C., that serves frogmore stew, that lightly buttery amalgam of seafood with plenty of sweet corn, green beans, onions, potatoes and diced tomato. I could wish that the potatoes were more thoroughly cooked, the scallops more flavorful and the head-on shrimp more pristine, but I’m glad to find it even with its flaws. And if the biscuits aren’t the very flakiest or the corn sticks are a mite too firm, they’re better than most restaurants’ boring, flabby French slices. In other words, Georgia Brown’s is a comforting presence, no more perfect on close inspection than home turns out to be.