Bernard Grenier - Owner-chef of Bistro D'oc
Bistro D’Oc: food like grandmère made
It’s not hard in Washington these days to find high-end restaurants that offer classical French cooking. What’s harder to find is the kind of restaurant you stumble upon around a corner in Paris that serves food like grandmère made. But Bistro D’Oc does it — literally.
“I developed the menu with exactly the memory in my head of what my grandmother would make,” owner/chef Bernard Grenier says of the dishes he cooks at his bistro opposite Ford’s Theatre.
Fans of La Miche in Bethesda will remember his name. From 1978 until five years ago, when he sold La Miche to open Bistro D’Oc, Grenier ran that little piece of rural France on Norfolk Avenue in a stuccoed white house with rustic red shutters and hanging baskets.
At his new venture, you’d more likely imagine Toulouse-Lautrec than characters from a Molière novel. The room is richly mellow as though patinated by the smoke from hundreds of Gitanes cigarettes, its walls distressed the color of a blood orange. A bar blackboard advertises an adventure in licorice aperitifs for nostalgic Francophiles — three different brands of Pastis as well as Pernod. At lunch a TV is tuned low to a French cable channel, and French tourist posters provide other decoration.
Grenier, who comes from the Languedoc region in the southwest corner of France, arrived in the United States at 22. He had done a couple of years at cooking school, followed by military service, and decided he wanted to become a chef. So he took himself first off to Paris.
“I told myself, if you want to learn the trade, you have to work at Le Doyen, on the Champs Elysées.” One of the great restaurants of Paris, Le Doyen, which dates back to the Revolution, was so good that the radical democrats were happy to be accommodated upstairs while Citizen Robespierre, whose downfall they plotted, dined downstairs. It made good training for the determined young man from Narbonne.
Then he learned of an opportunity to open a restaurant in Chicago, named “95” after the 95th floor of the tower in which it was located. “They were looking for a young chef,” he says. But Grenier didn’t take to the windy city. A friend who had worked with him at Le Doyen and had come to Washington to work at Rive Gauche found him a job there.
It was 1974, and, Grenier recalls, his seductive French accent rolling in astonishment, that aside from Rive Gauche, “Sans Souci was the only restaurant in town! That was it! Maybe two Italians, two beefsteak houses. Saturday afternoon, there was nobody! I was disappointed with the kind of food Rive Gauche was putting out. But hey!” he says, the American expression beguiling with the French accent, “the money was good!”
Plus he had met his future wife, a student from Thailand. “And you could feel the pulse moving, changing.” Things looked up even further when he was offered the chance to open La Miche. But almost at once its owner decided that for him an even better opportunity had come along. “So he say, ‘What do I do with La Miche?’ ‘I buy it from you,’ I say. In 1978, we opened La Miche. In 1979, I bought it from him!”
Five years ago he sold it. His customers weren’t getting any younger. “You make sure they have the nice cutlery, the glass of wine. Seven years later, it’s a glass of water. But they still want the same service, the same table for four. There’s never any lunch in Bethesda, the rents are getting higher and [the landlords] never want to sell to me.”
He still lives there with his family, but, he says, “I always wanted to be in town, open a bistro.” One of the owners of the restaurant that had occupied the site of Bistro D’Oc met Grenier’s son on a rugby tour. He wasn’t making a go of the venture, so Grenier stepped in and bought it. He runs it now with Benoit, another son, who is the manager.
“I worked in the kitchen since I was 10 years old,” says Benoit. “We were always late for school because we stayed up late as a family. When we were 11, 12, we’d come at least one, two days — no, nights! — a week.” Benoit would like to open his own restaurant, something small in the south of France.
Says his father, “He has to cook; he has a feeling for it. I am a shadow compared to him. Without him I don’t know if I would open this restaurant.” He is just as enthusiastic about his wife’s cooking talent. “She is a wonderful cook of Thai food. She has worked with me in the kitchen. Whatever she does is perfect.” Her Thai influence is seen in dishes like his pork shank confit flavored with star anise, and a risotto with a Thai twist.
They’re probably not versions he would have dreamed of cooking when he was still in France and chefs turned religiously to Auguste Escoffier and his “Le Guide Culinaire” for every instruction. He says that was a rigid way to cook. “Then, if you don’t follow the book, you don’t do it properly.
There was not as much choice as we have now. We didn’t have the imagination. But in the early ‘80s there came ‘nouvelle cuisine’ in France. They throw the book in the trash and you do whatever you want. That was pretty right,” he says, marveling. “It took me a while to realize, ‘Hey! I can do whatever I want!’”
His customers gobble up his classic bistro food. He sells plenty of his roast chicken in a black truffle sauce with potato purée and his onglet — hanger steak with pommes frites. But he doesn’t do badly either with sautéed calf’s brain, snails in Pastis butter, and crispy pork feet country sausage. “And I’m very happy to sell confit and cassoulet. People come here to eat a good hearty meal and they like to eat.”
Healthwise, he serves the dishes as they would be made in France. “I am not a doctor. You are not going to change classic recipes. I am not going to do a low-fat cassoulet. People need to look at when they sink in the middle of the day, they need something good to eat.”
Bistro D’Oc (202-393-5444; http://www.bistrodoc.com) is located at 518 10th St. NW. Main courses cost $13.95 to $21.95
This article by Julia Watson first appeared in the NorthWest Current newspaper. Photo Bill Petros/The Current.