My brother came to DC for a conference and asked me to join him for the weekend. When I arrived to DC, it was already 8:40pm -- pretty late for dinner, especially since we had to get up early to set up on Saturday. We decided we would like to go to a place with lighter bites and chose Bistrot du Coin (official website, yelp review) located around Dupont Circle. We got to the restaurant at about 9pm, and there was a line going out the door! Thinking that we needed to be in line to put our name down, we went in line and waited. We stood in front of the cheese platter for a while when we were in line. I’m very verbose so I’m sure some of my saliva may have ended up on the $10 4 cheese plate that someone ended up eating. After waiting for 20 minutes in the line, a girl came by and asked whether we needed to wait in line to put our name down. Our orderly sensibility took over our instinct of pushing everyone down to get a name on the list! We ended up putting our name down about 20 min later and were seated at the "chef’s table" -- that is, the table right next to the kitchen door -- in another 10-15 min.
After scanning through their extensive menu and the yelp review, we decided to go with the foie gras frais poele (avec) risotto de sorgo truffe (sauteed fois gras with barley risotto and truffle sauce), escargot a la Bourguignonne (snails with garlic butter), and Moules au pistou (steamed mussels with pesto, prosciutto and French ham) as our “main course.” My brother tagged a beer on with the order. Their beer/wine/cocktail list is not as extensive, and the beer cost considerably more than other joints. Unless you really wanted a beer, I would stay away from ordering beers there. We took the time catching up and checked out the decor. It was undeniably trying to transport the feeling of a bistro in France to DC: wooden chairs, small, crowded tables, tacky plastic table cloths on some tables, small strips of mirror around the restaurant, yellow light, posters and memorabilia from the yesteryear of European French culture, and the centerpiece at the bar. From the writing on the mirror at the bar, I also found out that the restaurant was in business for 11 years. This is no small achievement -- especially since there is a lot of competition in the DC area. This speaks volumes to their product quality. The bread arrived first and there was nothing special about it. Just good ol’ room temperature baguettes. My brother, being a genius, didn’t eat anything for the whole day except a small snack in the morning. He and I started chowing down on the bread, mostly because he was hungry, and my teeth itch when I don’t chew on something. While we were chowing down, the foie gras arrived.
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Foie gras frais poele, risotto de sorgo truffe
(sauteed fois gras with barley risotto and truffle sauce) |
For those of you who are against foie gras on humanitarian ground and want to burn my place to the ground, I apologize. I do realize that there were some unsavory practice in the foie gras raising industry. However, I would like to point out that some geese and ducks would fatten their liver naturally in preparation for migration. and there are outfits that “grow” foie gras naturally. I’m not sure exactly where Bistrot du Coin gets their foie gras from, but I would like to think they obtain their raw materials from a reputable outfit. The foie gras slice was about the size of half a fist and just shy of half inch thick. I have had larger piece of foie gras, and it usually comes with a tart tasting sauce to neutralize the queasy effect of foie gras. This foie gras came with creamy, al-dente risotto in a “truffle” sauce. As much as I like to go for “bigger is better” mentality on certain things, foie gras isn’t one of them. A big piece tastes amazing, but I would feel my arteries clogging like I was eating eggs and bacon in American diners, especially without a tart sauce. This fois gras size was perfect for a non-tart sauce. It was crunchy on the outside, soft like custard on the inside -- a perfect balance. The salad was a nice touch as well-- it cut down the richness of the foie gras. The mushroom sauce was good though it was definitely lacking of truffle taste. It wouldn’t have been too hard to throw some synthetic truffle oil to impart the taste (at the price they’re asking for, I do not expect to see anything that resembles real truffles in the sauce). This is a matter of correct representation!
Next up was the escargots.
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Escargot a la Bourguignonne (snails with garlic butter) , front.
Part of the Foie Gras dish , back. |
The method was pretty traditional -- garlic, butter, probably some aromatics, and a generous dosing of salt. The escargots’ texture was tender: not chewy, not ultra soft, but my brother would have preferred a bit more al-dente texture. As we finished our foie gras and escargots, the mussels arrived.
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| Moules au pistou (steamed mussels with pesto, prosciutto and French ham) |
Mussel dishes are typically pretty hard to screw up provided that the ingredients are fresh. With that said, mussels (and by extension, other bivalves) tend to have a mind of their own. Time management is the most important factor in bivalves cooking. The bivalves would need to be pulled from heat right when they opened up, exposing the succulent, soft flesh inside. Shell thickness and size both contributed to the cooking time. While most cooks cannot control the shell thickness, they certainly have some controls over mussel sizes. At Bistro du Coin (official website, yelp review), they certainly didn’t pay close attention to the mussel sizes. As you can see in the photo, some were about the size of 2 AA batteries, while others were about the size of 2 of the small round batteries. This contributed to uneven cooking: the big mussels were soft and succulent, while the small ones shrunk like certain phallic symbol faced the bitter cold. Shrunken mussel meats were usually a bit chewy. The menu stated that the mussels were cooked with basil, French ham, and prosciutto. There were plenty of ham and basil in the mixture, but I didn’t see much prosciutto at all. Most of the broth flavors were carried by the ham. The basil felt like certain Chinese pickled leafy vegetable (Traditional Chinese, google-translated-barely-comprehensible English) added into the broth, probably caused by a combination of color and the savoriness of the ham. I should have listened to my brother and ordered the moules Normande (Steamed mussels in cream sauce with celery, leeks, mushrooms, potatoes and bacon) instead.
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| Creme brulee, without flash. Notice the dark, charred center. |
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| Creme brulee "closer-up" with flash for better color contrast between center and side. |
Usually creme brulee uses ceramic ramekin with a fluted exterior. A fluted exterior increases surface area and heat transfer into the creme brulee. Ceramic and bain marie act as a large heat sink so that the edges would cook at a pace closer to the center (side note: making creme brulee is one the the best demo you can do to illustrate the nuances of heat transfer. If you replace the fluted ceramic container and the bain marie with a fluted metal container and a bain “air”, you would get chewy on the outside, uncooked on the inside “custard”-- if you could even call it a “custard” at that point. Trust me: I have tried that before in high school and that was exactly what I got. My appreciation of heat transfer class skyrocketed when I made successful creme brulee and understood why it works in college. I can go into a little bit more detail on the science behind creme brulee, but That’s Another Show. I know, I’m such a geek...) Eggs can be very temperamental with respect to heat. Slow and steady is the name of the game when it comes to creme brulee (and by extension, a lot of custards). The bowl was a bit warm when the creme brulee came out. The “brulee” part, consisted of torched up sugar, was crunchy, but maybe a bit too thick. The sugar ended up sticking to the teeth as we crushed the sugar apart. The custard was perfectly executed-- soft, tender, and fairly fluffy. Personally, I prefer my creme brulee’s texture to be more like a soft ice-cream and less like a custard, but what they made was very good. Interestingly, there was a significant temperature gradient across the little bowl. If I recall correctly, the center part of the custard was actually warmer than the perimeters generally, even though the ceramic bowl edges were a bit warm when the creme brulee came out. Judging from the distribution of chars on the sugar crust, it made a lot of sense-- the center of the creme brulee saw more heat than the outskirt, which caused the center to be more charred.
Even though Bistrot du Coin (official website, yelp review) would technically be classified as a “diner,” its food certainly exceed the realm of usual greasy diner food. In fact, I would rather let foie gras be the cause of my clogging arteries than Crisco with mystery-meat sausages and eggs. There was a good reason why they stayed open for 11 years amongst tough competitions and extremely expensive beer selection. With its rustic charm and better than average food, I’m more than willing to say “mais oui” on this gastro- and faux-visual journey to a French “cha chaan teng.”
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