ANNOUNCER: And now Signature Dish, a WETA original series.

SETH: Today on Signature Dish, it's a banquet of French flavors.

We'll start with a dish from France's heartland.

I love eggs.

I love wine.

BRENDAN: It's a very interesting combination.

SETH: That is perfectly poached.

Then go swimming in a sea of brown butter.

BRENDAN: You want that beautiful foaminess.

SETH: It's just a butter bath.

And indulge in a rich French favorite.

I love the sound of that sizzling.

CHRISTOPHE: And you can smell it so you know it's going to be good.

I mean, come on.

It's fat.

SETH: That is beautiful.

I'm Seth Tillman, WETA producer and DC native, and I love good food.

That's why I'm traveling to restaurants across the DMV at each stop looking for the one thing you just got to try, that Signature Dish.

While there's great French eateries across the DMV, there's only one place to start our journey, Georgetown.

When the Kennedys swept into power in the early 60s, they helped popularize French dining, frequently patronizing Rive Gauche, an elegant restaurant at the corner of M and Wisconsin.

In the 1970s, a towering figure of French gastronomy, Jean-Louis Palladin set up shop at the Watergate Hotel where for two decades he taught Washington diners the virtues of cooking with fresh seasonal produce.

And in the 90s, Michel Richard Citronelle on M Street became a center of gravity for Washington's elite.

MICHEL: Bon appetit.

SETH: Offering up playful takes on French classics.

Oh, and Julia Child once lived in Georgetown as well.

Actually in this very house.

But while the ghosts of Rive Gauche and Georgetown's other French trailblazers have begun to fade from memory, a slew of top-notch French restaurants, bistros, and brasseries once again dot Georgetown.

Today I'm heading to one of the standouts, Chez Billy Sud.

The first iteration of Chez Billy opened in Petworth in 2012, founded by restaurant and nightlife impresarios, the Hilton brothers.

With the help of Chef Brendan L'etoile, the team opened sister restaurant Chez Billy Sud two years later.

BRENDAN: The Chez Billy Sud, we weren't really sure what we wanted to do.

I know I wanted to continue down the bistro path.

One of our partners who actually did the design of this restaurant, kinda set the tone for the dining room, so I kind of took the menu in that direction.

I was like, "We gotta up it a little bit for the neighborhood."

So I think we are a upscale bistro, but we still are the kinda place where you could come for a weeknight dinner or for your anniversary.

SETH: Chez Billy Sud's menu also highlights some of France's more rustic regional cuisines.

BRENDAN: I had been to south of France, but I'd never been in the heartland of France before.

For my honeymoon, my wife and I drove all through Burgundy.

For a region that has such a prestigious wine tradition, the cuisine is really, really straightforward.

You see the same ingredients in most of the dishes.

Boeuf bourguignon, coq au vin, oeuf en meurette.

They all have the same garnish.

It's very focused around the wine.

The cuisine is very humble and very simple and very rustic, which I was drawn to.

SETH: Chef, nice to meet you.

BRENDAN: Good to meet you too.

Thanks for coming.

SETH: Oh man, I am excited to be here.

See some sauces reducing down.

What are you making tonight?

BRENDAN: Today we're making a dish from Burgundy.

It's called oeuf in meurette.

SETH: Oeuf en meurette.

All right.

I do not speak French, but I do know enough to know that oeuf means egg.

What's en meurette?

BRENDAN: En murette is basically a red wine sauce made with the local pinot noir from Burgundy.

SETH: So this is more of a kinda rustic country French dish?

BRENDAN: Yeah.

I had this dish, uh, in Burgundy with my wife on our honeymoon.

I saw it on menus everywhere, so I ate it sometimes multiple times a day.

SETH: Well, I've never heard of it, so I'm excited, uh, to give it a shot.

Is this the wine sauce right here?

BRENDAN: Yeah, this is the wine sauce.

We have a reduction of pinot noir.

I like to add a little bit of port to bring some sweetness to the party, some French red wine vinegar, some aromatics like shallots and garlic and some thyme.

The first thing we're going to do is we have our uh, warm wine bath, that's going to be the poaching liquid for the egg.

We're going to drop our egg in there.

There's enough acidity in the wine that kinda coagulates the white and gets the poaching process going.

SETH: I love eggs, I love wine.

So I guess the two of them together, it's going to make good stuff.

BRENDAN: It's a very interesting combination, I would say.

So the garnish, the traditional garnish for oeuf en meurette is the garniture de bourguignon.

It's bacon lardon, some pearl onions and some button mushrooms.

SETH: This is really uh, country cooking right here.

BRENDAN: Absolutely.

It's going to render out the bacon, get it crisp.

Before we add the rest of our ingredients.

The egg is actually served on toast, so we're going to get that toasting in the salamander.

We're going to go ahead and finish our sauce.

We have our strainer, our chinois... SETH: Whatever's left behind, that's just the shallots and the other aromatics?

BRENDAN: Yeah.

It's given all it has to the sauce, all the flavor is in the reduction.

We're going to keep this warm, the back of our stove, going to go ahead and get our mushrooms going with our bacon lardon.

We're going to go ahead and check on our egg.

SETH: Poaching an egg, when done right, it's my favorite way to do it.

So often though it's done wrong.

BRENDAN: There's no recipe, right?

It's a technique, so it's something you gotta poach a bunch of eggs, till you get a perfect poached egg.

Going to go ahead and add a little bit of thyme.

Check on our toast.

Toasted up nice, keep that warm.

I'm going to go ahead and add a little bit of shallots, some sliced garlic in there.

I'm going to go ahead and season our, our mushrooms.

Salt and pepper.

These are the petals basically of our pickled pearl onions.

They bring a crunch and a little acidity to finish the dish.

All right, we're going to check on our poached egg.

We give it a little... Just to make sure that the yolk is not overcooked and the white is set.

Looks perfect.

We got a little bit of a chiffonade of parsley to our mushrooms.

Shut that off, we're going to plate our dish.

At the base, we're going to do a little bit of our onion soubise, top that with our country toast, get our egg out of its wine bath.

SETH: Wow.

I've never seen an egg that color before.

BRENDAN: It kind of looks like a heart almost.

That goes right on top of our bread.

Next, sauce the egg with our beautiful sauce meurette.

SETH: That just has the nicest velvety texture, I can already tell.

BRENDAN: Around our lardons, our mushroom and our pickled pearl onion, garnish with a little parsley.

And here's our oeuf en meurette.

SETH: That is beautiful.

All right, chef, I've never seen a dish in this color before.

Also, a lot of wine in the sauce.

What kind of wine are we pairing with it?

BRENDAN: I like to pair it with Beaujolais from southern Burgundy.

It's light and has good acidity.

It cuts through the richness of the dish.

SETH: Beaujolais it is.

Cheers.

BRENDAN: Enjoy.

(clink) SETH: All right.

Of course my favorite part of a poached egg, checking out that yolk.

Oh, ho, ho, ho, ho!

Look at that.

Mmm!

You did it, chef.

That is perfectly poached, that egg, and that sauce on top.

A little hint of the vinegar, a little hint of the acid.

And I got to try it with some toast and some of these other fixings as well.

BRENDAN: Definitely.

SETH: Oh, that crunch.

Perfect counterpoint to the egg.

What's your favorite part of this dish?

BRENDAN: I like a little bit of everything together and then the sauce at the end definitely get the spoon in there.

SETH: All right, I'll see if I can mix a few things together here.

Just good country cooking.

And this is kind of what you guys try to do, right?

Try to pick out some dishes that are maybe a little more regional from France.

BRENDAN: Definitely.

I like studying regional cookery.

I don't get back to France as often as I'd like, but I'm kind of an avid collector of vintage French cookbooks, so I could take a lot of inspiration from those.

I'm definitely lucky that I stumbled upon this dish and, you know, it makes me think of my wife every time we put it on the menu.

SETH: Oh, that's sweet.

It just seems like with all the ebbs and flows in the world of fine dining, you know, here in DC, French, it never really goes out of style.

It's always there, right?

BRENDAN: Sure.

It comes down to technique, which is kind of the basis of French cuisine and classic French cookery right now is in vogue, but, you know, which is great for us, but I don't think it'll ever go out of style.

SETH: All right, chef, well, thank you for offering me a taste of this wonderful country French cooking.

I really enjoyed it.

Thanks chef.

BRENDAN: Thank you.

♪ ♪ SETH: From one of DC's oldest neighborhoods to one of its most rapidly developing, I'm next headed to NoMa.

On the ground floor of the stylish Morrow Hotel is Le Clou, the first French restaurant from Nick Stefanelli, the acclaimed chef and owner of the Greek restaurant, Philotimo and his flagship Italian restaurant, Masseria, which has earned him a Michelin star for eight years running.

NICK: I was taught classically how to cook French food and all I wanted to do was cook Italian because being half Italian and half Greek, that was the path that I went through.

But through life, and learning, and wine and experience and the people that I've worked with, French food has always been a very big piece of the things I have loved.

And, getting back to making Hollandaise sauce again, I started putting Hollandaise on everything I possibly could.

Brown butter is all over our menu.

It's one of the things that brings something to the next level.

And I remember in culinary school they were like, "Alright, we're going to do brown butter."

And it's like, "Why are we going to burn the butter?"

And then you taste and it's like, like doves are flying up through the air, Prince is playing in the background, like everything's... like, it's unbelievable.

And so that toasted notes of the milk solids caramelizing with the butter and everything coming into a sauce has been my favorite thing from day one.

Le Clou is a restaurant that's based on the philosophies of the brasserie, but has a little bit of playfulness and avant-garde-ness going through with the ingredients, local sourcing, plus just having a little fun with it.

Playing with the wine list, playing with the food, and that's what brings us all to the table, to do something different, fun, and have a good time.

♪ ♪ SETH: Chef, nice to meet you.

NICK: How are you?

SETH: Doing all right.

I've been coming to kitchens long enough to know we're looking at a uh, different kind of cut of meat here.

What is this?

NICK: This is a sweet bread.

SETH: A sweet bread, which I know is neither a sweet nor bread.

NICK: No, it isn't.

SETH: Discuss.

NICK: This is part of the offal that's inside the animals.

This is actually the thymus gland from a calf.

This was one of the things when I went to culinary school that changed my life when I had it.

These are like adult chicken nuggets and then my favorite way to cook them is we're going to roast them in brown butter.

SETH: All right, because I know we're talking about French cooking.

There's going to be some butter involved.

NICK: Just a little bit.

For the sweet bread, we would soak them overnight in a slightly salted ice water.

Then we're going to take that, put it into a pot, cold, with your aromatics, put all that onto a burner at high heat, and then we dump it into an ice bath.

SETH: So, these are the ones that were boiled in the ice bath?

NICK: Yep, so we're just going to do like this, and you can see how that skin just peels right off.

So, depending on how much you love it, this is one portion or two.

We'll do two so we can share because I love it too.

We're going to take our pan, we have a little bit of clarified butter.

We're going to start it on some high heat and then... SETH: The real star.

NICK: Because you can't have enough butter, so I'm going to just season.

(sizzling) Some people like to flour them, I don't.

I like to use them as they are.

We start them in high heat and then we're going to introduce the butter and the herbs.

SETH: Nice.

Nice, healthy amount of butter there.

NICK: I got garlic, I got some bay leaf.

SETH: It's just a butter bath at this point.

NICK: So what's happening is the butter solids are caramelizing and that's what we want to baste over top of the sweet bread.

You want that beautiful foaminess, right?

So, we're basting over the top while it's also going underneath.

SETH: And you can't walk away from this.

I mean, you know, it's, if you're not careful, this thing will burn quickly.

NICK: You can't go take a phone call and have a beer.

It's like when you're making caramel, think of it that way, right?

It goes from nothing to almost on fire.

SETH: Oh, my goodness.

And there's just a beautiful aroma happening already.

NICK: And that's where you're getting all the milk solids, toasting and caramelizing.

SETH: Smells like caramel almost.

NICK: Just flipping these over.

So we can color both sides evenly, but we're going to continue to baste.

SETH: And is butter what drew you to French cooking as well?

NICK: Well, I was trained in all the beauty of Hollandaise and lamb navarin, and duck a l'orange, so it was always a foundational base of my cooking.

SETH: And it's such a cliched expression to this point to say butter makes everything better, but... NICK: Butter does make everything better.

SETH: It's actually true.

NICK: Pull these guys out, and then in our same pan, we're going to also cook our garnish in.

Right now we're doing it seasonally with celery root and mushrooms.

We have all that flavor of the butter that's in there.

While that's roasting, we're going to do the brown butter sauce.

So we take some more butter and we're going to bring this up.

So now we're going to take this, we're going to finish this with some fresh cut parsley.

SETH: Ooh nice.

This is looking mighty good, chef.

NICK: So, I'm going to put this out to blot and dry.

You can see in here the butter starts to foam.

Once you get to this light blonde, foamy spot, we're deglazing the pan with lemon juice, and then we're going to add our veal stock.

Well, the veal stock's going to give us a little bit of body to help keeping it from the sauce splitting.

SETH: And the lemon juice will give you a little bit of acid to balance everything.

NICK: The acid to help cut through some of the fat and the butter and then that brings it all together.

There we go.

We're ready to plate.

SETH: Nice.

♪ ♪ All right, chef, I'm excited to try this.

Just swimming in this brown butter.

NICK: Smells delicious too.

SETH: It sure does.

NICK: And it pairs great with red burgundy.

SETH: Of course.

NICK: Cheers.

SETH: Cheers, chef.

Delicious.

All right, and no steak knife needed for uh, for the sweetbreads.

NICK: No, the protein's soft enough.

The knife should cut right through it.

SETH: Gosh.

You know, I was expecting something super gamey.

The brown butter though, a little bit of lemon juice, that acid and just how unctuous the texture of that sweetbread is.

That is just outstanding.

NICK: That's good stuff.

SETH: I can see why you fell in love with brown butter.

These mushrooms, the celery root as well.

Also going to have a similar meaty texture to them.

NICK: Yeah.

And as you're putting the components of a dish together, you want some things that give you some contrast but also give you some balance so, that play well with it.

SETH: I like this butter, not a fleck of black.

You pushed it right up to the edge, I'm sure just, you know, one minute too long and you're going to have a totally different... NICK: Like 10 seconds too long.

SETH: And I think this is delicious and I'll eat just about anything, but what would you say to people who are maybe scared off by the idea of organ meat or offal just generally?

NICK: If you see it on the menu and you're at a restaurant that you love and trust, from a place that you frequent, I would give it a try because you'd be pleasantly surprised.

SETH: And there's probably going to be some organ meats that are a little gamey or a little more out there flavor-wise than this.

NICK: 100%.

Where you know, like liver has... You got that irony mineraly piece to it.

So this is a totally different, different flavor profile from it.

SETH: A little starter organ meat.

NICK: There you go, the gateway.

SETH: It's dangerous after this.

And for you, chef, making the jump to French, do you have to do some difficult R&D trips back to France to sample the cuisine?

NICK: There are some difficult trips.

As much as it sounds like it's not, but eating three, four meals a day as you're going through and just trying to get the understanding and the foundation of the flavors and the flora, fauna of a region or what's going on.

It's a great experience to go through, but it can be challenging.

It's good for my tailor, bad for my waist.

SETH: It's still a job.

Still got work to do.

Well, thank you chef for reintroducing me to this adult chicken nugget.

Not something I've had in a while, but something I'm definitely looking forward to trying again.

Thanks a lot.

NICK: You're welcome.

Anytime.

♪ ♪ SETH: My last stop takes me across the river to Alexandria.

In a quiet corner of the Old Town west neighborhood is Bastille, an upscale yet casual brasserie and wine bar helmed by husband and wife team, Christophe and Michelle Poteaux.

CHRISTOPHE: I was born in a small town outside of Paris.

My grandparents were in the food business, actually multiple-generation pastry chef and pastry shop owners.

My parents kind of discouraged me of going to that business, so I did other studies.

But I always knew that was my calling.

SETH: After arriving in the States in 1997, Christophe landed a job as the chef at the Watergate Hotel, which is where he met Michelle, an American-born pastry chef.

CHRISTOPHE: There was an opportunity at the Watergate, so I submitted, and, um, I got a phone call from this French guy and I was a little apprehensive.

I am a pretty headstrong, uh, independent person and I had always had heard rumors about French chefs.

Oh, they're all wrong, all wrong.

MICHELLE: And really, we struck it off.

We just decided that at some point that we really wanted to try our hand at doing our own thing.

SETH: Bastille opened its doors in its original location in 2006.

CHRISTOPHE: When I look at the landscape of French restaurants, and at the time there was really the stuffy kind of place where you only go for special occasions.

Then there was the brasserie bistro style, very affordable, but super classic.

Some of the food I felt like that was food of my grandparents.

MICHELLE: We came up with the name Bastille in the idea that we wanted to revolutionize how people perceive French food.

Lighten it up, freshen it up, still hold on to what made it historic.

CHRISTOPHE: So, our approach was also to be more adventurous, but offer great quality at an affordable budget.

so we went away with a lot of the fancy, so the tablecloth, keeping it more simple, more to the point.

To the point is having a good time, good food, and get along with your friends or family.

Have a good wine.

SETH: Christophe.

CHRISTOPHE: Hey, how are you?

SETH: I'm good.

Nice to see you.

MICHELLE: Hey, how are you?

Welcome to Bastille.

SETH: Well, I'm excited for whatever French feast that you guys have in store today.

What are you making?

CHRISTOPHE: We're making the magret de canard.

SETH: Magret de canard.

All right.

Well French is not my forte.

What does that mean?

CHRISTOPHE: The magret de canard is the name for the moulard duck rice.

It's a fully grown duck.

Most of the ducks you see for roasting are young duck.

MICHELLE: What we love about the moulard duck is that it has this meatiness, this very delicate gaminess.

If you're a chicken person, you may not like moulard, but if you like beef, you'll love moulard.

CHRISTOPHE: I'm going to first trim it, going to separate the two parts.

So we're going to contour it a little bit.

There's a little bit of silver skin.

We want to remove this.

SETH: Not a lot of marbling through in the skin at all.

CHRISTOPHE: No.

The moulard is actually very lean, pretty much the entire part of the fat is on the skin.

Now we're going to score it.

What it's going to allow is that when we put it on the pan, the fat can escape, so I'll do the same for the other one.

MICHELLE: Once we've scored the duck, we're going to season generously, shall we say, salt, pepper.

And we're going to place it in a sous vide bag.

CHRISTOPHE: We cook a sous vide to help seal the flavor and it helps tenderize the meat.

MICHELLE: So, I'm gonna add the garlic.

I'm gonna add thyme, rosemary, and bay leaf, and then I'm gonna give it a generous squirt of olive oil.

SETH: How long is this going to go in the sous vide for?

CHRISTOPHE: 45 minutes.

SETH: Oh, okay.

So not very long.

MICHELLE: At what temperature?

CHRISTOPHE: At 52 degrees Celsius, which is about 124... SETH: Celsius?

CHRISTOPHE: Yes.

MICHELLE: Oh, yes!

CHRISTOPHE: We use metric, sorry.

MICHELLE: So, this is what it looks like after we've cooked it, we've chilled it, and now it's ready to be prepared.

So Seth, while Christophe shows you how to sear off the duck, I'm going to go make dessert so we can enjoy it after.

SETH: That sounds wonderful.

CHRISTOPHE: All right, Seth, why don't you follow me?

SETH: Let's do it.

CHRISTOPHE: Seth, that's where we're going to sear the duck.

SETH: All right.

What's the secret to uh, to cooking the moulard?

CHRISTOPHE: The secret is to have a pan that is hot, not blasting hot.

So I would say a medium-high to get the skin to start developing a crust.

So, putting skin side down, you can hear the sizzle right away.

SETH: And no oil or anything needs to go there.

CHRISTOPHE: No oil's necessary.

There's so much fat.

SETH: It's like cooking with bacon or something.

CHRISTOPHE: Exactly.

It's not going to taste the same though.

SETH: Also delicious though.

CHRISTOPHE: Also delicious.

We're not discriminating.

As it renders fat, it's important to remove the fat.

Otherwise, what you end up doing is deep-frying your duck breast.

SETH: So you're looking for more of just a sear?

CHRISTOPHE: Yes.

We're going to start removing some of the fat.

Take the pan, hold the breast and drop it into your container.

SETH: It's amazing how much fat's already rendered out.

CHRISTOPHE: It's only the beginning.

You see it start, you get a little bit of color and you can smell it so you know it's going to be good.

I mean, come on, it's fat.

So, here we're going to get rid of a little bit of the fat again.

So, that fat is not what you're eating.

So when people say, "Oh, duck is so fatty, it's so rich."

Oh, you're not cooking it right.

SETH: But the fat that is in there, especially when you flip it, it's going to help us flavor the other side.

CHRISTOPHE: Yes, yes, yes, absolutely.

On this side, we can see the edges here a little bit darker.

SETH: If I walked right into this kitchen, I would just assume you're cooking up a rib-eye steak right there.

CHRISTOPHE: It is a red meat.

It is a red meat.

So it's starting to get some nice color and this little darker spot here.

So now we're going to flip it and seal the flavor in the meat.

So I'm searing all the different sides, make sure it gets a good sear on every side.

So now we're going to let it rest and then we'll slice it and plate it.

So once it rested enough, we'll slice it up.

We are going to serve it with little braised kale, some baby carrots, and small baby onions, a sweet potato souffle.

And we have a cranberry orange gastrique.

We'll spoon the orange cranberry gastrique over the duck.

Garnish with a few candied kumquats and fresh cranberries.

So then we'll be able to enjoy it with Michelle's dessert at the table.

SETH: All right, Christophe, Michelle, what pairs nicely with this moulard duck?

MICHELLE: So, one of the things that I love to pair with duck is pinot noir.

The fruitiness of, of pinot just really makes the duck shine.

What we have is a sparkling pinot noir.

It brings nice acidity, uh, it still has nice weight of fruit.

SETH: All right, well French food, sparkling French wine.

Can't wait to try it.

Cheers.

CHRISTOPHE: Sante.

MICHELLE: Sante.

SETH: Delicious.

Oh, that's wonderful.

I'm not sure any of the duck I've ever had has this level of meatiness.

And I like a little bit of that crispiness too, that you get from the skin, but the sweetness of that gastrique.

CHRISTOPHE: The moulard always play very well with the sweetness because of the richness.

A little bit of the fat and the flavor of the meat.

SETH: And these garnishes kind of change with the season.

So what kind of pairs nicely?

CHRISTOPHE: Obviously now, squash, sweet potato, braised greens, root vegetables.

But we made, put another layer with a cranberry on this one.

It just came to me after Thanksgiving.

Something about being introduced in America.

SETH: In a couple of months, you'll start thinking about the next set of garnishes.

CHRISTOPHE: Oh, yeah.

MICHELLE: We've done pomegranate, we've of course, an orange, we, you've... the peppercorn, uh, classic with steak.

It really holds up to everything.

SETH: Of course I'd be remiss if I didn't try uh, some of these desserts.

This is uh, your specialty here at the restaurant, Michelle?

MICHELLE: Yes, it is.

That is our cafe au lait creme brûlée, cookies, coffee, cream.

You've got to have a little bit of everything.

It's a classic.

And it's a classic for a reason.

SETH: And a little bit of a twist on the classic by adding the coffee as well.

MICHELLE: Yeah, I like to play it up a little bit.

SETH: And, and, what is this beautiful one?

MICHELLE: So in French it would be gateau au fromage.

It's as close as you can get to cheesecake.

The berries, has red currants.

It has white chocolate, uh, whipped ganache, toasted almonds, a little homemade mediant on top.

SETH: This is all just too good.

And you guys have been open for 17 years now.

Probably part of that is that you have these foundational items, whether it's the duck, whether it's the creme brûlée, but you're not afraid to keep changing it up, to keep innovating.

MICHELLE: It keeps our jobs interesting.

It, it, it makes it fun for us.

SETH: You can't really coast.

MICHELLE: No coasting in this town.

CHRISTOPHE: It gets boring.

MICHELLE: Yeah, you know, I want people to come in and always find something new and interesting, but yet, uh, still find comfort in the classics.

SETH: Well, watching the two of you work in the kitchen and how well you play off each other, this is wonderful.

Merci.

MICHELLE: Merci.

CHRISTOPHE: Merci beaucoup.

(music plays through credits).

♪ ♪ ANNOUNCER: To find out more about great food in the Washington Metro area, visit weta.org/signaturedish.