Brasserie Les Halles - Washington, D.C.

August 13, 2008


My wife and I took our four-year old daughter to check out dinosaur bones at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum. We also used it as an excuse to eat at a nice restaurant in DC!

The original New York City location of Les Halles is best known for being the last restaurant where Anthony Bourdain was a chef before Kitchen Confidential made him a star. Les Halles is a French bistro with a focus on steaks ("American Beef - French Style") as well as some other classics of French food (cassoulet, mussels and frites, steak au poivre).

I started with an appetizer portion of steak tartare, my first time eating the dish. At Les Halles, steak tartare is prepared table side with the server stirring in a raw quail egg, Worcestershire sauce, and the amount of Tabasco to your liking. In addition, anchovies, capers, cornichons, raw onions, and flat-leaf parsley are offered to be stirred into the meat. I remembered once as a child tasting raw ground beef and it not having a lot of flavor so I ordered mine with medium spiciness and everything except the raw onions. I enjoyed the dish, but I believe I my choices led to an overseasoned tartare. This "appetizer" portion was probably about six ounces of ground beef. With the mixed-in ingredients, as well as a small salad and two pieces of toasted baguette, this appetizer portion could make for an affordable lunch ($8). I didn't finish mine, knowing that I had a (cooked) steak entree coming.

I ordered the hanger steak with shallot sauce with frites (it also came with a small salad). The fries were excellent: Hot and very crispy (twice fried?). The steak and sauce were both rich, well-seasoned, and nicely flavored. I thoroughly enjoyed my entree.

The downside of the meal was my daughter's chicken tenders. She enjoyed the crispy fries but the chicken tenders were terrible, an afterthought which probably came out of a box out of the freezer. What made this even more frustrating was the $9.50 price tag. (Kids' menu chicken tenders don't have to be poor: Dogfish Head Brewing in Gaithersburg has excellent tenders.)

This was my second meal at Les Halles and I enjoyed them both. The restaurant, however, gets no love from neither The Washington Post nor The Washingtonian. I've been following both publications' dining guides for two years now, and Brasserie Les Halles has been absent from both. In addition, when the Post reviewed hamburgers at sit-down restaurants within the last year or two, Les Halles' burger finished at or near the bottom (by the way, Central Michel Richard's was #1, Palena's was #2). It doesn't seem to matter - it was packed for lunch on this summer Wednesday.