About Restaurant Openings Around DC
A guide to the newest places to eat and drink.
When chef Cedric Maupillier shuttered his celebrated Shaw French restaurant Convivial last year, he thought he might be done with restaurants for good.
His business was already struggling when a shooting across the street sent diners diving under tables. A separate shooting shattered one of the restaurant’s windows, Maupillier says. Soon after, Convivial closed.
“I was completely PTSD about opening another one,” Maupillier says. “I said ‘no more restaurants for me. I want to do something else in my life. I want to become a skiing teacher, a climbing instructor.’ I wanted to leave the city and move to the mountains with my family, and start over somewhere else.”
The feeling didn’t last long. When investor Nasr El Hage, who met Maupillier at a French embassy event, asked him to lead the kitchen at a lounge-y new French-Mediterranean restaurant he hoped to start in DC, the two clicked immediately.
El Hage handed Maupillier the reins to the culinary side of the restaurant, which they named Barbouzard, a riff on a French slang term for secret agent. It opens Tuesday, July 29.
Barbouzard isn’t the only buzzy “coastal European” spot to grace downtown DC lately, but it has the strongest culinary pedigree. Maupillier was born in Toulon and has family in Marseille and Cannes, where he has cooked private dinners for the film festival. After a stint at Central Michel Richard and a term leading the kitchen at Mintwood Place, he dialed in his elegant yet unfussy French cooking at Convivial.
At Barbouzard, Maupillier is fully embracing the Riviera. His menu here starts off with chilled seafood, traditional Niçoise tarts called pissaladière, escargots, and a foie gras opéra cake. Rack of lamb is served with polenta and ratatouille. Daube de boeuf, a traditional Provençal beef stew, comes with gnocchi. Dover sole gets a Riviera-style version of the meunière treatment, with beurre blanc, tarragon vinegar, and fried artichoke.
Maupillier is particularly proud of his new bouillabaisse Marseillaise, the traditional seafood stew with saffron-yellow broth, which he says he nearly perfected at Convivial.
“The way I cook the fish, the way I make the sauce, the presentation, and the light of the restaurant will be able to produce excellent quality pictures, which people love,” Maupillier says. “They first eat with their phone.”
Both Maupillier and El Hage have been regulars at restaurants like Bagatelle, La Môme, and La Petite Maison— places that have outposts from St. Tropez and Cannes to Miami, Dubai, and Doha. Fittingly, Barbouzard feels a bit like the south of France by way of the Emirates or South Beach.
The 180-seat place is outfitted with plenty of bleached oak, glass chandeliers, potted palms, and gold accents. There’s a VIP Champagne lounge, a separate private dining room with a wall of flatscreens, and secluded alcove booths with sound-dampening panels. Top-of-the-line speakers pipe in loungey global music that begins to pick up in volume and tempo as the hour gets later, sometimes played by DJs or musicians. Barbouzard’s bar will remain open until 1 AM on Friday and Saturday nights.
One VIP corner table sits under a photorealistic image of a man piloting a motoryacht. That’s fitting: Barbouzard feels like a place for people who own a yacht, or wish they did. There’s a fairly serious dress code, and lots of seafood on the menu.
And don’t forget the ultimate luxury ingredient. “Lately people tend to eat a lot of caviar,” Maupillier says. “I don’t know how they make their money, but they love to spend it on caviar.”
Barbouzard, 1700 K St., NW
