L'Avant Garde

L’Avant Garde at 2915 M Street NW is adjacent to L’Annexe at 2917, making the two French addresses share a block on the lower M Street commercial strip and together produce a French dining presence on this section of M Street that approaches the concentration of French restaurants that Prospect Street maintains further into Georgetown’s commercial district.

The contemporary French approach that L’Avant Garde takes differs from the classic bistro format in its willingness to move the French culinary tradition into the present rather than presenting it as a preserved historical form. Contemporary French cooking in the American context involves using the techniques and preparations of the French tradition, including the classical saucing techniques, the proper use of fonds and reductions, and the French approach to vegetable preparation, while allowing the menu to reflect the current culinary conversation rather than the Paris bistro menu of the 1970s.

The cocktail program at L’Avant Garde takes the bar dimension more seriously than the standard French bistro format, which typically emphasizes the wine list over the spirits program. The craft cocktail approach, applied to French spirits and the citrus-forward, herb-inflected cocktail formats that French cafe and bar culture has developed, produces a bar program that can serve as a destination independent of the food menu. The French aperitif tradition, which includes Pastis, Suze, Lillet, and the bitter liqueurs that French drinking culture developed, provides a spirits foundation for cocktails that is distinct from the American bourbon and rye base.

The M Street address at 2915 serves the M Street Georgetown market in the evening and weekend hours that French restaurants dominate in Georgetown’s dining calendar. The extended late closing on Friday and Saturday allows L’Avant Garde to function as a bar destination beyond the dinner service hours. The contemporary French culinary conversation that L’Avant Garde participates in is the conversation that has been taking place in Paris’s bistronomie movement since the late 1990s, when young chefs who had trained in three-star kitchens opened their own small restaurants at bistro prices with food that used the classical techniques but applied them to modern ingredients and international influences. The bistronomie format produced some of the most interesting French cooking of the early twenty-first century by freeing the classical techniques from the institutional conservatism of the starred restaurant. L’Avant Garde at 2915 M Street brings this approach to Georgetown, where the French restaurant tradition has been represented primarily by the classic bistro and the formal hotel dining room. The adjacency to L’Annexe at 2917 creates an interesting dynamic on the lower M Street block: two French restaurants with different approaches, one classical and one contemporary, sharing a block and addressing the same Georgetown market from different directions. For the Georgetown diner who has already explored L’Annexe’s traditional bistro program, L’Avant Garde provides the next step into the contemporary French conversation. The cocktail program at L’Avant Garde is more central to the restaurant’s identity than at a traditional bistro, which reflects the contemporary French bar’s growing importance as a dining destination in its own right. Hours run Tuesday through Sunday with late closing on Friday and Saturday.