Chez Billy
Critic rating
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Cuisine -
French
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$$$$
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Craig L. Moran/For The Post
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Review
(Good)
Chez Billy brings Paris to Petworth
By Tom Sietsema
Sunday, July 22, 2012
It's the middle of a heat wave, and I’m eating beef daube -- but no sweat. Dinner is unfolding in a fresh French bistro that does justice to the wintry braised beef, and this in a neighborhood hungry for better places to eat.
Welcome to Chez Billy in Petworth. The restaurant is the latest contribution to the eats-and-drinks scene from brothers Eric and Ian Hilton, who pumped up U Street Northwest with hipster haunts including Marvin and the Gibson.
Chez Billy departs from their usual recipe in every detail: cuisine, scenery, location. “We want to help make the neighborhood,” says Ian Hilton, who sees Petworth as “a rising star.” The watering hole spreads across two floors; a mezzanine lounge looks down on a bar featuring two-stool nooks that give occupants privacy even during rush hour. The small dining room on the ground floor is dark and moody, but also cozy with flashes of green (curtains and panels) and white (globes set off each booth). It’s uncommon to see salt and pepper shakers on restaurant tables anymore; Chez Billy sets out copper shakers that add a color pop.
With the restaurant pendulum seemingly stuck at Italian, it’s swell to see a new source for French. Hilton explains the choice of 29-year-old kitchen chief, Brendan L’Etoile, the former sous-chef at Marvin, in practical terms, as “based on the talent pool in our stable of chefs.” L’Etoile’s menu opens with hors d’oeuvres of chilled vichyssoise , frisee salad and a twist on liver mousse that uses rabbit instead of chicken or duck, and sweetens the pot with lavender. The floral note is kept in check with a garnish of pickled carrot strips. A lighter introduction comes by way of golden orbs of salt cod arranged on shaved fennel and a sunny rouille.
I like the way the chef punctuates much of his food. Split, roasted beef bone filled with marrow needs a shock to temper its fatty richness. Rallying for a good cause: pickled ramps and shallot jam. A dab of that, spread with marrow on thick grilled bread, and you’ve got yourself a caveman canape. House-made merguez on white beans and wilted Swiss chard is more of a raised-pinkie pleasure.
Tired of mussels yet? The bivalves surround us like fanny packs on the Mall. Yet plucking the morsels out of their shells from a warm bath of white wine, mustard and cream shot through with pastis demonstrates that when mussels are plump and sweet and served with a cone of true French fries (stand back, ketchup), they make life more worth living. It doesn’t hurt, of course, that my steaming pot of seafood is accompanied by live singing -- jazz on jazz! -- on the mezzanine on a recent Friday night.
It wouldn’t be a bistro without steak frites. The kitchen does better by the entree’s cool watercress salad and lemony bearnaise than the routine flat-iron steak. Duck confit, crisp and succulent, draws more attention than its sliced roasted potatoes, which taste like warm-overs. As for the beef daube, it’s straight out of Paris, where L’Etoile apprenticed for six months. Baby carrots flatter the main course of winey beef cheeks brightened with orange zest and star anise. And roast chicken with Swiss chard and a wedge of potatoes Anna is both timeless and soothing. (Vegetarians won’t be content with mere gnocchi to eat as a main course.)
True to its bistro roots, Chez Billy’s wine list finds an unpretentious selection focusing on smaller estates and varietals that don’t often see the limelight. Its understatement dovetails with the menu, which begs for bottles such as the spirited Domaines des 3 Vall
Clafoutis√ is one of those desserts that I see done wrong more than right. The secret to the cake-custard's success at Chez Billy: L'Etoile whips his batter in a blender before baking it with whatever fruit is choice. Just as much fun to end the evening with are profiteroles draped in satiny chocolate sauce and pot de crème, seemingly a cross between chocolate and velvet and finished with a tuft of fresh whipped cream.
The servers are a cheerful lot, eager to please if sometimes quirky, as when one was unable to identify a selection on the cheese course and asked, in all seriousness before he checked with the kitchen, “Do you want a bacteria count, too?” (Uh, no, just tell me what kind of blue it is.)
Moving east and north from where they made names for themselves, the Hiltons are injecting welcome flavor into Petworth. With luck, they won’t stop at just one.
Bar review
Chez Billy bar review
By Fritz Hahn
Friday, June 1, 2012
In many ways, the new Chez Billy is a fish out of water.
Its prices don’t fit in with the other popular restaurants and bars in Petworth, which tend to be down-to-earth places with affordable food and deal-laden happy hours: Chez Billy serves steak frites for $27 and cocktails that usually cost at least $12.
The space, too, is unlike anything else nearby. Before the bar’s opening in mid-April, the building was lavishly and lovingly restored, for it sits on the National Register of Historic Places, thanks to its ties to African American history. In the days of segregation, Billy Simpson’s House of Seafood and Steaks, as it was then known, welcomed such luminaries as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Ella Fitzgerald and Dick Gregory. It’s designed to wow visitors from around the corner and across the region.
And it’s owned by Eric and Ian Hilton, whose other bars, including Marvin, the Gibson, American Ice Co. and BlackByrd Warehouse, are mostly clustered along a few blocks of the U Street corridor.
Because of its menu, history and pedigree, Chez Billy arrived with a blaze of attention -- not all of it positive. Neighborhood message boards lit up with complaints about the “downtown” prices and the lack of happy hour.
My first few visits were marked by indifferent service, including a bartender who half-jokingly told a friend that she wasn’t sure if she knew how to make a cocktail on the menu. I found myself more charmed by the chandeliers or the old photos on bookcases behind the bar than the ho-hum Sazerac sitting on the counter in front of me. There also were wild inconsistencies in the crowd: It could be lively one evening and almost deserted at the same time on another night.
But it looks as if Chez Billy is finally catching up to its potential.
The star remains the gorgeous old building. The striking bar is open to two stories, and you can look down on the action from the mezzanine on the second level. The boothlike and high-walled alcoves are just large enough for two bar stools, a spot where I’d happily spend date night. There are many other intimate spaces: a small, cavelike room tucked at the back of the building and a narrow, secluded second-story rear deck. With old soul and funk music playing, it’s kind of the place where I don’t mind lingering.
In response to customers’ feedback about the high prices, the staff added a happy hour and cut some prices on the menu. The happy hour (5:30 to 8 weeknights) features $7 appetizers -- for example, a thick slice of the rich house pate or a personal-size bowl of decent mussels -- and $5 beer, glasses of red and white wine and the “cocktail du jour.” On a recent visit, it was a crisp mix of gin, grapefruit juice, thyme simple syrup and bitters.
The revamped drink list has cocktails that range from $8 to $12 including the Ouragan (the French word for “hurricane”), a sophisticated variation on the old New Orleans standby with apricot eau de vie and cognac replacing the rum. Although some cocktails went down in price (the Sazerac from $12 to $10), every drink with champagne in it increased from $12 to $16. C'est la vie, I suppose.
I still wish the draft beer list were more interesting -- Amstel Light, Kronenburg and Hofbrau hefeweizen are among the six taps, which average $7 -- but the wine list is decent. There are a half-dozen white wines for $7 to $9 per glass and some interesting French reds, for as much as $14.
The place has not suddenly become budget-friendly -- an utterly decadent bowl of beef cheeks will still set you back $25 -- but I’d drop in for that happy hour-priced bowl of mussels and then order the $12 plate of deliciously salty marrow bones, washed down with a seasonal beer.
The one thing I can’t figure out is the crowd, or lack thereof, and even my bartender admitted one night that he has given up trying to predict it.
Petworth doesn’t yet have the critical mass to lure the weekend crowds that pour into Marvin near 14th and U streets. And some people may have come in early on, didn’t enjoy the experience and, unlike me, have no reason to go back.
After a rocky start, Chez Billy is moving in the right direction. The question is whether its changes will lure the crowds it was designed to attract.
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Petworth's historic Billy Simpson's Restaurant has become Chez Billy, a French restaurant and lounge run by the owners of Marvin and Blackbyrd Warehouse.
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Enter chez billy, meet diarreha...
I went to dine at Chen billy on Saturday July 21 and had flat iron steak (rare) with béarnaise sauce. The day after I was plagued by diarreha and still am. It could well be correlation and not causation but I rarely have gastroenteritis. My dinner date didn't eat the same and she was fine so maybe I was the lucky one! We also ordered red wine, a chateau la chaize half-bottle and the waiter served us a leaking bottle! I mean the wine was leaking from the bottom of the glass bottle...he didnt notice and took us a bit to draw someone attention to have the bottle changed. They nicely charged only for one. Never observed such a phenomenon (I mean a leaking bottle). Also, the noise in the room was really high. Positive note: the music upstairs!
