Au Pied Bistro and Pizzaria Uno, Georgetown, D.C.

Last night, Ian and I made a late night visit to Au Pied Bistro on the east side of Georgetown. I think I've mentioned before that Au Pied Bistro is the remnant of the old Au Pied du Cochon, an old standby country French restaurant which used to be on Wisconsin Avenue where the Five Guys hamburger place is now. Way back in the Dark Ages when I was at Georgetown, we'd pop in to the Pig's Foot for late night, simple, inexpensive, French suppers. After Au Pied du Cochon sold out to Five Guys and closed down, the former staff moved down to the M Street/Pennsylvania merge area to Au Pied Bistro, a simplified version of the original.

Well, alas, it isn't Au Pied du Cochon anymore, and Au Pied Bistro has declined even since my last visit there last August with Leo. Now, we haven't been avoiding going to Au Pied, but they've just not been open every time we've attempted to eat there; they advertise that they stay open til 2 a.m. or so, but they close when the restaurant gets slow, which could be as early as 10 or 11. Even when Ian and I wandered in last night about 10:30, we were the only table in the restaurant and they seemed to be closing down.

It was a bad sign and a harbinger of things to come when our waiter brought our drinks and my iced tea had the distinct taste of coffee—they'd brewed the tea in their coffeemaker! I sent it back.

Ian wanted to compare the food at Au Pied Bistro to that at Bistro Français, where we usually get stuck dining on our late night soujourns, so he ordered the omelette aux fines herbs et fromage avec pommes frites, something he'd had last week at Français. Well, the differences were immediately obvious. The Pied version was a simple, flat omelette with herbs in the eggs and a little bit of Swiss cheese inside; Français' version not only gives diners a choice of cheese but includes a much more ample quanity and they also whip their eggs before cooking to give the omelette "lift" and a light fluffiness. The waiter brought no condiments with the food and Ian had to wait a long time for his ketchup. He said the Français omelette was much better.



My eggs Benedict experience was similar. The hollandaise sauce had the distinct taste and texture of a commercial quick sauce, the Canadian bacon tasted rather more like ham, and the whole dish was just rather ordinary.



We were going to order some dessert, but our waiter said the kitchen was closed. Well, several of the desserts require no preparation and he could have plated them himself if there was no one from the cook staff to dish it up.

Ian still wanted dessert after we left Au Pied Bistro, so after wandering the streets of Georgetown for a while, we landed at Pizzaria Uno, where Ian made me eat and split with him one of those enormous brownie/ice cream/whipped cream desserts that it seems everyone has these days. This is the first time I've been to an Uno in literally decades and the chain has changed quite a bit. When last I ate at one, it was a pizza place; today it's a typical full-menu franchise restaurant like a T.G.I.Friday or Applebee's or Bennigan's. We had a friendly waitress who's about to graduate from GU and she's moving to New York City for a job, so she and Ian chatted about NYC apartments and neighborhoods. At least we had a fun ending to the evening.