Adour

When Adour showed up on the list of places participating in restaurant week I immediately booked a reservation. Adour is the newest fine dining restaurant in DC, one of legendary French chef’s Alain Ducasse’s restaurants, and a place I've wanted to try since it's opening last year. I also knew it would be prohibitively expensive on their normal menu, so restaurant week was my chance. It seemed that a whole lot of other diners had the same idea since I couldn’t get a lunch reservation until the second week of restaurant week.

Adour is just the latest of Alain Ducasse’s global empire of restaurants. He’s the only chef in the world to have three restaurants in different cities/countries with three Michelin stars. This isn’t a guy who’s famous because he guest hosted Top Chef or wrote a cookbook, although some fabulous chefs do both, he’s famous because he's considered one of the best few chefs in the world. With that said, Adour isn’t why he’s famous.

Upon walking in it’s difficult not to concentrate on the decor. The first room is dark with a luxurious bar. The main dining room (above) is small, only seating 60 people, and is shielded by glass wine cellars on either side of the room. The furniture are various shades of off-white while the ceilings are dark and grand. The servers fit the decor, all in black suits with white shirts and black ties, fading into the background as they quickly maneuver through the restaurant. The service was excellent throughout and a highlight of the meal.

Even though Adour is a fine dining French restaurant the flavors were surprisingly American. We started with the sunchoke parmentier soup with bacon foam and the dorade ceviche. The soup was poured into the bowl tableside over bacon bits, breadcrumbs, and foam. The taste of the sunchoke, aka the Jerusalem artichoke, was subtle and mostly overshadowed by the bacon foam and bacon bits which were smokey and distinctly American. The dorade ceviche was a better all-around dish, incredibly fresh with a topping of guacamole, cilantro, red pepper, and the slightest hint of tabasco. Dorade, better known as seabream or orata, was light in taste and texture and allowed for the topping to shine, but those flavors were pretty subtle as well. The final product was a mix of latin and Southwestern tastes: latin ceviche when taking a bite of the cilantro while Southwestern when tasting the guacamole and red pepper.

For the main courses we tried the pasta with shredded duck and cooked chestnuts and the hanger steak with potatoes boulangere and spinach. The pasta were well cooked thin double tubes with a delicious cheese and cream sauce that resembled luxurious mac and cheese. The shredded duck leg was also soft, rich, and tasty, although the cream sauce sort of overshadowed the duck’s richness. Neither of us enjoyed the cooked chestnuts, however, they were incredibly heavy and added little. 

Hanger steak with potatoes and spinach

As for the hanger steak, it was served as ordered, rare, with a shallot and red-wine infused butter on top and specialty salt sprinkled on each piece. This was a pretty innovative take on the basic hanger steak with red wine reduction sauce, since here the shallots and a hint of red wine came in the butter rather than as the usual ubiquitous sauce. The potatoes were delicious, soft with a clear taste of the onions, herbs, and stock it had been cooked in. This was probably the most quintessentially French part of the meal and I totally devoured them. The steak was also flavorful but not much different from a good bistro hanger steak besides the unique butter.

For dessert, we had the coffee cremeux with Marsala sabayon and the contemporary pina colada with coconut-tapioca sauce. The coffee cremeux was beautifully presented but way too rich for my liking. The “pina colada” was a diced fresh fruit salad with fresh mango, pineapple, papaya, and kiwi along with a scoop of mango sorbet on top and coconut tapioca balls throughout. This wasn’t French, it was straight out of a South Florida restaurant and it was really really refreshing. Not only was it an interesting take on a pina colada but we could’ve eaten a few bowls of the fruit salad and mango sorbet.

Coffee Cremeux

All in all I’m mixed about Adour. In the context of restaurant week, this was an incredible meal and I absolutely suggest it. For $25, we were served and ate like kings and everything we ate save the sabayon and chestnuts was good. On the other hand, I’ve had similar dishes at plenty of other restaurants in DC and many we’re just as good. The main dishes were really flavorful, savory, and fulfilling, but the desserts were hit or miss and the appetizers were more refreshing than flavorful. Delicious, but there were some mistakes. Either way, Adour is definitely not why Alain Ducasse is so revered.

Now here comes the obvious disclosure. I only tried the restaurant week menu so this is far from a complete review. Yes, some of these dishes are on the regular menu but so are probably 15 other items and I didn’t try any of them. As for the foods I ate, it was refreshing and comforting to have such distinctly American tastes infused with French food, but that alone doesn’t warrant a visit. Eating the meal I did for $25 or even for $50 I’d be thrilled, but that exact same meal (without liquor) would be closer to $75-$100+ per person on normal nights, and that price is much harder to justify. 

Send your thoughts and if anyone’s been to Adour for their regular menu please let me know how it compares.