A $35 Steak Frites Icon From D.C. Opens in Manhattan Next Week

Washington, D.C. import Medium Rare is opening in New York shortly after Labor Day: It’s the latest entrant among value-driven steak restaurants, offering one menu option — steak frites – plus bread and a mixed green salad — for $34.95.

The restaurant from Mark Bucher is on track to open on Friday, August 23, at 488 Third Avenue at 33rd Street, with 120 seats in a tight-packed, 3,000-square-foot space.

The price of dinner is slightly higher than the $29.95 deal at his D.C. locations in Arlington, Virginia; Bethesda, Maryland; and the flagship D.C. neighborhood of Cleveland Park, which he first opened in 2011. He also has locations in New Orleans and Baltimore.

Medium Rare

The menu is simple: A single order is a culotte steak with fresh-cut fries, a mixed green salad, and bread. “All you have to do is tell us how you want your steak cooked,” Bucher said. Drinks and desserts — chocolate cake, carrot cake, Key lime pie, apple pie, or a hot fudge sundae ($12 each) — are separate. For vegans (like Bucher’s wife), the restaurant offers a portobello mushroom entree with roasted red-pepper sauce.

“In New York, it’s going to be a war of the sauces between us and [Le Relais de Venise] L’Entrecôte, which we’re totally fine with.”

The rival steak-frites restaurant Le Relais de Venise L’Entrecôte from Paul Gineste de Saurs opened in Paris in 1959 and reopened after the pandemic in New York last November, selling steak, salad, and unlimited fries for $33.95 before tax and tip — to mixed reviews.

Even in a crowded market with other value-driven meat restaurants including places like Skirt Steak (with a $45 prix-fixe menu of skirt steak, endless fries, and a salad), Bucher believes he’ll make a mark here. Back in 2019, Bucher told Washingtonian, “You have to have the best of something. Otherwise, you’re off the radar,” he said. “We knew we had to have a sauce with ‘come back’ quality.” They went through hundreds of variations before they hit on their recipe — one that they’ll go to “insane lengths” to keep secret.

Medium Rare

In addition to steak frites, there’s a bottomless brunch on weekends, with a choice of bloody marys, screwdrivers, mimosas, coffee, sodas, and orange juice for $39.95. Bucher jokes, “When I die, they’ll remember me not by the steak frites but by our French toast,” for which the bread is soaked overnight in French vanilla custard, then deep-fried. Also on the menu, there’s a Benedict, steak and eggs, and a breakfast sandwich with steak, eggs, fries, and chorizo.

Bucher announced his expansion plans last year to open in cities with NFL teams. “NFL cities are proven in media, commerce, community, strong restaurants and our ability to making a difference on food insecurity,” he said. Bucher also started a Feed the Fridge program that sets up refrigerators his team stocks daily around D.C., Virginia, and recently New Orleans, feeding 3,600 people a day. Once he’s open in New York, he plans on working with partners like the Boys & Girls Club to launch in the area.

Bucher became a popular restaurateur in D.C. around 2008, having first started BGR– the Burger Joint in Maryland — a celebrated burger restaurant that he expanded, then sold in 2014. His other restaurant, Community, a diner that has since closed, featured politically-themed patties, including the “golden showers” burger, that was “drenched with self-tanning cheddar and yellow mustard leaking down the sides, and topped with a very small pickle,” Washingtonian reported — a reference to former President Donald Trump’s alleged sexual proclivities that he has denied.

Medium Rare will open next in Houston in the fall, followed by Boston in October and Philadelphia by Thanksgiving, he said.

Medium Rare