Occoquan restaurant features French cuisine

He’s served presidents and movie stars. But now, Youssef Eagle Essakl is serving Occoquan.

The day after Christmas, Essakl, 40, of Tyson’s Corner opened his new restaurant, Bistro L’hermitage, a French restaurant in Occoquan.

“I love people,” Essakl said. “That’s the number one thing if you ask anyone about the restaurant business. You have to be a social type. I enjoy meeting people, I enjoy serving people.”

The building originally housed Herb’s Village Inn which opened in 1954. In the late ’80s or early ’90s, Essaklsaid it became a Chinese restaurant, Hunan Imperial.

“When he bought the building it was very run-down," Essakl said.

But you’d never know that going to Bistro L’hermitage today. The small dining facility is designed with class in mind.

“It’s an upscale restaurant, but we like to keep it casual as well,” Essakl said.

The most expensive item on the menu is $25.

Essakl came to the region from Morocco in 1985. He was 18, taking English classes at George Washington University and working part-time as a server at various upscale Washington restaurants. He said he earned between $500 and $600 a day in tips, serving people like Madonna, Paul Newman, Elizabeth Taylor and Nancy Reagan.

“If you were involved with this industry, it was better than Hollywood,” Essakl said.

He stayed in D.C. for a year after finishing at GW, and then moved to Paris. He spent a year and a half there, trying to introduce American cars to the French. But, he returned to the United States, when his brother, Abby Essakl, was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Abby Essakl died in 1995 at the age of 33.

“That’s when my life changed,” Essakl said.

Essakl said before his brother died, he always dated models and thought of going to Hollywood. After his brother’s death, however, Essakl started living his life day by day, more focused on what he wanted to accomplish.

He took a job as a manager at the Grand Hotel in Washington, D.C., where he met executive chef Robert Wiedmaier. They worked in various Washington restaurants together over the next couple years, and ended up at the Watergate, where Wiedmaier took over for the late Jean-Louis Palladin, who Essakl said, was the number one chef in the country.

Essakl and Weidmaier renamed the Watergate restaurant Aquarelle. They worked there for a year and a half, before buying Marcel’s on Pennsylvania Avenue in 1998. In 2001 Essakl sold his shares to Wiedmaier and took a job at Jeffrey’s, back at the Watergate.

Essakl said Jeffrey’s was President George W. Bush’s favorite restaurant in Austin, Texas. A new location was opened at the Watergate when Bush became president, Essakl said.

“George Bush is a very simple man, very humble, very down to earth,” Essakl said. He added Bush enjoys Tex-Mex entrees such as chicken, rice and fried oysters.

In 2003, he took the money he had from Marcel’s and bought the Occoquan property.

“I thought I wasn’t going to open after almost five years,” Essakl said.

He borrowed $1 million in loans and invested $800,000 of his own.

“That’s money I didn’t start with, I had just a dream,” he said.

Since the time Bistro L’hermitage has been opened, Essakl said that they’ve been doing “very good.”

“I like to work with fresh products,” said Chef Jeremy Sandoz, 32. “I like to work with French techniques, French recipes… I like fish. Fish is very delicate to cook, so there is very little room for mistake.”

(Sandoz left Bistro L’hermitage for New York shortly after the interview. He was replaced by Chef Dawn Burkart, the former executive chef at Watergate Hotel.)

Sandoz added that he hopes customers leave with “a smile on their face, feeling fulfilled flavor-wise, taste-wise.”

Staff writer Josh Eiserike can be reached at 703-878-8072.