Augusta Eats: New North Augusta restaurant can help you conquer your fear of French food

French food can intimidate American restaurant-goers. But at Bistro 55 in North Augusta, the legendary quality of French cuisine doesn’t require formalwear.

“The idea of a bistro is your neighborhood restaurant,” co-owner Lilo Benz said. “It becomes very entertaining and very familiar for people. This is what we have here.”

When he and his wife moved to Augusta in 2016, the Benzes sought a restaurant that served Continental cuisine reminiscent of Benz’s native France. They found it at DiVino Ristorante Italiano, 465 Railroad Ave., in North Augusta’s Hammonds Ferry development next to SRP Park. Owners Marion and Andrea Petruzzi moved from Florence, Italy, to North Augusta to establish the restaurant in 2016.

After DiVino’s veteran chef, Leonardo Accorsi, died of a heart attack in 2022, the Petruzzis decided to close the restaurant in 2023. That gave Benz an idea.

“We never thought about opening a restaurant,” he said. “That’s not what my background is, but my brother-in-law was in the restaurant business.”

Maurice Cohen, a French native who had been a restaurateur in the Los Angeles area, moved across the country to help transform an Italian restaurant into an icon of French life – the bistro.

Many Americans associate French food with small portions artistically plated and drizzled with balsamic glaze. Now, more French restaurants offer traditional specialties retaining the flavor of haute cuisine but without the starched-napkin formal setting.

“People are getting tired of the big, fancy restaurant and a bunch of people in France want the old, old bistro that’s been there a hundred years," Cohen said. Now, “everywhere you go is bistro, bistro, bistro.”

Close enough to taste it: Customers are getting Heart Attacks, and liking them, at Dearing restaurant

DiVino’s classic lasagna is still on the dinner menu in tribute to the Petruzzis. Most of the rest is French, with meat regionally sourced from Chatel Farms near Reidsville in south Georgia.

Bistro 55’s pavé de boeuf is a rump steak carefully trimmed of fat and served with potatoes au gratin and steamed asparagus in a black pepper cognac sauce.

Sole meunière, a favorite of legendary TV chef Julia Child, is a filet of sole served in lemon butter with boiled potatoes and green beans. Wild rice and green beans accompany Bistro’s canard á l’orange, a roasted half-duck in tangy orange sauce.

Bistro 55 isn’t the only restaurant in the area with escargot, but there are few places better to give the appetizer a try.  The baked-in-shell snails in garlic butter was a provincial food favorite in France before becoming one of the country’s unlikely culinary symbols.

Bistro also features new menu items each week, ranging from entrees such as a cassoulet or beef bourguignon to new desserts. The restaurant’s newest is a bread pudding, not too soggy nor too sweet, cooked in the style of past generations of chefs who would mix their remaining bits of bread into re-baked desserts.

But quality meals can get you just so far. Hostess Paulette Edery, also French, helps create a welcoming environment for guests that Cohen joked might led to changing the restaurant’s name to Chez Paulette.

“That’s what you want in a restaurant. You don’t want to go to a restaurant and see people at the door who don’t smile, don’t say, ‘Hi.’ Right away your experience is going to be bad,” Cohen said. “Even if you have the best food in the world, something is going to stay with you. But when you come in and people are nice, they welcome you, you feel good. All of a sudden, the food is better, the drinks are better.”

Bistro 55 is open for dinner Mondays through Saturdays from 5 to 10 p.m. and from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Sundays for brunch and lunch.

This article originally appeared on Augusta Chronicle: C'est bon! North Augusta restaurant switches from Italian to French