L'Annexe

L’Annexe at 2917 M Street NW is a French restaurant on the lower M Street commercial block, in the section of M Street between the Key Bridge approach and the main Georgetown retail cluster. The French restaurant format at this address serves the M Street dining population with the bistro preparations that have made the French restaurant one of the most durable formats in American urban dining since the mid-twentieth century.

The French bistro menu is organized around a set of preparations that have achieved a canonical status in the history of Western restaurant cooking: the French onion soup, with the slow-caramelized onion stock and the Gruyère-gratinée crust; the steak frites, where a flavorful thin cut of beef and an excess of thin-cut fries produce the most satisfying simple dinner that French cooking has established; the duck confit, in which the duck leg has been preserved in its own fat and finished with the crisped skin that the fat-cooking produces; and the moules marinières, the steamed mussels in white wine and shallots that French coastal cooking established and that have become an international standard.

The wine list at L’Annexe covers the French regions that the French restaurant wine program typically draws from: the Burgundies, the Bordeaux, the Loire valley whites and reds, the Rhone valley, and the Alsace wines that accompany the French kitchen across its regional variations. The house wines by the carafe provide the accessible option for the weeknight dinner customer who wants a straightforward glass with dinner rather than a bottle from the cellar.

The lower M Street address at 2917 serves the Georgetown community that uses this end of M Street for dining, which includes the residents of the surrounding lower Georgetown residential blocks and the visitors who come to Georgetown from the Key Bridge direction.

Hours run from dinner Tuesday through Thursday and from lunch through dinner Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. The French restaurant customer in Georgetown in 2026 is a different customer from the Georgetown French restaurant customer of the 1980s, when the neighborhood’s diplomatic and professional community treated French dining as the default register for a serious business meal or a special occasion. The current customer tends to seek French food for a different set of reasons: the comfort and reliability of the bistro preparations, the quality of a French wine list, and the specific pleasures of the cuisine that no other national tradition provides. L’Annexe at 2917 M Street serves this customer with the classic bistro approach that has proven more durable than the modernist or fusion French approaches that attempted to update the tradition in the 1990s and 2000s. The Paris bistro, which has itself survived the same pressures and emerged intact, is the model that the M Street restaurant’s format follows. The wine service by the carafe is particularly important at a French bistro because it signals that the restaurant understands that wine and food at this level are not about ceremony but about pleasure. Hours run dinner Tuesday through Thursday and lunch through dinner on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.