A new, semi-upscale French bistro opened in Cascades this week, with long-time chefs Michael and Allyson Stebner launching their second Loudoun restaurant.
The Stebners opened Local Provisions, located in Cascades Marketplace in 2023, but they’ve been chefs for decades, meeting 20 years ago and opening their first restaurant. When they were ready to start a family, they sold the business, and Michael took a job working in the corporate culinary world while Allyson worked at home raising their two daughters.
The Stebners moved to Sterling in 2019 and began forming connections in the community. After COVID, and with their daughters older, they decided to open another restaurant with a key characteristic in mind – that it would be a neighborhood restaurant, a place where friends could gather for a meal, or a snack or sometimes just a drink.
It quickly caught the attention of critics at The Washington Post earning good reviews just months after opening.
“Like so many other mom-and-pop restaurants that that happens to, it really accelerated our business, so that timing was great,” Michael Stebner said.
Local Provisions is a Mediterranean farm-to-table restaurant serving up a wide range of dishes including shrimp risotto, lamb burgers and frittatas.
But while the dishes appear unassuming, they are anything but basic, Michael said.
Deeply rooted in the Stebner’s culinary philosophy is the idea that each dish must be crafted with excellent ingredients – a conviction stemming from a moment shared by the whole family duringa trip to Paris years ago.
“Before we opened the restaurant, we spent a couple weeks in France and just fell in love with,obviously how good the food was, but also how focused on the product quality they were,” Stebner said. “We ate in some fancy restaurants, but the best meals we had were in casual bistros.”
On one memorable day, the Stebners spent the morning walking around Paris, from the Louvre to the Eiffel Tower and back again. When they got back to where they were staying, Michael said that everyone was starving so they walked into the first corner bistro they saw.
“I ordered roast chicken and French fries because I just wanted something simple and basic and it was a transformative moment for me, because it was so remarkably good,” Michael said. “It’s something that I’ve eaten a million times, I’ve cooked a million times, but it was so good, and it just kind of clicked for me that there’s room for that kind of food. You know? This sort of super-satisfying approach.”
That goal has been proven at Local Provisions and will be continued with the Stebner’s newest restaurant, Brasserie Royale.
Michael said when people hear “French restaurant” they often think of something fancy or ostentatious, but his family’s goal is to create “approachable,” delicious food.
“I’m proud to say we have a menu that’s approachable. People look at the menu, they say, ‘I understand rigatoni Bolognese. I understand this menu.’ It’s not confusing, it’s not contrived, but then they order the rigatoni Bolognese, which is our number one selling dish over at Local Provisions, they realize it’s the best version of that dish they’ve ever had. We make the pasta from scratch. The sauce cooks for four hours. We use the best possible ingredients.”
In many ways, opening Brasserie Royale is merely an extension of what the Stebners love about Local Provisions – quality, local ingredients transformed into simple yet excellent dishes in a location that feels like home.
In fact, the restaurants are located right next to each other. Michael said that about a year and a half into owning Local Provisions, he and Allyson began thinking about opening a second Local Provisions and began touring possible locations in McLean and Vienna.
As they were driving back from one location in McLean, Michael said he was reminded of some advice his father, who owned several brake and muffler shops in Arizona, gave him when he was young.
“He was literally driving hundreds of miles every day, putting out fires in his businesses,” Michael said. “I remember him telling me when I was a kid, ‘having two locations is three times harder than having one location, because you spend so much of your time going between the two.’ And I was reminded of that as I was driving back, and I was like, ‘what are we thinking? Our restaurant is brand new.’”
So, Michael and Allyson pivoted from their original plan and decided to open a second restaurant with a different concept that would still be near their home, and in the community they love.
“We know the community is good. We live in it. We know we have a loyal following and for the most part, on busy nights, it’s hard to get into that restaurant. So, the business is there, the only rub is, we’ve got to come up with a different concept and that’s kind of what led us into this,” Michael said.
While the core of what ties Local Provisions and Brasserie Royale together is the same, Michael said customers will have a completely different experience at each of the restaurants.
“Our rule is, whatever we do, we have to have three or four things that differentiate us from other restaurants and at Local Provisions those differentiators are very simple – fresh pasta made from scratch, homemade bread baked every day, a wood burning oven and a wood burning grill and soft serve ice cream,” Michael said.
But what sets Brasserie Royale apart will be different.
“Our differentiators here are a hospitality experience that is unmatched in the area,” Michael said. “And that means our level of service comparative to Local Provisions is going to be a notchhigher. … We’re basically doubling down on that here and really going after our hospitality being the differentiator. The second one is going to be the design of the space.”
Michael said while Local Provisions provides a cozier environment, the goal for the bistro is tomake the visitor feel like they are stepping into France.
“I want you to feel transported. I want you to feel like you’re eating in that bistro in the corner in Paris. I want walking in the door and looking at the space to really move people,” Michael said.
The third differentiator will be precision cooking.
“At Local Provisions, we’re cooking with fire. So sometimes the oven is 500 degrees and sometimes the oven is 475 degrees… The chef has to manage it, and I would say the food there speaks to that. It’s a little more rustic, whereas here [at Brasserie Royale] we have Rational iCombi ovens. Those ovens are Wi-Fi enabled, fully integrated and programmable to our recipes, to the exact humidity, temperature, time, fan speed,” Michael said, describing them as the “Porsche 911” of ovens.
“We have no open flames in our kitchen here, no open burners. Everything is either plancha style cooking or French top cooking or the Rationale. So, for a chef, that’s a big difference,” Michael said.
The menu at Brasserie Royale will also be updated seasonally with ingredients that are in their prime.
“That’s what we’re good at honestly,” Michael said. “It’s what we talk about a lot. Our daughters will tell you that we talk about it too much and but it’s easy to get inspired by ingredients. That’s the way we’ve cooked for years.”
The Stebner’s approach is similar to how an Italian grandmother would plan a meal, he added.
“An Italian grandmother gets up in the morning, goes to the market and buys what’s great,” Michael said. “She does not go to the market with an idea of what she’s going to make for dinner. She goes in with an open mind. She sees what’s perfect, and she buys those things and then makes dinner. So, she lets the market decide the menu, rather than the chef saying, ‘oh, I need to go find fava beans because I want to make a fava bean ravioli and then going to the market, and the fava beans are four or five days old and gross. Why would you buy those? So, it’s much easier to start with the ingredient for us and to say, ‘OK, what can we do with watermelon in the summer?”
Michael is also putting together the wine list for the bistro himself, after recently receiving his level two wine certification from Wine & Spirit Education Trust.
“We’re not trying to be Chez Francois,” he added. “… It’s a simple French wine list with wines that were picked to go specifically with this food.”
In addition to the precision and quality that goes into bistro dishes, Michael said it’s important to him and Allyson that the restaurant be a place where the neighborhood feels at home.
“We have people that come to Local Provisions two or three times a month, which is, for a restaurant like that, a lot. To get that sort of loyalty is like every restaurant owner’s dream,” Michael said. “They’ll come in Friday night dressed up, and they’ll come in Thursday for lunch in their sweatpants, and they may order the same exact thing both times, but they can have two different experiences. And I really want that to happen in this restaurant too. It’s at its core, a neighborhood restaurant.”
The restaurant planned to open July 2 located at 46290 Cranston St. in the Cascades Marketplace. Learn more at brasserieroyaleva.com.