Photo by Pat Padua

Phyllis Richman’s 1978 Washington Post guide to “Washington’s taste of France” listed 49 restaurants in the greater Washington area (including Baltimore’s Chambord), 37 of which were located in city limits. Today, if you search for French restaurants on Yelp, you’ll find the numbers haven’t changed much, but the names almost completely have. With few exceptions — Georgetown’s La Chaumiere and Bistro Français survive — the area’s French restaurants have seen an almost complete turnover. Many of these Francophone haunts have been replaced by comparably respectable establishments serving a different kind of cuisine. But one of old Washington’s most famous French restaurants met a less glamorous fate.

Sans Souci, originally located at 726 17th Street NW, closed in 1983, but had become a shell of its former self even before then. In a dispute with then-owner Bernie Gorland, famed maître’d Paul DeLisle left the restaurant in early 1979, which set off a chain of events that led to the restaurant’s bankruptcy and closure in 1981, to be briefly resurrected as French-Italian joint Il Nuovo Sans Souci .

Legendary Washington Post columnist Art Buchwald wrote, “Before the Sans Souci, there was no Power Lunch. Sans Souci got the power after I went there.” In a 1987 article about the building’s demolition, Post writer Sarah Booth Conroy wrote that, “it’s said that the wreckers didn’t dare tear down the building … until Buchwald left for the Cape.”

A club that featured in the terrible movie but fantastic time warp of The Happy Hooker Goes to Washington, in which Joey Heatherton, as the titular professional, entertains a client in Sans Souci. The McDonald’s that moved next door to Sans Souci still stands, today, but the place where, as Buchwald put it, “everybody who was indicted because of Watergate” once dined, there’s only the entrance to a parking garage.