Photo by Pat Padua

You may wonder why this particular Five Guys franchise, located at 1335 Wisconsin Avenue NW, is graced by leaded French doors. The elegant entrance is the portal to an intriguing and absurd slice of Washington history.

This greasy burger joint used to be a French bistro that withstood various trials. It was temporarily shut down for back taxes, and got caught in the middle of a lawsuit after Mike Tyson was accused of assaulting two women in the bistro in 1998. But the most notorious incident in Au Pied du Cochon’s recorded history (who knows what else happened in a French dive that was open 24 hours a day) inspired a house cocktail consisting of Stoli and Grand Marnier known as the Yurchenko Shooter.

Vitaly Yurchenko had served on the KGB for 25 years when he defected to the United States in 1985. At least, that was his story. He asked his CIA protectors if he could attend Georgetown’s annual Halloween festivities, and he made his way through the crowd of 60,000 wearing a wig and sunglasses for security purposes. On November 2, 1985, Yurchenko was dining at Au Pied du Cochon when, according to Ronald Kessler’s book, Escape from the CIA, he told one of his CIA escorts, “I’m going for a walk. If I don’t come back, it’s not your fault.”

He didn’t escape through a bathroom window, as one report had it, but he never did come back.

DCist first wrote about Yurchenko’s Au Pied du Cochon in 2004, an Internet eternity ago. Yurchenko re-defected to the Soviet Union, and some still wonder if his defection was legitimate or if he was just a Soviet plant. After re-defecting, Yurchenko, in a two-hour press conference, told a Moscow audience that he was kidnapped by the CIA. According to a 1985 Post article, the would-be defector described a dinner with William Casey as particularly odd, the CIA Director having dinner “‘with his trousers unbuttoned’ and [popping] pills during the meal. ‘I thought that maybe he was on drugs like me.'”

Yurchenko reportedly ended up at Au Pied du Cochon because there were no good French restaurants in Manassas. Maybe his walkout was an act of food criticism. He apparently spent his limited time in America basking in the glow of capitalism. A 1985 AP article noted that Yurchenko tried out mattresses and ran up a furniture bill of over $18,000 at Powell’s Furniture, near Fredericksburg, Va. Company VP Jimmy Powell told a reporter, “He wanted a very firm one.”