At this new steak house in Fishtown, you get free seconds on your steak frites

Medium Rare is not a typical steak house.

French lessons in the restrooms, classic rock in the dining room, servers who scribble your order in crayon on your paper-topped table, cheeky messages on the cocktail napkins, Bazooka bubble gum sent out with your check.

The chain out of Washington has arrived in Fishtown — next to Suraya — with its steak frites dinners and brunches, and it’s all prix fixe.

Dinner ($32.95) starts with a green salad with a Dijon dressing and a hunk of crusty bread. The main course is six ounces of sliced culotte steak, fanned neatly and topped with a creamy “secret sauce,” beside a tangle of crispy frites. (“Medium Rare” is only the name; they’ll cook steak to any temperature, and the vegan alternative, at the same price, is a grilled portobello mushroom with fire-roasted pepper sauce.)

As you finish, the server will arrive with a tray bearing a second steak portion and more hot frites, which you can eat there or have boxed to take out. Desserts ($12 extra) include oversize hunks of chocolate and carrot cakes and Key lime and apple pie, plus a hot fudge sundae with jimmies (or sprinkles, as you might call them).

Based on Medium Rare’s growth (this is the ninth location), founders Mark Bucher and Tom Gregg are on to something — a moderately stylish, clearly unfussy dinner for two, including a cocktail each and a shared dessert, for about $110 plus tax and tip. With the check comes a pen, embossed with “Stolen from Medium Rare.”

Weekend brunch (a fixed $39.95), which started Aug. 16, includes the steak frites and sauce; a Benedict (steak and egg portobello mushroom hash with hollandaise); breakfast sandwich (steak and choice of eggs, fries, and chorizo sausage served on a baguette with secret sauce and hollandaise); steak and eggs; or the house specialty, French toast (soaked for 24 hours in vanilla bean custard) with sausage. Included are juice, coffee, and soda.

Mimosas, Bloody Marys, screwdrivers, and a weekly special drink are priced at 25 cents at brunch in Fishtown to comply with Pennsylvania law prohibiting drink giveaways; in other cities, the brunch booze is comped. In a local touch, martini olives at the bar are stuffed with Philadelphia cream cheese.

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Part of the magic of steak frites restaurants — the sector includes Steak Frites DC in Washington, the Steak Room at Rochambeau in Boston, and Stephen Starr’s new Chez Frites at the Ocean Casino Resort in Atlantic City — is their secret sauces and the lengths to which home cooks and competitors have gone to try to crack the recipes. Bucher said no one, aside from him and Gregg, knows what’s in theirs. (It tastes like an au poivre married to a Steak Diane — suggesting butter, cream, cognac, shallots, garlic, maybe dashes of mustard, and Worcestershire.)

“We have one company that makes what we call the base, which is like a starter,” Bucher said.

“That’s all they know. Then our group and the restaurants finish it, so they have no idea what’s coming to them.” It’s cooked in 20-quart batches. Each restaurant, whose cooks follow printed guides with color references, makes about eight batches a week.

Asked to divulge even one sauce ingredient, Bucher replied: “Salt and pepper.” He did allow that it contains dairy. The sauce is gluten-free, as are the frites themselves, which are made in fryers that never see ingredients containing gluten.

Bucher, 56, grew up in Cherry Hill. After getting C’s in public school, his parents sent him to what was St. Mary’s Hall-Doane Academy in Burlington. “My parents said I needed to be a little challenged,” Bucher said. “That was the best thing that ever happened to me.”

He went to work in the food industry in the Washington area, though he spent time in Philadelphia in the early 1990s while he and his wife, Amy, invested in Baker Street Breads. His restaurant debut was in 2007 with BGR the Burger Joint in Bethesda, Md.

Fifteen years ago, Gregg, who ran a food company called Cuisine Solutions, invited Bucher to go to Paris to help with a cooking event. As a thank you, Bucher said, Gregg took him to his family’s favorite restaurant, Le Relais de Venise L’Entrecôte, whose specialty is prix fixe steak frites.

“In the middle of that meal, I looked at him and said, ‘You know, we could totally Americanize this and do it back home.’ And he was like, maybe we’ll do it when I get back. When he got back, we did it.”

The first Medium Rare opened in 2011 in what was a low-ceilinged Greek restaurant in Washington’s Cleveland Park neighborhood. The formula was the same then, though the price was $19.95.

Medium Rare manages beef prices by buying a single cut — culotte steak, also the move for Brazilian steak houses — on contract. It buys about 2 million pounds a year through the New York butcher Pat LaFrieda, Bucher said. “They’re happy to have our contract because it’s consistency for them, too,” he said. With today’s beef prices, “they’re getting crushed right now.”

Bucher and Gregg, who closed a short-lived New Orleans location in March, are considering other openings in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Florida.

Several years ago, the partners created the Feed the Fridge program, setting up refrigerators that workers in the Washington-Virginia area stock daily; the program serves 3,600 people a day. They’re planning to extend the program to Philadelphia.

Bucher said growth was calculated. “Every independent multiunit operator will tell you they never made more money [than] when they had one restaurant,” he said. “We do this for a slightly different reason — one is to grow and groom staff and people and provide opportunity for folks. Whenever you have a successful business, your successful people need a path to grow forward and if not, they leave. We’ve created a company that creates jobs people want, not need. It’s one of our philosophies.”

The average kitchen manager has been with the company for 10 years, he said. Vanessa Quintero, who is overseeing the Fishtown opening, as she does for all new restaurants outside of Washington, started with Medium Rare 12 years ago as a server.

“I have to continue to provide learning and training, so when the day comes when she leaves me, she’s better off than when she met me,” Bucher said. “That’s when my job is done and she’s good.”