Thursday, 21 November 2024
Jeune & Jolie, Carlsbad
To a visitor from lands afar (me) who sees this part of the world in little two-week periods twice a year, Jeune & Jolie feels like it did all the work of establishing itself as one of the best restaurants in California in a metaphorical blink of an eye, a few short months between opening, winning its Michelin star and becoming the last word in sophisticated Cali-French dining.
Of course, it didn't happen quite that easily. They opened all the way back in 2018, and won their star three years later right in the middle of the Covid pandemic, which must have felt like quite the reward for making it through lockdowns and the whole home delivery rigmarole. It's probably fair to say they were always trying to get a star - French fine dining, even Californian-French fine dining, needs Michelin recognition more than most other types of cuisine for validation of their efforts - but let's not forget it's never inevitable, and never easy, and always welcome. Even if, occasionally, the choices made by the tire company can be bizarre bordering on insane.
Anyway, in this case, as anyone who's ever eaten at Jeune & Jolie will tell you, Michelin got it exactly right. While most of the mid-to-big budget restaurants in the San Diego area do their best to project an air of laid-back California cool even as the prices they charge creep ever upwards, Jeune & Jolie give you smart surroundings, sparkling (and - crucially for this part of the world - not over-familiar) service and, yes, some of if not the best food (certainly that I've been lucky enough to try) on the West Coast for less than you'd pay at many less impressive places.
Alongside a round of cocktails - a perfect gin Martini my own choice, a lovely little thing indeed - we had cheekily ordered a plate of truffled gougères from the bar menu because, well, if gougères are available you have to order gougères. That's the rule. And even though they would have been perhaps even a little bit nicer warmed, they were still excellent, delicate little puffs of cheese and truffle, top pastry work.
The raw bar at Jeune & Julie has its own menu, so you can either skip this course entirely (as if) or order as many little extras as you think you might be able to fit in before the four courses of the main event. Here are 3 different types of oyster and an extra dressed version, a local bay scallop, a huge blue prawn and a dressed mussel, all of it impressive but the dressed oyster being the particular standout with its balanced pan-Asian dressing.
Amuse of duck liver and peanuts were next, with a scattering of edible flowers to add a bit of colour. But as with the gougères it was the pastry that was the most impressive element - impossibly thin and light and dissolving in the mouth to brilliant effect.
I have the capacity to enjoy even a fairly ordinary steak tartare (I'm good like that), but when it's done well it has the potential to be a highlight of the meal. This was definitely in the second camp - lovely loose, richly flavoured veal chunks shot through with just enough wasabi to season and provide a bit of heat but not too much that it overwhelms the meat. On top, crunchy sliced radish sprinkled with seaweed, and underneath, a subtle layer of white soy providing more seasoning and Japanese-leaning flavours. This really was very good.
Amberjack crudo, I hope you can tell even through my terrible photo, was a beautiful plate of food and tasted it too, the fresh fish nicely matching the sharp ceviche-style dressing and topped with bits of pickled pear, celery and passionfruit. One of the best things about eating out in a part of the world so far away from your own is the chance to sample a completely alien range of fish and seafood - some vaguely familiar but some genuinely new. Amberjack is a Pacific game fish which I'm going to suggest tastes a bit like wild sea bass, although until I try them side by side I won't know if that description is useful or completely off the mark...
Last of the pre-starters (sorry, course "Un") was this bowl of some kind of melon soup with (real) caviar, crème fraîche and cucumber and though I didn't get to try it myself (there's only so much passing around of dishes you want to do to keep the front of house spending most of their time mopping up spilled food) I heard only good things.
The bread course was marvellous - a big, fluffy, glossy brioche served with soft lemon butter, it was as dangerously addictive as the house bread at the Devonshire, and anyone who's had that will tell you how difficult it is to have just the one portion.
"Deux" - for want of a better word, starters - continued being supremely enjoyable. A mushroom tart had yet more impeccable pastry work encasing a deliriously rich and complex autumnal mixture of chanterelle, chestnuts, almonds and black truffle. "Saint Jacques" was a giant scallop roasted to a beautiful golden brown served with grapes, tarragon and various foraged sea vegetables, and my own dish of pork (sorry again about the godawful photo) was a generous chunk of just-cooked fillet, served alongside some slow-cooked belly (with superb attached crackling), quince and chicory and all bound with one of those brilliant glossy French sauces that you want to take home and eat spoonfuls of in front of the TV. Well, that might just be me - but it was a very good sauce, honestly.
For "Trois", a single mousse-like ricotta gnudi came next to an artfully arranged series of braised and fried seasonal vegetables, the crunchy/creamy artichoke hearts and enoki mushrooms being particularly noteworthy. The food at Jeune & Jolie, as you may have noticed - is neither austere nor rustic, but a perfectly fine balance between the two, ending up impressing with technique and presentation but also never being anything less than accessible and easy. It's an irresistible formula.
This was my main of guinea hen (about as close to game birds as you'll get in this part of the world), cutely ballotined and sliced into medallions, drenched in another gloriously rich and glossy sauce and served with sliced mushroom and sticks of "garleek" (a cross between garlic and leek - who knew?) that had been charred up nicely on the grill. Again - again and again - it all worked perfectly.
And we needn't have worried that the Jeune & Jolie kitchens were putting all their efforts into the savoury courses and leaving desserts as an afterthought. Not a bit of it - an apple-treacle tart served with soft ginger ice cream (I think it was anyway) had a bewildering number of techniques on display all producing a ridiculously moreish result, a dish that would not have been out of place on the menu at l'Enclume or Moor Hall. And I won't inflict the distressing photos of the other desserts on you, but suffice it to say they were equally enjoyable, an autumnal berries dish having some lovely floral notes of orange and violet mixed with toasted nuts for texture.
Petit fours consisted of some weeny tartlets of some kind of citrus mousse, and sticks of Ecuadorian chocolate. I've become slightly obsessed with Ecuadorian chocolate after stumbling across it in a specialist shop in Girona (Spain) recently - and these were just as good as I remember, coffee and citrus notes released with every bite with a lovely snap.
You will have gathered by now that I had a great time at Jeune & Jolie. As I said earlier, it's almost certainly one of the best restaurants in California, never mind just San Diego, a city that has traditionally been left behind by Los Angeles and San Francisco when it comes to this kind of thing. It's smart and serious enough, with an experienced enough kitchen, to serve sophisticated and intelligent food without coming across as pretentious or needy, but does so with such love and flair (aided by a front of house team who didn't put a single toe on any foot wrong) and at such eminently reasonable prices (relatively) that it's virtually impossible not to fall in love with the place. And so I'm afraid I did - hook, line and sinker. And chances are, you will too.
10/10
Tuesday, 5 November 2024
Lima, Shoreditch
I don't usually like to do invited reviews back-to-back, so this was supposed to be a post about a lovely Catalonian restaurant called El Molí de L'Escala. El Molí serve a daily-changing menu of exciting and unusual local seafood (they had sea cucumber on the menu last week, and scorpion fish), foraged seasonal fare (fully five different types of wild local mushrooms) and world-class premium meats (proper Txuleton from Txogitxu in San Sebastian) for prices so reasonable - even for Spain - you wonder how they make any money at all. We had 3 set menus, a bonus plate of Palamós prawns (the best prawns in the world, trust me), plenty of wine and cava and the bill came to €56 each. It was all absolutely brilliant.
Sadly, due to an unfortunate run in with a dodgy SD card reader from a roadside stall in Girona (note: if the price of an SD card reader seems too good to be true, it probably is) I lost all my photos, so the post about El Molí has been put on the back burner until I can either go back for another reasonably priced lunch or somehow un-corrupt my photos from last week. In the meantime, I may as well tell you about another towering achievement in regional Hispanic food, albeit this time from the other end of the world, Lima in Shoreditch.
I was always predisposed to like Lima Shoreditch because I was a huge fan of their original site in Fitzrovia. Then, as now, there just isn't anyone else, as far as I'm aware, at least outside of Peru itself, doing this kind of thing at this kind of level to such astonishing effect. True, there are South American restaurants all over the place, and one or two fairly decent Cevicherias in London but Lima is the finest ambassador for this cuisine as you could hope for, a really smart and exciting little place operating entirely to its own set of rules and procedures.
Even the table snacks are noteworthy - a little bowl of fried corn kernels, not tooth-shatteringly crunchy like the stuff from the packets but moreish and satisfying, like flaky peanuts. They arrived alongside one of my favourite drinks of the moment, a Margarita Picante (Homeboy in Angel do a very good one as well, if you can put up with the insane noise levels) and I heard appreciative noises made about their Pisco Sour too.
Another snack (sort of), oyster topped with a wonderful basil foam, was notable not just for the base of zingy lean oyster but the surprising chilli hit from togarashi powder, which lifted all the other flavours around it. In fact, everything you need to know about the way Lima approach their menu can be learned from this single mouthful of oyster - accessible, attractive and inviting but at the same time surprising with unexpected techniques and flavours, it was a great start to the evening.
Bluefin tuna tartare came piled on a crunchy seaweedy batter base, providing a nice greaseless contrast to the fish. But the best thing about this dish was a lovely toasted sesame flavour that had been woven into the tuna, producing another whirlwind of complimentary flavours and textures.
The trio of ceviche is a great way to cover as much ground as possible if you're either new to Lima and ceviches in general, or alternatively if you're a food blogger trying to ingest as much of the menu as possible without causing a scene. All 3 examples contained incredible fresh fish - stone bass, sea bass and more of that lovely bluefin tuna - but I think my favourite was the Classico which had some buttery sweet potato spiked with a remarkably brave amount of chilli.
They found yet another way to present tuna in this dish of gambas, tiger's milk and avocado, which burst with colour and inventiveness, little dots of flavoured oils floating in the tiger's milk. Even if the same raw ingredients had found their way into a number of different dishes, they were all different enough not to feel samey, and to be honest they were all good enough that I would have quite happily eaten 6 or 7 plates of the same dish anyway without complaints.
If there was one single element of the entire meal that I could criticize it was that these lamb chops were a little bit on the flabby side - they needed a bit more heat from the Josper to get a darker crust and possibly to render off a bit more of that fat. However the "corn tamal" underneath was genuinely excellent - packed full of buttery goodness with an addictive soft-yet-distinct texture.
And the other large plate, red prawn quinotto (risotto, made with quinoa) was another comforting and attractive thing, with bits of octopus and plump fresh clams studded into the mix. I didn't try the red prawn - there was only one of them, and it wasn't technically my order - but I believe it was very good, although I'm guessing not quite as good as the Palamós prawns from El Molí...
Anyway there's no point crying over spilt SD cards. Lima's desserts continued the theme of exciting, unique and gently dramatic - cute little Alfajores biscuits were a joy to eat and the accompanying lime sorbet exactly the right kind of thing to match with the rich dulche de leche. And a geometrically pleasing puck of light cheesecake on a delicate biscuit base came with 3 neat blobs of lucuma coulis on top. Lucuma, by the way, is a south American fruit tasting a bit like passion fruit which I'd never even heard of before. There's a lot of things that Lima does that you don't see anywhere else - that's one of the supreme joys of eating there.
So yes, after all these years and even after the new location, I'm still a massive fan of Lima. It's tempting to wonder why there haven't been a whole slew of copycat Peruvian restaurants popping up in its wake over the last decade or so as tends to happen whenever a particular trend takes off (see US-style steakhouses about 15 years ago, or more recently smash burgers) but I have a feeling the reason Lima stands alone (or rather as a pair) even today is because this stuff really isn't easy to pull off. It's a culinary style so far removed from most European kitchen skill sets that doing it at all is only within the ability of a select few and doing it this well is only possible by... well, Lima. In short, if you want to see how good Peruvian food can be without travelling 6,000 miles, you have a choice of two spots in London. Both come extremely highly recommended.
9/10
I was invited to Lima Shoreditch and didn't see a bill. Expect to pay around £150/head I think if you make the most of the drinks list.
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