“Just making sure,” the Juni waiter said each time we gently rebuffed his incessant butt-ins to ask if everything tasted OK. But all else is not OK at Juni, a place that seems bent on killing off “fine dining” once and for all.
Two month-old Juni, serving some of the most compelling food in town, is flirting with self-immolation. Oligarch-friendly prices, wintry rooms and Fawlty Towers service might bury chef Shaun Hergatt’s “heart of the season” menu before it takes root.
Juni, in the tiny Chandler Hotel, marks Hergatt’s much-anticipated return after the premature burial of SHO Shaun Hergatt on Broad Street. That place’s well-earned two Michelin stars weren’t enough to overcome its barricaded, second-floor location on a war-zone block.
I loved Hergatt’s work at Atelier on Central Park West, the Setai in South Beach and at SHO. A classically inclined but creative modernist, he commands everything from French haute cuisine to neo-Japanese to what I’ll call Exalted American. I compared his SHO menu’s “clarity of presentation and lightness of bearing” with Thomas Keller’s.
At Juni, he’s striving for “an intimate affair between guest and chef.” He sets aside his earlier Asian inflections for a contemporary American menu nominally built around vegetables and grains.
The harvest theme wants a sunny setting. But 50 seats slouch in two expensively wrought but dimly lit, carpeted, white-tablecloth spaces competing to be the more gloomy. The back room feigns coziness with booths and mirrors; the front room under a Venetian-vaulted ceiling aspires only to despair.
Dishes presented on a round cement platform are beautiful to behold under a flashlight. (Warning: tasting menus from $90 to $180; appetizers $20 and entrees $40 a la carte.)
You’ve eaten pork and kale soup, but not this transporting “Tuscan” version. Deep-green kale puree and pork stock are poured over ruggedly rich pork neck rilette, barley and farro. The foresty brew reflected extraordinary kitchen discipline — it was perfect three times.
So did a sensuous marriage of golden corn and farm egg “cooked at 64 degrees” — the corn soup on top, the cured yolk beneath, and the scent of anise hyssop flower lilting through. “Stir it up and it explodes,” Hergatt suggested. On target!
Hergatt’s harmonious marriage of earthbound elements to meat and fish often left us breathless. Yet, Juni wears its “harvest” hat too heavily. Cryptic menu entries typically list a vegetable or grain first even for veal tenderloin attended by approximately four quinoa grains.
But so what? Three mighty veal rounds are roasted to a key of complexity rare for the often bland cut and elevated to glory with maitake mushrooms and puree, truffle mushroom emulsion and the root vegetable burdock.
This is three and a half-star cooking. Yet, for the first time, Hergatt overcomplicates things. A tasting menu’s joy lies in a calibrated procession of dishes, each framing its central element — a scallop, a mushroom, a sweetbread — in a new way.
But some baroque presentations resembled a tasting menu on a single plate. “Where do I start?” a friend mused over a wild whirl of lightly torched kingfish and vegetable pearls — blotches and blobs of radish, butternut squash and kohlrabi, plus fine-ground pumpkin seed for us to sprinkle on. It seems inspired less by any culinary school than by the “magic realism” of Spanish painter Joan Miro.
Or take “chicken skin-adzuki beans-baby onions.” The skin’s a mere crisp on top of rich leg rilette. The powerful essences blur amidst the fussy flourishes — foamy sherry vinegar emulsion and streaks of jus like jet contrails across the plate. It’s wearing to sort it all out amidst the onslaught of pretty but precious compositions.
Pasty chef Mina Pizarro’s desserts are just as disjointed — a chocolate/sweet potato/bay leaf ice cream combo has a skeletal, “Jurassic Park” look — but taste swell in spite of their over-mannered conception.
Even with flaws, the menu transcends the setting — but not the service, which wobbles from over-familiar to insufferably stuffy to insubordinate.
Captains over-describe dishes in the tone of a surgeon briefing a patient on side effects. Once when the sequence of courses got mixed up, the waiter blamed “Chef” for “just sending out extra things.” Are they on the same team?
Wine service wallows between inattentive and not there at all. When we asked the waiter to compare two choices, he promised to send the sommelier — who never appeared. Ten long minutes later, a food runner plunked down a glass without a word of explanation.
This isn’t the “intimate affair” Hergatt and his ESquared Hospitality backers have in mind. It doesn’t cut it at a place where two will spend at least $300 on dinner and easily twice as much.
I hope they get a grip on it before I return in a few months for Hergatt’s winter menu, a season Juni brings on too early.