ULTIMATE Tasting Menu - Jeune et Jolie

Jeune Jolie, it's a home for our community. It's an intimate 80-seat restaurant inspired by the unpretentious sophistication of French nouvelle cuisine. We focus on rich and bold flavors through the lens of our southern California landscape. We're surrounded by these beautiful waters and farms so that's what we focus on our menu is vegetables and seafood and that's what we love. We always like to start off our guest experience with a soup shot that shows the true sense of hospitality I mean dating back for centuries. It's a daikon turnip and potato leek soup and it has a little bit of a lemongrass espuma on top. The menu we curate it by having the vision of our guests coming in and being able to create their own tasting menu. We also offer a tasting menu it's our carte blanche so we get the freedom to cook for our guests where we get inspired by what we may get from the farm or what our fishmonger might call us with it is true micro seasonal. We always love to start our guests with our raw bar we get some awesome seafood from our waters it's just all about the flavor of the dish and then we try to manipulate it and make it look sexy and kind of keen in on our plating. Our plating style is a little bit intricate but it is very simple I think less is more so we kind of focus on maybe two to three ingredients and we try to highlight those ingredients. We like to make sure when you look at the plate you do know what you're eating but it is also a little bit unfamiliar. We also have a couple staples which we don't plan on changing anytime soon. One is our grenouille that's our frog legs that was inspired by some of the French colonies from Thailand so we kind of ran with that theme so we made a nice sweet sticky chili glaze with fermented chilies and fish sauce and lime and Thai basil. We also have our pom which is our apple salad it is inspired by Waldorf salad. My mother would always make this for holidays so we kind of wanted to enhance it we have these beautiful hidden rose apples, granny smith apples, we have shaved celery, celery confit, stained agar blue cheese and it's topped with a little bit of walnut oil and lemon juice. We like to have a crudo on our menu and it's very seasonal right now we currently have one with the honeydew consomme it's a hamachi which we quickly cure salt sugar and then rinse off in a dry sake. We kind of got a little bit creative with our rabbit dish so we hollow out these beautiful heirloom horse carrots and stuff it with our boudin blanc but made with rabbit also served with a crepinette which is wrapped in the caul fat and then baby heirloom carrots. We also have our coquilles which is our scallops with our beautiful golden wine it's a vin jaune sauce with abalone mushroom and crispy sunchokes. Traveling to Paris and Europe you notice they eat kind of lighter and more on a slower pace I want to say so we kind of wanted to create that vibe in the sense of having a tasting menu and smaller dishes. It is about gathering around still and having great conversation and just creating a really really fun space for the community and wanted to transcend them into another space. So to try more our main dishes on the menu we have a sable fish that we take the carcass and smoke it and we make a smoked bone broth with brown butter the sable fish itself is topped with a little bit of a sunflower seed miso and it has yuzu and ginger in there and we get these beautiful live seaweeds from Monterey Bay Seaweed Company. For the poussin it's our jidori chicken we slow roast it so it gets a nice caramelized crispy skin and we hold it in a butter bath. The cote de bouf we wanted to play with the classic theme of mirepoix which always enhances a lot of french inspired dishes so we took our cote de bouf which is a snake river farms cap steak and a veal sweetbread and took a greek yogurt turn it into labneh and then infuse it with carrot juice to brighten it up give it a little bit more sweetness and then around you'll see the mirepoix so we take sweet maui onion cook it down in beef tallow and then top it with a sweet oat bacon streusel the nice celery confit and the roasted carrots our pork is an iberico pork from spain it's the presa cut we like to cook it over our benshitan we first marinate it in koji to kind of give it almost a little dry age and sweet flavor we serve it with a little bit of roasted eggplant and then a smoked eggplant puree with crispy artichokes and then we finish it with a buttermilk and a green chamula sauce we always have a variety of seasonal driven desserts we like to have at least one fruity one more chocolaty more decadent dessert currently we have a milf we have chocolate kind of a play on a snickers meets recess on steroids the heart of the restaurant you see this beautiful custom hessan french sweet we do like to have fun we do take ourselves serious but not too serious because at the end of the day it comes out in the product we're here for the community we wanted to kind of bring the show with the dinner instead of going to dinner and the show so it is a very amazing space for people to watch us cook their food for them