A Celebration of Black Southern Food, at JuneBaby in Seattle

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/15/dining/junebaby-review-seattle-black-southern-food.html

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SEATTLE — As great restaurants will do, JuneBaby pulled me in from more than one direction. The first of course was the sheer pleasure of the cooking. (Without that, the others wouldn’t matter.) The food is Southern, which I was primed to like before I walked through JuneBaby’s Dutch doors in this city’s Ravenna neighborhood. And whenever Edouardo Jordan’s menu offered a dish I’d expect to see at a Southern restaurant, he gave me something better than I’d imagined.

Fried catfish over grits can be better in theory than reality. At JuneBaby, the fish, from an Idaho farm, is firm, tight, fresh and free of bottom-feeder muddiness. The crust is semolina, which stays crisp and unsoggy. The grits are fluffy, yellow, full of corn flavor. Ringing the grits is an orange circle of shrimp bisque. Strictly speaking, shrimp bisque has no business on fish and grits, but if you see the bisque as a tamer, richer stand-in for hot sauce it makes a delicious kind of sense.

This is the tactic — find superior ingredients and bring some fancy kitchen tricks to bear on them — favored by most of the South’s prominent restaurants. If that were all Mr. Jordan had in mind, I would still think JuneBaby is a very good restaurant. But on the menu of this nearly year-old establishment are dishes that I wasn’t expecting, that many of those other restaurants don’t serve, that pulled me in deeper.

Like any good Southern chef, Mr. Jordan loves his pork. But I paid closer attention when I noticed which parts of the pig he’s cooking. He will boil ham hocks with collard greens until the leaves are soft and velvety and wonderfully smoky. He stews pigs’ ears until they surrender their ornery stiffness, then slices and fries them into irresistible, crunchy sticks. He seasons okra and tomatoes with a North African spice mix and stews them with hog maw, otherwise known as the outer wall of the stomach.

“Almost nobody likes it,” Josh Ozersky wrote of hog maw in Esquire in 2014, a year before he died. “It’s tough and tasteless, like the chitterlings to which it is attached.”

Mr. Jordan would disagree. By the way, he cooks chitterlings, too.

These are the cuts that enslaved black people on plantations were allowed to keep when hogs were killed; after Emancipation, these were the cuts they might have had the money to afford and the skills to make into something memorable. Their healthy representation on the menu tells you that JuneBaby is not just a Southern restaurant but, specifically, a black Southern restaurant.

Of course, much of the huge edifice of Southern food was built by black farmers and black cooks: as enslaved people in plantation kitchens and in their own families’ cabins; later, as domestic servants, hotel chefs, railroad cooks, restaurateurs and entrepreneurs. Mr. Jordan is interested in all of it, but he particularly wants to introduce customers to the food of his family.

He was raised in St. Petersburg, Fla., where the surrounding culture wasn’t particularly Southern but his mother’s table was. “The food she cooked was the only food she knew,” Mr. Jordan said in a phone interview. “That’s where I got my experience of fried fish, fried chicken, braised meats, offals, bread pudding.”

JuneBaby’s oxtails are a tribute to one of her mainstays. Mr. Jordan deepens the flavor of the beef by roasting it before braising. He focuses the broth by clarifying it with egg whites, as he would have done in culinary school and in kitchens where he’s worked, such as the French Laundry in California and Per Se and Lincoln Ristorante in New York. But he doesn’t try to prettify what the menu calls Momma Jordan’s Oxtails, serving them whole, with cubes of turnip and rutabaga, the hunks of beef barely hanging onto tailbones whose wide, white wings flare out like propeller blades.

The chitterlings are essentially his paternal grandmother’s recipe, stewed with onions, carrots and garlic. Instead of water, he might use some chicken stock, or the collagen-rich liquid thrown off by the pigs’ ears. Rather than use a pot on the stove, he softens them in a pressure cooker. This both speeds the process by several hours and allows him to welcome the customers who line up each night waiting for the doors to open into a dining room that does not smell like intestines.

As variety meats go, intestines are not at the top of my list. Out of strong curiosity, I’ve eaten them packed into andouillettes in France, fried and kept under heat lamps in a gas station in Mississippi, and grilled over charcoal in the backyard of a Korean restaurant in Queens. I liked them best at JuneBaby.

“My grandmother’s chitterlings were a thing I loved, but never talked about,” Mr. Jordan said, a thought that will sound familiar to immigrants and other people whose families’ food veers from the mainstream American diet. “You tell your friends as a kid you eat chitterlings, they run away from you.”

Eventually he ran away from them, too, until he began to prepare a follow-up to his first restaurant as both chef and owner, Salare, down the street. The menu at Salare, he has said, expresses what he has learned in his career, centering on the Italian and French food he made in other people’s restaurants. JuneBaby, though, “speaks on who I am as an individual soul and as an African-American male.” And to do that he realized he would need to go back to “these ingredients that we don’t want to talk about” and start to show them off.

Junebaby’s chitterlings never come off the menu. They are not a huge revenue center for the restaurant but they may be, in a cultural sense, a loss leader.

The dining room has a welcoming, domestic atmosphere; somehow it always feels as if a warm breeze were blowing through the screens, even in winter with the windows shut.

For all the braised and simmered and stewed dishes, the kitchen glides easily into lighter territory. Vegetables keep their crunch. Bright green broccoli is tossed with grated Cheddar, almonds, apples and very delicate puffs of pork skin, all of them sharpened by preserved-lemon vinaigrette.

The buttermilk biscuits and raised dinner rolls, known here as Antebellum Wheat Buns, are made with a light, practiced hand under the direction of Margaryta Karagodina, the pastry chef. Red-flint cornbread, baked in an iron skillet, gets its minerally sweetness from sorghum.

Some of the desserts are slices of church-supper favorites, like a rich brick of bread pudding, interspersed with dark chocolate and soft apricots, sitting on crème anglaise. The Black Forest cake was the kind you rarely see anymore, three chocolate-cake layers frosted with cocoa-dusted whipped cream.

Alongside one of these, it’s a good idea to let Mr. Jordan take you all the way back to the beginning of his career and have a flip. This is frozen fruit juice — pineapple the night I had it — in a paper cup, a tribute to the homemade Popsicles Mr. Jordan used to whip up out of powdered drink mix and sell when he was a boy in St. Petersburg. If the word flip doesn’t ring a bell, one of its other names might: huckabuck, hucklebuck, frozen cup, freeze cup, cool cup.

If you’re still in the dark, a definition can be found in the JuneBaby encyclopedia. This still-growing document, found on the restaurant’s website, defines menu terms and concepts in Southern cuisine from Aunt Jemima to yams (“Most common African staple that fed enslaved Africans on board ships.”).

The encyclopedia is another way JuneBaby drew me in. It nudged me to consider what I was eating. And it situated Mr. Jordan’s family recipes in a centuries-long arc of American history. Many restaurants start with a chef’s personal story. JuneBaby traces that story back to where it meets the country’s.

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