Jov Bistro
1701 Bayview Ave., Toronto, 416-322-0530. Dinner for two with wine, tax and tip, $125.
Those are some big shoes to fill, chef Owen Steinberg's at Jov, which since the end of January has belonged to chef Masayuki Tamaru and maître d' Michael Haralampopoulos. Steinberg is not only a fine and creative chef but a foodie hero, a small bistro chef forever pushing his own personal envelope. He had a surprisingly large coterie of regular customers who adored him and counted on his ever-changing opus for their food thrills.
For Tamaru, owning a restaurant was overdue. He had laboured in others' kitchens long enough, paid his dues and made a bit of a name for himself. He cooked at the Fifth, Rouge, Crush, the short-lived O-Do and Azure Restaurant in the Intercontinental Hotel. Jov was the ideal "starter restaurant" for him, being small and inexpensively decorated.
Tamaru, who has in the past pulled off some extravagant flights of fusion fancy, has held himself to a restrained bistro menu, to mostly very good effect. This is a chef with a long-running love affair with foie gras, which he reins in . . . somewhat. He's doing a sweet, dense terrine with my fave animal fat, with small chunks of intense black plums. Foie gras also appears in winter salad, but nowhere else on the menu.
Tamaru always wanted to run with the big boys, whose fealty to the seasons is a core value. So it's no surprise that his winter menu is heavy on meat, legumes and root veg. Stupid cooks squander winter, using flavorless tomatoes and asparagus. Tamaru has joined the ranks of the smart ones who embrace winter's ingredients: His carrot and beet soup is a marvel of sweetness, innocent of cream. He uses pink grapefruit, shaved fennel, hearts of palm and fresh crab to build a marvellous winter salad. His sole disappointing starter is goat cheese Napoleon, composed of pedestrian goat cheese layered with poached pear bits and something crispy but blah like a homemade cracker.
But even the disappointing mille-feuilles item tells a Tamaru story: With it are fat cherry tomatoes (the only tomatoes with taste in winter), broccolini in a dangerously creamy dressing and sweet fresh walnuts. This guy is not shirking his duty to the palate.
His winter menu is very meat-based, save for splendidly sautéed filet of bass with crispy skin, served with a clever little fry-up of fresh artichoke quarters, portobello mushrooms, fennel and bacon (for sizzle and smoke). Cornish hen, which is making a recovery from banquet hall hell, has been almost entirely deboned, stuffed with Jerusalem artichokes (sweet) and wild mushrooms (earthy), cooked perfectly (not overdone, hallelujah) and served in a fine Madeira-tinged brown sauce. Hold the burdock root, however, which is snazzy only because nobody's ever heard of it, not because it tastes good.
Tamaru roasts duck breast until blood red and builds a clever cabbage roll with duck-leg confit. He rounds out that plate with another rich brown sauce, this one orange-inflected, which has a charming sweet citric influence on the potato on the side. It is all very French bistro: meats cooked rare, winter veg, demi-glace sauces.
So it is with blood-red roast venison, served with sweet, tiny caramelized turned turnips and small onions, with which he has worked similar frying pan magic. But quell misstep with the gratin of potatoes: We expect a sinful excess of butterfat turning thin slices of al dente potato into silk 'n' satin. How dare such a francophilic chef present this nasty mealy cake, the potato slices mushed together in un-buttery banality?
But who else could compose a dessert menu of blancmange, tarte tatin, mille-feuilles, mousse, clafoutis, sorbet and cheese? How sweet it is, mostly. The apples in the tarte tatin are caramelized dark golden brown; its crust is a marvel of buttery fragility. Blancmange, a milk custard not appealing to all palates, is silky smooth and splendidly fragrant with sesame.
Only the clafoutis and the mille-feuilles fail. The latter suffers from terminal dryness, as does its savoury appetizer cousin. Puff pastry is a wild horse to ride. It requires à la minute preparation and hair-trigger timing, or else it goes either dry or soggy, neither of which is a happy fate. Clafoutis, the French confection that is supposed to be a fruit-studded cross between cake and custard, is not, in this case. This pineapple clafoutis is thin custard (perhaps made watery by what the pineapple exuded) with no reference to cake.
But disappointing clafoutis and mille-feuilles aside, vive la France . . . and ditto Jov reborn.