Advertise | About Us | My Account | Log In

 

Dining Out - Jojo: What a Jewel

French country bistro sparkles on Piedmont Avenue.

By Stett Holbrook

Lots of people fantasize about building a dream house. Seven years ago, veteran chefs Curt Clingman and Mary Jo Thoresen had visions of a dream restaurant. They've realized it at Jojo, a jewel of a restaurant on Oakland's Piedmont Avenue.

Having cooked in some of the Bay Area's most celebrated kitchens--Chez Panisse, Oliveto, Zuni Cafe--the couple and business partners decided they wanted to open their own place. Clingman found an available space on lower Piedmont Avenue and began sketching out ideas for the restaurant.

The space wasn't so dreamy when they took it over in late 1999, but Thoresen says Clingman had the vision to see beyond its initial disarray. The restaurant once housed a falafel joint and required hours of labor and sweat to transform it into the elegant space it is today.

What Clingman and Thoresen had in mind for the restaurant was a simple but refined place that served classic, country French food, the kind of stripped-down, honest food that formed the foundation of what they've been cooking their entire careers.

"What we really wanted to do is get back to where we started," says Thoresen. "That simplicity really appealed to us." Jojo has never been a place to chase culinary fads. You won't find herb-infused foams or esoteric fruit gelees here. This is a mature restaurant. The food stands on the strength of its ingredients and simple, but confident technique.

But simple doesn't mean easy. Jojo's uncluttered dishes are the work of two talented chefs with the experience to make it look easy. The restaurant's small but wellchosen wine list, a polished yet affable floor staff and a cozy dining room add to its appeal.

The menu at Jojo is refreshingly small-- half a dozen starters, a handful of entrees and a few of Thoresen's superb desserts. It changes seasonally, but there are a few items such as the steak and frites and savory bread pudding that are served year-round.

The trio of little salads ($9) is another menu standard, but the particular salads change. On my visits, the early spring offering included a wonderful creamy and salty cauliflower and caper salad, nutty celery root with chopped bacon and asparagus with radicchio, each totally expressive of its constituent parts. The house-made pate de campagne ($7.50) is a classic Jojo dish, exquisitely rich and flavorful, like liverflavored butter. I also loved the escarole salad with bay shrimp, avocado and citrus ($8.75). It's a simple salad, yes, but the farm-fresh, pleasantly bitter greens, the contrasting sweet, creamy and acidic notes of the shrimp, avocado and orange and the perfectly applied vinaigrette remind you of what a salad is supposed to taste like.

Chef Anthony Paone (inset) is winning rave reviews with dishes like grilled Columbia River sturgeon served with broccoli raab, baby turnips and caponata. To me the savory bread pudding ($17.50) was so fluffy and creamy it tasted more like a souffle than a bread pudding, but no matter. Paired with the sauteed winter vegetables, it's an imminently satisfying dish.

I especially liked the saffron-and-fennelscented seafood stew ($23.50) with plump, sweet scallops, shrimp and shelled clams. I was spooning up flavorful, terra-cotta-colored broth long after I'd finished the shellfish. It's easy to see why the anchovy butterdabbed grilled Niman Ranch flat iron steak with frites ($21.50) is a menu fixture; you won't find more classic bistro fare than this. The sublimely tender beef is fanned out on the plate with the compound butter melting over it. The only thing I would add is a little more crusty caramelization to the steak--the meat is so rich and tender, more contrast would be welcome. But I quibble. The steak is quite good, but it's the pairing with wonderfully crisp and creamy frites that makes this dish so timeless. I suppose frites fried in goose fat might taste even better, but it would be hard to top these twice-fried (in peanut oil) beauties.

Dessert is essential at Jojo. While Thoresen's craft is rooted in French technique, it's this list where you're likely to encounter some of the most inventive dishes like walnut and nocino (walnut liqueur) ice cream bombe with chocolate pave ($8) and tangerine-banana-pineapple sorbet ($7.50). I kept to the classics. The chocolate souffle cake with black currant tea creme anglaise ($8) is so light, a breeze could pass through it, but once on your tongue, it melts into wonderfully rich, bittersweet chocolate. And the hazelnut custard ($7.50) is supremely silken, creamy and rich; it's one of the most compulsively edible desserts I've had in a while.

As a true mom-and-pop operation, Clingman and Thoresen work the line every night. Clingman handles the grill and some saute work while Thoresen dishes out desserts. You can watch them working quietly but quickly from just about anywhere in the restaurant, a sight that contributes to the homey, open spirit of the restaurant. A dream house is a private affair created just for the enjoyment of its occupants. But dining at Jojo, the realization of Clingman and Thoresen's collective dream, we get to share in it nightly from Tuesday to Saturday.

Lucky us.