To return to the main subject of Blog 39, I add a few extra thoughts about where is the future of dining out going to place us fairly soon? This week I visited Sheffield, not in the brief of this Blog for sure, but I was able to dine at what might be viewed as a cutting edge restaurant in that city which has been notorious for its poor gastronomic reputation over the past 30 years or so.
My dining companion and I set out for Jöro (which is apparently Old Norse for 'earth') and were quite impressed when we arrived at a very stylish little restaurant housed in the Krynki shipping container development which seemed like just the right place for what we thought of as a rather adventurous place to dine.
The restaurant states that its philosophy is based on a blend of influence from Nordic regions and Japan which they have nick-named 'Scandi-Jap-Mashup', the New Nordic Kitchen. Hmmm. The focus is on creating minimum fuss and producing delicious food using the best obtainable ingredients especially from local sources.
Chef Luke French opened Jöro with his fiancée Stacey in December 2016 having worked for a short period as a youngster at Daniel Clifford's Midsummer House in Cambridge from whence he fled feeling overwhelmed by the place and then travelled around and worked in Asia and then worked in Sheffield for several years before trying out Jöro as a pop-up restaurant in the city. The chef most admired by Luke French is Paul Cunningham (a photograph of him occupies a prominent place in the restaurant), an English chef who holds two Michelin stars at his restaurant, Henne Kirkeby Kro, in Denmark. Presumably this foregoing paragraph explains the 'Scandi-Jap-Mashup' served up in Jöro. This is very interesting as one can not help but wonder if British exit from the European Union may result in young British chefs doing less of this international travelling especially on the European continent with the result that we see a contraction of foreign influence, especially European, on the future direction of British cuisine.
A fixed 9 or 11 course Tasting menu is all that is served at Jöro and the menu may vary nightly. The home page of Jöro's website leads with the phrase, 'A meal built of many small plates'. Whether that concept actually works is sometimes questionable. A menu similar to that served to my dining companion and myself is depicted below. Some of the 'small plates' were indeed small gems. The mackerel with yuzu and coastal herbs, depicted at the head of the Blog was wondrously fresh and marine and the blue cheese and onion dish was delicious.
In the middle of the meal things got a little out of hand. A small piece of duck, with an enjoyable, crunchy coating with plum sauce was really no better and less satisfying than a trip to a reasonable Chinese restaurant would have brought to the diner and immediately afterwards was, and to be honest it was a lovely piece of belly pork, another dish with a classic Chinese restaurant sauce - plum - which made me wonder why I hadn't just gone out 'for a Chinese'. The lowest point came next with a vaguely unpleasant dish containing charred broccoli and another brassica and not a lot else. I've made this point before (see Blog 5) - a plate of a single vegetable does not a course make and usually they're not very enjoyable. Please Chefs, serve your vegetables with something else.
The meal as a whole was very good allowing for these false steps and it all represented tremendously good value. I'm not really convinced that we need to combine Scandinavian and Japanese food but it makes a change. I'd be very happy if Jöro upped sticks and settled down here in Birmingham and I could go there more often. As he matures I expect that Chef will swerve away from serving a plate full of brassicas and straight Chinese restaurant steals; some of the dishes worked very well and I would be happy to eat them again. But the brassicas - oh dear, a shiver goes down my back every time I think of the dish.
O, I must go back again if only to have another piece of Chef's Ginger Miso fudge served as a petit four with the coffee.
So perhaps we are still heading in the direction of using the freshest and most immediately available ingredients with less theatre both on the plate and in the restaurant but served in unusual and original forms and in chic, original environments. Refreshing dishes with a cleanness to them even though they may not always work.
Jöro was awarded a Michelin Bib in the 2019 edition and the 2019 Good Food Guide rated it as having a 'cooking score' of 5 which, improbably, is just one less than Purnell's which I think says more about the underscoring of Purnell's than it does about the overscoring of Jöro.
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