Of course, that food is fake -- doctored up and retouched like a car or a supermodel or any other artificial commodity -- but this fish was real. It was my dinner. And as I pushed my fork through and twisted away my first bite, watching a little curl of steam rise from inside the fish just like on a commercial, I thought there was no way it could taste as good as it looked.
But it did. The flesh was juicy -- not at all flaky, but rather squeaky-stiff and slightly chewy; having been given just enough internal heat to become the fishy equivalent of a perfect medium rare, it was then removed from the fire and served, unrested, before any residual heat could take it beyond the magic moment of ideal temperature. As a result, much of the fat and fish oil was retained in the meat, giving it a mellow but broad flavor while avoiding the abject fishiness that comes from overcooking and the American cook's ingrained fear of underdone seafood.
It was a singular achievement, a small masterpiece of the poissonarde's art and a great goddamn piece of fish. This was the first honestly good piece of Chilean sea bass (aka the Patagonian toothfish, an ugly, nasty, bottom-feeding critter considered absolute junk until the over-fishing of snapper, sword and other more socially acceptable whitefish demanded a name change and a PR makeover for this substitute stock) I'd had since a meal four years ago at the Spring Mill Cafe -- one of my favorite restaurants in the country. The only trouble was, I was having this somewhat transcendent toothfish experience in a restaurant that I didn't particularly like.
Junz opened last year in a generic space in a generic strip mall out in the vast, low-density commercial/residential sprawl of Parker, a place considerably off-center on the radar of most metro foodies. And while the truly dedicated gourmand is willing to cross not just local borders but time zones in search of the new, the different and the delicious, all but a very few restaurants live and die by the goodwill of the neighborhoods in which they exist. As Tip O'Neill said of politics, all eating is essentially local, so Junz was created with a little bit of Parker -- a little bit of suburban Tuesday-night dining -- at its heart. The place is pretty but not fancy, comfortable for both families (of which there were many on each of my visits) and couples on a casual Saturday night out, and the menu is complicated, worldly and expansive without being overly fussy or at all intimidating.
That's all smart business, but for the food-obsessed -- those who, like me, believe deep down in their own hearts that food is neither a means nor an end, but should exist in a perfect vacuum, absent commerce, absent any sullying by the gross influence of crowds or fads or tastes du jour -- the discovery of who's in the kitchen on that Tuesday-night dinner shift can't help but carry with it a small sense of betrayal.
Chef Jun Makino is young, not yet thirty. But he comes from a restaurant family (his father owned Todai here in Denver; the extended family ran other left-coast establishments) and cut his teeth working prep shifts in one galley after another. That alone isn't so odd, because most genius chefs, and probably a good share of the merely mediocre ones, can trace their kitchen lineage down through childhood Saturdays spent mincing garlic or peeling potatoes. But Makino's story takes a celebrity turn: He worked under the late, great Jean-Louis Palladin.
Palladin was (and still is) a Name -- something you put in bold print on your resumé once you left his kitchen and went out into the world. He was also a monster, a hard-living, hardworking, flesh-and-blood dinosaur who shook the trees wherever he walked. He was a champion of haute French cuisine, a perfectionist, a brilliant cook and a wunderkind who got his double Michelin stars at age 28 -- the youngest ever -- then labored under their weight until lung cancer took him down at age 55 in 2001. You had to be more than good just to get onto one of his lines. You had to be great. And traveling in his orbit couldn't help but make you better. Friends who worked for Palladin at the height of his power alternately describe their time with the master as one of the most inspiring, instructive periods of their careers...and a season in hell. To a man, they also say that having Palladin's name on their resumés is a double-edged sword.
No story written about Junz would be complete without a mention of Makino's time with Jean-Louis -- and when foodies see Palladin's name anywhere, they begin to salivate. Their hearts flutter, their blood pressure goes up, and their expectations go through the roof. They assume that anyone who spent time basking in the radiated celebrity and glowing brilliance of a chef like Palladin must carry a little bit of that sunshine around in his back pocket.
And in terms of Makino, the chef, that assumption is correct. But in terms of Junz, his restaurant, it isn't, because it's not a particularly bright spot on Denver's dining scene.
With Junz, Makino set out to create a place that deliberately and intellectually fused his Japanese-restaurant roots with the haute French he learned in his journeyman years under Jean-Louis and elsewhere. "It's not fusion cooking," he says to everyone who asks. "Just the best mix of traditional French and Japanese dishes." Add to that a pinch of pan-Asian Hawaiian influence and worthy sushi, and you've got Junz: a restaurant with some very good food, but a skewed vision of how to bring those loosely related elements together into a single, seamless whole.
That beautiful sea bass, for example, came mounted on a bed of slightly mushy, cheesy-gooey risotto kicked up with a Franco-Italian-Asian mess of baby asparagus, shaved carrots, shiitake mushrooms and something that might've been tomato, red bell pepper or something else entirely, because it added no taste and just a spark of color to a starch already running riot with a rainbow of mismatched ingredients. Strangely, while this risotto had every reason to be awful, it wasn't. It had been on the heat a little too long, yes, and was terribly ill-conceived, but something like a pure force of will (or maybe just a lot of luck) had brought all these antagonistic flavors and textures together into something edible. It didn't exactly sing, but it could carry a tune.
Unfortunately, there was no harmony at all between the risotto and the fish. And while an orangey puddle of smooth, lobster-spiked bouillabaisse sauce (a pure Palladin moment from the kitchen) gave a nice grace note to the sea bass, adding a consequent layer of richness to the already rich flesh, it didn't work with the risotto. And neither did the four quarters of stewed tomatoes with pancetta -- the plate's vegetable, apparently -- because while the tommies might have been fine on their own (and in an Italian restaurant), paired with everything else here, they were just as wrong as nuts and gum.
This imbalance was the rule more than the exception at Junz, on both a macro (whole menu) level and from plate to plate. The appetizer lineup -- not counting sushi, not counting a second appetizer menu tented on every table -- was front-loaded with scallops in oyster sauce, beef tataki, ahi with ponzu and pepper shrimp fried with scallions, and then it took a sudden but pure French twist with marinated foie gras in a consommé butter sauce. Granted, it was great foie gras -- but it was living in a strange neighborhood. On the entree side, lamb chops over fettuccine in a rosemary cream sauce shared space with niku maki (asparagus wrapped in shaved ribeye) and lemon-pepper kajiki (Pacific marlin). Makino is right when he says this food isn't fusion: It's more like a terrible high-speed collision between a traditional French restaurant and a fast-moving Japanese fish house.
Few dishes escaped the pile-up unscathed. I had some excellent gyoza dumplings -- thin-skinned, filled with mild pork and green-onion pâté, then fried blisteringly crisp. But my order of edamame was damaged: Perfectly cooked in unsalted water, the pods had then been sprinkled with coarse-grain salt -- which meant that none of the salt went through to flavor the beans. A tartare of good ahi tuna soaked in a spicy, peppery, brightly flavored Hawaiian marinade, served in a martini glass and garnished with a folded bamboo leaf looked pretty, but it suffered from the inclusion of bitter, underripe, grocery-store-quality diced tomatoes where sweet plums or even run-of-the-mill cherry tomatoes would have done better. It also wasn't really a tartare, which would presuppose a mash of marinated tuna ground up with its ancillary ingredients, or served with the tomatoes, onions and maybe some capers on the side.
On a quiet weeknight, as the kitchen crew worked, I watched through the pass window, peeking into their polished box of steel and fire as I sipped a warm, workhorse miso soup, cloudy and deeply flavored, brightened by slivers of green onion. Since things were slow, the cooks could concentrate on every plate; the servers could offer careful, polite service to every table in their care; the guys behind the long, lacquered sushi bar had time to toast the comings and goings of regular customers. I'd ordered pork tonkatsu and a lobster salad in the hope that by sticking close to the Japanese side of the menu, I'd find some inspiration. But what I got was a few tiny chunks of dry lobster tail dressed in basil vinaigrette and mounted on a bed of dull field greens, followed by a whole pork cutlet, breaded, fried, sliced and slapped down on a plain white plate beside a straight iceberg salad in a dressing notable only for its incredibly vivid shade of orange.
Maybe I was missing something. Maybe there was a theme I hadn't noticed, some knot that tied everything together, some combination of dishes that would have made Junz make sense. But if there was, I didn't find it. While my Palladin-centric expectations were high, it was also clear that Makino -- while obviously a great cook -- hasn't yet settled into being a great chef, which is a very different thing. Chefs need to be capable of driving a restaurant's concept and menu, of translating -- through the medium of sauté pan and top broiler -- everything they have to say about food through ten or twelve or twenty dishes. And Makino isn't doing that. Yet. Right now, Junz has too many voices talking about too many things all at once.
While this may improve with time, as I sat there poking disappointedly at the last few bites of my tonkatsu -- considering whether to have the crème brûlée or the lychee sorbet or just the check for dessert -- all I knew for sure was that I was going to give Junz plenty of time to figure out what it wanted to say before I came back.
