Jean’s Opens Its Doorways Downtown

Max Chodorow is aware of precisely the place the produce at Jean’s comes from. He even is aware of the particular route the produce travels to reach on the NoHo restaurant’s kitchen; he drives all of it there himself from his household farm in New Hope, Pa.

“We nonetheless don’t have a produce van. That’s the one lacking piece I haven’t addressed but. I’ve been the man driving in all of the produce as soon as every week,” says Chodorow, including that he had simply re-upped the restaurant’s garlic provide from the farm, which was initially owned by his grandfather.

Jean’s, owned by Chodorow together with Ashwin Deshmukh and Bernardo Metsch, is absolutely stocked and formally open for service. Within the lead-up to its public opening, the restaurant has hosted non-public occasions, together with a current trend week dinner for Body, constructing word-of-mouth buzz.

“We’ve been operating the place simply once we need to principally for 3 years,” says Deshmukh. “However now it’s time to push the actual identification of what it’s, which is a restaurant.”

Jean’s is positioned on Lafayette Avenue subsequent door to the Public Theater, in an area previously occupied by ideas together with hotspot Butter and Asia de Cuba, which was owned by Max’s father, Jeffrey Chodorow.

“It’s not difficult. It’s not fussy. There’s one thing for everybody,” says Deshmukh, who’s additionally a managing associate of Superiority Burger, of the crew’s strategy to Jean’s. “We need to be actually in regards to the neighborhood. We love NoHo. We predict it’s the center of the town and a very particular place and very easy for nearly everybody within the metropolis to get to.”

The menu is New American, anchored by Chodorow’s farm and regionally sourced proteins.

“My intention with designing the menu and the meals idea was to be accessible to actually everybody, however to nonetheless be appreciated by individuals who know rather a lot about meals,” says Chodorow. “The meals feels very simple, however the issues we’re doing within the kitchen are usually not essentially simple.”

Dishes on the menu embody a seared native fluke served with wok-cooked kale, chitarra pesto, and a Thai hen salad impressed by a beloved dish served at Jeffrey Chodorow’s former restaurant, China Grill, in Midtown.

“The unique salad is great. Everybody in Midtown for enterprise lunches was obsessive about it for 30 years. I wished to have a little bit little bit of that legacy, however not have or not it’s fairly the identical. I wished to do one thing rather a lot brighter and extra fashionable and lighter,” says Chodorow, earlier than describing the coconut milk-based dressing that accompanies his composition of poached hen, napa cabbage and mustard greens, and crispy shallots for Jean’s. 

The bi-level, 110-seat restaurant features a café, most important eating room, and cocktail lounge. The crew notes that they wished the area to really feel like a “New York restaurant,” rendered via strategic mirror placement, a wall of “discovered objects,” and gold leaf detailing. Most design selections had been executed in-house, complementing the non-public strategy of the whole undertaking.

“[Jean’s] is a mirrored image of who we’re, what our style is, and what we want New York to be going ahead,” says Chodorow.