When the restaurant experience just doesn't click

Jaja is a restaurant specializing in small plates and natural wines inside the space formerly home to chef Martin Juneau’s Pastaga. When Juneau closed his celebrated St-Laurent Blvd. restaurant in late 2022, he opted to sell it to husband-wife duo Francis Duval and Genviève Beaudoin — both former Pastaga employees with CVs that also include Patrice Pâtissier, Hélicoptère, Butterblume and le Mousso — who now run and co-chef the restaurant.

Having been open for roughly a year and a half, Jaja has occasionally been recommended to me. Until recently, however, I had chosen to steer clear of it because it had always seemed like a style of restaurant formula that I know well and don’t particularly enjoy. Last week, however, I decided it was time to know for sure. Without beating around the bush, it pains me to report that Jaja disappointed in exactly the ways I feared it would.

Before I delve any deeper, I want it to be said that I take no joy in writing reviews like this. Duval and Beaudoin seem like nice enough people and the food that they served was not objectively bad. Unfortunately, being well-meaning and cooking decent food doesn’t guarantee a quality restaurant — especially when many of the city’s best restaurants are just a stone’s throw away. In my view, the best restaurants lead with the food and drink but are measured in large part by the many other aspects of the dining experience. Pacing, timing, decor, ambiance, service, plates, cutlery, glassware — they all have their role to play. Most important, however, is for a restaurant to have an identity. In my experience, the latter is what Jaja lacks the most. Reflecting back on my meal, it was clear that Jaja didn’t have a point of view or concept more definable than just food and wine.

At the time of my reservation, a Tuesday at 7:30, Jaja’s dining room was empty save for one two-top and the nasturtium-garnished terrasse had just a handful more diners. I make this point to clarify that the restaurant was not busy. That’s important information because from the time our party was seated to the time we received our first plate was over an hour. We ordered the entire menu (11 small plates in total) for a group of four — an order we were told was the ideal way to experience Jaja.

The first course was a trio of vegetables: overly buttered radishes, long out-of-season asparagus and grilled baby gem with Nordic shrimp. The whipped butter in the radish dish was so abundant that it was mistaken for yogurt and the asparagus was tasty enough but, was so out of season that it was not much more than a clump of fairly sad spindly twigs. Look, unless the produce is still spectacular, there’s no reason spring vegetables should be on your menu well into late July. Not a particularly good start. The wine on the other hand, a dark rosé from Austria, was lovely, offering generous notes of crunchy red berries, watermelon, a touch of spice and lively acidity.

As is often the case with restaurants of this type, the small (emphasis on small) shareable plates mean that each person eats a morsel and the plate is finished in about four bites. Five minutes after reaching the table, our plates were empty — we’d wait another hour for our next course.

The first bottle of wine long since polished off, we opted for an aromatic white from Rhône Valley producer Antonin Azzoni. Another wine with great freshness, it had notes of ripe citrus, bruised apple, waxy honeycomb and white flowers. A great passe-partout wine for the eclectic array of dishes to come.

The next course was also a mixed bag — a decently good piece of burrata (a quarter of a ball) with meaty oyster mushrooms and crispy chicken skin. Tasty enough but nothing special. A quite unimpressive green bean salad was served with too many decorative flowers and a tonnato sauce that tasted more like lemon curd than the tuna it’s meant to be made of. Lastly, a grainy somewhat pale beef tartare with oysters that did what it says on the tin but failed to be particularly interesting.

Onto our third hour of dining and approaching the ripe hour of 10:30 p.m., our next course arrives: squid with a Sichuan-style chilli and cucumber salad that had all the right colours but none of the bold flavour; a decently cooked piece of duck with potato pavé and some pickled grapes and, the best dish of the night, a half cornish hen whose leg meat was transformed into spinach-stuffed roulade and breast meat that was perfectly cooked, with golden, crispy skin. Had all the dishes had been like this, this may have been a very different review.

At this point, our party all agreed we’d had enough. The restaurant had emptied out, and three hours into dinner, having finished our second bottle, and despite still being hungry, with more dishes left to come, we were tapped out on patience. We agreed it was time to pull the plug on the evening. It’s a great disappointment — I was looking forward to trying the desserts, given Beaudoin’s CV, and I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt that they were good but I wasn’t prepared to wait another hour for them to hit the table. Instead, we paid our bills and went for dessert at the neighbouring Mon Lapin who, in stark contrast, showed how a neighbourhood restaurant specializing in creative small plates and natural wine, when done right, can be the best restaurant in the country.

It may not be fair to compare Jaja to Mon Lapin but even compared to Mamie, a wine bar around the corner, it can’t stack up. It’s simply unclear who this restaurant is for or what it hopes to be but whatever it’s doing now, it needs some serious fine-tuning. ■

For more on Jaja (6389 St-Laurent), please visit their website.

This article was originally published in the Aug. 2024 issue of Cult MTL.

For more on the food and drink scene in Montreal, please visit the Food & Drink section.