Crab cakes, featuring crawfish and crabmeat, blackened on the top and bottom, are made to order and served with a chilpoltle remoulade at Juniper. (Photo by Sherwood Cox)

A cute family of four steps out of the church at noon Sunday morning. They’re as dressed up as anybody ever is for church anymore, except for the father wearing jacket and tie. They greet their friends and when the crowd disperses, Mom asks, “How about a nice Sunday brunch?”

The kids beam. “Yeah! How about the place across the street?”

Dad says, “Where else are we going to go on the North Shore?”

They walk in the sunshine to Juniper, the only restaurant in Mandeville with a true Sunday brunch. It’s amazing the place is not full because it’s always been terrific. Must be the church traffic.

Juniper is only 2 years old but its site across from Our Lady of the Lake Church is its second address. The original restaurant in a spiffy building full of metal art about two blocks away flooded twice in last year’s storms.

It was a double disaster for Peter and Kaia Kusiw, who also owned the popular coffee shop Java Grotto on Lakeshore Drive.

Juniper was an irremediable mess. The coffeehouse was washed away.

Luckily, a barbecue joint called Shady Brady’s had vacated a century-old building across from the church. It had been an old-school bakery for a long time and left behind big stone ovens. One of several restaurants that tried to make a go of the location in the last decade fired up the ovens again and was baking bread but found the job too difficult.

So the Kusiws moved in. Peter redid the kitchen and Juniper reopened in September. At first, they were a coffee shop by day and restaurant by night but that confused everybody. So it became just Juniper.

Within a few weeks, the Kusiws had a thriving restaurant better than the one they had before.

The original Juniper was pretty good. But the new one is one of the four best places to eat on the North Shore.

The rustic premises feature two long rooms with high ceilings and uneven old wood-plank floors with big doors and windows that never close exactly right. It looks more like a neighborhood place for a seafood platter or po-boy.

Maybe that’s what surprises everybody. They expect a modest table but here comes a menu starting off with panneed asparagus topped with crabmeat and orange hollandaise. It’s as good as any such thing you’d find in the best gourmet bistros in New Orleans.

You could also have a cake of crawfish and crabmeat, blackened on the top and bottom — a new idea and a good one. The chilpotle remoulade fills in the flavor profile.

The gumbo and the turtle soup are made in a thick, spicy country style. It seems perfect for the place as does the wedge of Bibb lettuce with thick bacon and Stilton cheese vinaigrette.

Then the chef shows the too rare ability to step things up in the entree course. The stunner is the bouillabaisse, an enormous bowl of seafood you will have trouble finishing if you ate an appetizer. The lobster-based broth covers big chunks of fish, big shrimp, mussels, lobster with a little tomato, fennel and saffron and more than a little red pepper. I order this whenever I see it and this is one of the best versions around.

The next dish I recommend does point up the only problem worth talking about. It’s a moderately large filet mignon with two sauces — a brown sauce and a bearnaise on top of a fried green tomato with a crawfish cake. And a vegetable. And another vegetable. And some potatoes. And sauces and sprinkled spices around the edge.

This dish needs at least three things removed. Yeah, people on the North Shore have country appetites but there’s no need for this kind of overload.

The soft-shell crab amandine is just what you want. Although soft-shell crabs grow scarce and smaller this time of year, that will turn around. Excellent grilled fish specials are better than the standard fish here, the awful tilapia.

Veal Oscar returns from the dead here and comes alive. Panneed veal with crabmeat and hollandaise with asparagus on the side is fresher than most. The most filling dish (as if we need to look for that) is the pork shank with oyster andouille dressing. They also have a nice pork tenderloin coated with cracked black pepper glazed with a slightly fruity touch for a great sweet heat effect.

And the rack of small veal chops, tasting better than the big ones, is good with fava beans and tasso.

That brunch includes many dishes I just named plus an assortment of fancy poached egg dishes. Kusiw gets the eggs just right and the sauces, too.

For dessert, they have a magnificent nutty bread pudding baked to order in titanic portions.

Juniper is a dazzler of a bistro with near-perfect consistency and a pleasant small-town feeling. It’s the biggest news in the North Shore dining scene since before the storm.•