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) |
The following scenario sounds like something from a 1950s Saturday
Evening Post with a Norman Rockwell cover but I saw and heard it
happen. 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.• | 
