Is cooking an art? To many Tufts students, a meal is nothing more than sustenance. Sure, there's skill required in rolling a super burrito from Anna's Taqueria, but that doesn't make the kitchen staff artists or storytellers.
Anyone who doubts the artistic merits of food preparation need only to visit Journeyman, a relatively new restaurant tucked inside humble and under−explored Union Square. Conceived by a husband−and−wife pair with no prior gastronomic experience, Journeyman's eccentricity is at times off−putting — for better or worse, a meal at Journeyman is an exceptional experience.
Tse Wei Lim and Diana Kudayarova traded in their respective careers as a sociologist and a historian in order follow their passion for food. Undaunted by their lack of professional experience and the recession, Lim and Kudayarova built a restaurant that delivers an experience that feels both effortlessly organic and painstakingly deliberate.
"We wanted to create a restaurant that we would want to eat at," chef and co−ownerKudayarova said. The duo's personal culinary preferences lead to inventive yet idiosyncratic dishes.
A visit to Journeyman consists of a three−, five− or seven−courseprix−fixe dinner. Guests select one of the three preset meals and surrender themselves to the whims of the kitchen staff. "I hate looking at menus and having to pick," Kudayarova said. "Here we make a meal that makes sense and tells a story — it has a beginning, middle and end."
While the menu officially changes once a week, various courses are continuously altered or swapped out according to the seasonality of the ingredients and restlessness of the chefs. Instead of clinging to signature dishes, Journeyman will ditch even the most successful of ideas. "We've been serving this cheese tortellini with coffee, hazelnut and sweet potato," Kudayarova said. "It's fantastic, but it's been there for three weeks so now it's on the butcher's block."
The dishes appear on the menu as illusions rather than as descriptions. Forgoing the traditional laundry list of ingredients and preparative techniques, the courses are enumerated by only one or two of its components. This coyness was entirely intentional, according to Kudayarova. "We wanted a surprise that gives guests just an idea and lets the food speak for itself."
An example would be my first course, described merely as "Salad." What came to my table was in fact a collage of legumes, vegetables and fruit of various textures. The bright yellow of baby beets, the vibrant green of the pea tendrils and the deep ruby of the fig against the stark white plate was reminiscent of playfully colorful art of Joan Miró. This deconstructed salad typifies Journeyman's element of surprise, as well as the restaurant's artful execution.
The kitchen also incorporates technological ingredients and techniques to achieve unique textures and flavors. "We don't incorporate technology for the sake of technology. We're not whiz bang," Kudayarova said.
My meal began with a tomato foam amuse−bouche — a complementary bite−sized hors d'oeuvre that precedes the appetizer — punctuated by a palate cleansing digestif that contained a gin gelee.
The main course's lamb was prepared two different ways. First, the lamb was braised in a toasted barley−infused milk, which lent a faint nuttiness to the meat. The secondary cut was cooked sous−vide, a technique popularized by chefs such as Heston Blumenthal and Thomas Keller that involves cooking food in a vacuum−sealed bag in a temperature−controlled water bath for long periods of time. This process evenly cooks the meat while also retaining the juices that normally escape during traditional cooking methods.
The menu is scattered with a variety of different ideas, flavors and techniques competing for dominance. At best, the resulting meal is overly ambitious; at worst, it feels busy and half−baked. The dishes rarely exceeded the sum of their parts. The fish course incorporated plump oysters, a sweet Japanese broth, perfectly cooked fish and chorizo gnudi. At first glance, this seemed like a lovely reimagining of the Catalan "mar i mutanya" cuisine with far−reaching ingredients. The gnudi, however, was too tough. I ended up eating all of the ingredients separately and leaving the gnudi behind. Even a slight disappointment like the gnudi stings, especially given the three−figure bill.
I should be clear: The food at Journeyman is good — even better than good. Journeyman spares no expense in using the best ingredients and the newest techniques. Ultimately, Lim and Kudayarova are taking risks as all good artists do, but they simply fall short in their efforts.
