Every time Richmond foodies clap their hands, a new smash burger, street taco or rustic Italian joint seems to get its wings.
More and more restaurants are replicating the same concepts these days – and somewhat successfully, I should add. But it leaves you wondering: Doesn’t anyone have anything original to say?
Thankfully, JewFro does. If perspective is, indeed, currency in the food business, the visionary Jewish-African fusion restaurant, which started as a pop-up and then evolved into a brick-and-mortar spot in 2021, has a surplus of riches.
People are also reading…
Modern fusion concepts are often devised as marketing ploys, kitschy mashups of popular cuisine inclined to make more money than they do sense. Not so for chef Ari Augenbaum and restaurateur Trey Owens – the prolific team who, along with their partner, Nar Hovnanian, also gave us Soul Taco. For them, it’s an act of activism.
Owens conceived the idea after learning of antisemitic remarks by comedian and TV personality Nick Cannon. Controversies like this – and more recently, the Kanye West fiasco – are nothing new, however.
There have long been “flashpoints amplifying conflict in Black-Jewish relationships,” writes renowned Black-Jewish author Michael Twitty, whether it be anti-Black racism within the Jewish American community or anti-Semitism within the African American community.
Cannon’s comments were simply a spark that lit the creative fire. Owens, who is Black, and Augenbaum, who is Jewish, have since taken a stand. By linking the foodways of the Jewish and African diasporas together and weaving elements of them into coherent culinary narratives, they want the food at JewFro to serve as an expression of unity, both symbolic and educational, between their respective communities. The name itself, “JewFro,” makes the point provocatively.
And what better place to achieve some cultural healing than a space exuding 1970s-era love-and-peace vibes, in the Shockoe Bottom neighborhood – the site of the Virginia Holocaust Museum and, historically, the center of Richmond’s slave trade in the 19th century?
Augenbaum and Owens’ bold, empowering, boundary-pushing vision has certainly resonated with food media folks, contributing to the success of their restaurant. Bon Appetit magazine, just last year, featured JewFro, praising the restaurant as the first of its kind in the country. With a second JewFro location forthcoming in Raleigh, N.C., the popular food website Eater dubbed it one of the region’s “most anticipated restaurants.” And Richmond Magazine’s annual shortlist of restaurants also included JewFro, calling it “fusion at its best.”
All the recognition is well deserved. But is perspective, even an abundance of it, enough to sustain a restaurant?
At times, the brilliance of JewFro’s vision is realized – in such dishes as, believe it or not, gefilte fish ($14). Turns out, when you take that love-it-or-hate-it staple of the Jewish holiday table, deconstruct it into dainty slivers of rockfish sashimi, and cap this off in a spindrift of horseradish foam and pickled garnishes, you wind up with a refreshingly vibrant Yiddish crudo.
Same goes for curried potatoes, molded into bocce ball-sized kugel croquettes ($10). Fried to a daring shade of brown, they’ve got both that mashed-potato creaminess on the inside and that bottom-of-the-fry-box crunchiness on the outside. Squiggles of aioli, rich with turmeric and other heady spices, tie in nicely with the curried potato flavors.
Hats off to the kitchen as well for applying the notion of “toasted breadcrumbs over pasta” to a plate of gnocchi ($23), plump pillows of them, fairy-dusted with pangrattato and crisped to completion in the pan. Although the berbere alfredo that accompanies this dish could afford some subtlety, instead of bludgeoning us with heat, the sauce does add an irresistible layer of intrigue — as do shreds of Eritrean-style brisket that give the gnocchi a beautifully unctuous gloss.
Elsewhere, though, the food comes across as more of a three-wheeled sportscar – fun to admire, cool to think about, just not fully developed enough to get off the ground. (If you don’t catch the reference, watch the Elizabeth Carmichael docuseries on HBO.)
Braids of challah are tight and fluffless ($7). Clunky satchels of pierogi ($13) pack so much baking spice into the pumpkin filling, it’s like chomping on a fall-scented Yankee candle. And stalk-roasted clusters of brussels ($11) might look magnificent, yet beneath their caramelized veneer, there’s an unsavory boiled quality that sends my inner-child fleeing from the dinner table.
Seasonings, teetering either too far “over” or “under,” prove a repeat issue for the kitchen. The verdant kick of Ghanian green pepper salsa, or “kpakoshito,” can’t possibly counter the amount of coarse sea salt bombarding a piece of seared rockfish ($27).
Nor can an Ashkenazi Jewish-inspired “tzimmes,” a delightfully sweet medley of couscous and stewed fruit served in the hollow of a roasted gourd, compensate for the lack of discernable flavor in the braised lamb shank ($29). The lamb is allegedly za’atar spiced. I’ll have to take their word on that.
More is needed, too, to balance the tongue-piercing acidity of lemon that hijacks the West African peanut soup ($10). And is it really that presumptuous to want more than a single minced-lamb kreplach dumpling, which floats along so lonely and sad in the bowl?
A huge saving grace is the innovative chutzpah of JewFro’s cocktail program. Equal parts spectacle and sophistication, the drinks are a mixological magic show for the senses. A rosemary-scented air bubble is shot tableside into a beet and tequila concoction ($13) that strikes a sweet, bright and herbaceous chord. The restaurant’s riff on an Old Fashioned ($14), made from fat-washed bourbon, gets rounded out by light and dark facets of smoke – cigar syrup and pipe tobacco plumes that billow downward into a dimpled whiskey glass.
Breaking new ground usually means hitting rocks along the way. And the terrain at JewFro has some bumps, for sure. A few ideas have already come to fruition, others have not. The hope is that, when the dust finally settles, the full landscape turns out to be as compelling as its pioneering founders promise.
Editor’s note: The Times-Dispatch has resumed publishing restaurant reviews. Because of the pandemic, restaurants will not be given star ratings.
Justin Lo is The Times-Dispatch dining critic. Follow him on Twitter or Instagram @justinsjlo.