When I spoke with chef Brandon Jew last year for my article about the proliferation of tasting menus in the Bay Area, he had a simple explanation for why he replaced Mister Jiu’s à la carte format with a five-course tasting menu. It came down to finances. “We were going to be experiencing a slow death,” he said. “The math problem is ‘Do I think we can get 200 people to spend $80, or do I think it’s more realistic to have 100 spend $160?’”
My colleague Cesar Hernandez and I released our list of the Top Chinese restaurants in the Bay Area today, and Mister Jiu’s — the first Chinese restaurant in the California to earn a Michelin star — is on it. But in recent months, there’s been a shift at the Chinatown spot. Jew is phasing out the tasting menu, reverting to à la carte — and adding a new menu option that hearkens back to Mister Jiu’s origins.
Financial considerations aside, Jew felt pulled towards a tasting menu approach because it allowed for more engagement with diners around Chinese ingredients and techniques. A customer who is signing up for five prescribed courses at upwards of $125 a head is demonstrating commitment to a dining experience, one that might include a tableside explanation of fish maw or snow lotus. That felt important to Jew, who has dedicated himself to educating the larger dining public about why his culture’s culinary traditions are as deserving of respect as French or Italian cuisine.
- Related reading: One of S.F.’s most anticipated restaurants is about to open
- Best restaurants:Top Chinese Restaurants in the Bay Area
Yet something felt off about the tasting menu. Jew couldn’t quite put his finger on it until, several months ago, he came across a cache of old menus from Chinatown restaurants. There, preceding the à la carte section, were banquet menus — as curated as a French tasting menu beginning with an amuse bouche and ending with mignardises, but with an aura of celebratory abundance. Jew realized that he’d been trying to shoehorn Chinese cuisine into a Eurocentric format that didn’t quite serve the spirit of Mister Jiu’s.
Now, diners can once again go fully à la carte, or they have the option of pre-ordering a $125 banquet menu built around Jew’s signature Peking duck. (You can still get the duck if you choose to order à la carte, but they do sell out; go with the banquet menu if you want to reserve one.) Banquet diners will be able to select an array of coursed, family-style dishes to supplement the duck. “The table is mostly full the whole experience,” Jew says. He’s particularly excited about the return of seasonally driven spontaneity. The long R&D process of a tasting format meant if he saw spectacular produce at the farmer’s market, it didn’t make it onto the menu for a couple of weeks…