Jun's Chef Tasting Menu
Jun’s 11-course chef's tasting menu is a grazing tour of Chef Kelvin's life that both delights and reaches deep.
Chef Kelvin Cheung shepherds me through Jun’s 11-course tasting menu, bite by bite. I could talk about the wine pairing (pocket friendly), the local ingredient sourcing (well done), the technical skill (self-evident) or the satisfying deep cuts of 90s rap and R&B (had me zoned). All those are reasons to book a table. Eat, drink, be merry.
Over a week later, those are not the things that linger in my mind. Instead, it is the vivid, palpable storytelling of a chef who wanders through worlds, and how he conjures and cooks sincere moments of his childhood night after night.
“One of my favourite things that my dad served at his restaurant was his potstickers, and this is our version of that dish”, chef Kelvin Cheung shares. He tells me how Jun’s kitchen whip local Omani prawns together with wagyu beef then fold this into thimble-size, rice-wrapped potstickers steeped in his mother’s favourite soup.
“Every day before dinner service, she would ask me to make her a hot and sour soup. Even after she passed, we would always make it and put it on her altar for her.”
That story claimed the air from my lungs.
I am at that stage of life where I’m in the middle. I am the middle. The one keeping children safe and alive, but ever more aware of my parents’ advancing years. Much of my idle thoughts oscillate in this liminal space.
Jun’s tasting menu is a deeply personal affair that, like Kelvin, wields boisterous and colourful, while being capable and considered.
It’s food that seems simple enough, on the face of it. Yet scratch just a little to reveal real skill, care and aforethought.
They age sea bream for a week to coax the umami. Chefs ferment vinegar from coconut water for almost two months. Their sourdough starter is lapping a third trip around the sun. Planning today what to cook in weeks or months from now. Ask me what I did yesterday or my plans for tomorrow, and see if you extract anything cogent or sensible.
Jun’s is a good time place with a tasting menu mercifully shaken of pretentiousness, but savvy enough to show enough prissiness and micro-herb tweezing for fickle Dubai diners to be reassured magic lives here long before you lob that first pani puri in your mouth.
Oooooh, that pani puri! Butter-poached morsels of lobster rolled in a nostalgic Macanese yellow, spiced curry that acquiesces to avocado’s fatty lushness. Then comes a sprightly sea bream almost jewelled with verdant kombu oil and slivers of glistening young coconut–inspired by Kelvin’s recent chef’s trip to Bangkok.
Jun’s is my second tasting menu this month and, like Hadrien’s Chez Wam tasting menu, it tells a biographical tale. Tasting menus are often showy restaurant offerings, but great ones have conversations with you, like in Alchemist, or Dubai’s Tresind Studio.
Jun’s menu is intimate and heartfelt, even while Jay Z’s “Big Pimpin” bounces in the background. It’s a portal into Kelvin’s early years culturally raised between east and west.
He lifts the lid on a dim sum-style bamboo basket to reveal “bites”, a concept inspired by Kelvin’s father who owned over a dozen restaurants. Sweet, pudgy Hokkaido scallop with yuzu kosho and corn cooked in its own dashi; a beef chicharron anointed with wagyu sirloin, two kimchis and caviar buttressed by a wagyu beef stir fry with fermented black bean.
His memories unfurl as we go. A morsel of Jun’s signature heirloom carrot in smoked labneh, a fish congee of roasted toothfish enriched with ghee and a kaya-rich dessert sings of floral, grassy pandan.
Each tells a story. First his mother acquiescing to the pleas of second generation Cantonese kids who just wanted “Canadian food” for school lunches. That fish congee is the comfort food made from the affordable fish of the day boiled with rice and eaten for days. The kaya pays tribute to his mother’s Singaporean heritage.
It is not all tear-jerking, family hour. You do eat very well at a relaxed price point in a Downtown licensed restaurant. There’s levity and joy, humour and eccentricity, with tasty mouthfuls punctuated with guttural satisfaction–and yes, 90s hip hop, remember?
The agnolotti pasta is painted brilliant ochre colour—a cataclysm of colour—answering the question: what if Jackson Pollock was left unsupervised with pickled fermented mango and fistfuls of king crab. A beef and broccoli course winks at hazy memories slumped outside late night Chinese takeaways eating out the box (I should tell you Jun’s grind their own rice on a specially imported stone to make their own rice noodles).
I left sated, inspired and impressed. Jun’s is not trying to be the most gilded restaurant in Dubai, but it continues to be one of my most recommended.
Jun’s Chef Tasting Menu, Would I Return?
Absolutely, it offers good value to diners especially in this location inside a fun restaurant that’s serious and unserious where it counts. The wine pairing is modestly priced at an accessible price point that those insecure about choosing wine should seriously consider, if not to learn. The more discerning may want to poke through the wine menu by the bottle.
Jun’s Chef Tasting Menu, Who Should Go?
Downtown residents and those who enjoy the easy decision making benefits of a tasting menu but want a more casual atmosphere. People who are intrigued by tasting menus but put off by astronomical prices.
Jun’s Chefs Tasting Menu, How Much Was It?
Non-vegetarian tasting menu, AED 485
Wine pairing, AED 165
Eira sparkling water, AED 40
Macchiato, AED 30
Jun’s, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Boulevard, Downtown Dubai, Dubai. Visit Jun’s Website or call +971 4 457 6035.
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