San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Mediterranean flavor in bloom
Small plates, toast-worthy cocktails among standouts at Jardín Jardín
Among the many ambitious restaurant projects that opened during the pandemic, chef Jason Dady’s Jardín at the San Antonio Botanical Garden might have been the riskiest.
A couple of restaurants have circulated through the old Sullivan Carriage House in the past 10 years, none of them with the staying power to outlast the novelty of life down the garden path. It’s possible that Dady’s Mediterranean spin on lunch, brunch, dinner and cocktails under the twinkle lights of the good life can break that cycle.
Dady’s already said that Jardín’s the busiest restaurant he’s ever opened, busier than Range, Tre Trattoria, Two Bros. BBQ Market and all the others that came before that. On a recent Saturday, Dady said his staff moved 500 customers through Jardín, operating from a grill kitchen the size of a walk-in closet and a small-plates prep station no bigger than a coffee counter.
That prep station accounts for Jardín’s mezze plates, a collection of 16 small dishes to set the tone for choose-your-own Mediterranean adventure and some of Jardín’s best work. One set of three plates brought color and crunch from a seven-vegetable crudité with basil aioli, a sweetand-savory mix of butternut squash with goat cheese and toasted pepitas, and the sugary indulgence of dates stuffed with white cheddar.
Do the math on the three-plate mezze option, and you could put together hundreds of different combinations. But why stop there?
Three’s good. Six is better, because it opens up the field, starting with a fluffy naan-pita hybrid armored with herbs, then moving through smoky eggplant baba ganoush, crunchy fried balls of arancini filled with Bolognese sauce, roasted beets with blue cheese and oranges, bruschetta with vegetable puree and cauliflower spiked with golden raisins and capers.
At $12 for three and $23 for six, a mezze sampler is a value-conscious conversation starter, a tour of the kitchen and a cocktail party kit all in one. That’s convenient, because Jardín feels like a cocktail party, with drinks like a rosemary-forward gin-and-tonic variation called Herbs and Spices, an astringent and refreshing housemade limoncello spritz, a competent bourbon sour with a proper egg-white froth and a frozen peach bellini that seemed like an affectation until our waiter suggested floating bourbon over the top for a proper Southern porch sipper.
A companion to that cocktail set-up, hummus is an event at Jardín, a plate the size of a vinyl 45 record, mounded at the sides like a reservoir, filled with olive oil and rimmed with herbs, served with naan pita on a plate of equal size. Focaccia pizza extends Jardín’s skill with bread, a tall square with firm structure punctuated by air pockets to absorb the lush ricotta, pecorino and fried-egg payload of the White Truffle Milanese.
Snacks and cocktails are fine, but we come to a Dady restaurant for fire and flash. Jardín came through with a fall-apart block of boneless beef short rib with a smoky aura that wove through a bright, acidic Moroccan tomato sauce called matbucha. Dady’s version of the omnipresent octopus incorporated olives, potatoes and a chimichurri-style herb sauce called zhoug, all in service to a curled tentacle that presented a range of properly firm and seared textures along its length.
The hot side of the menu brought challenges. A roasted chicken couldn’t decide if it was undercooked or overcooked, with the breast side hard and sticky, and the leg quarter blushing too red at the core. Lamb meatballs came out too hard, with centers that crumbled apart like clay. And a small plate of seared gnocchi took the “seared” part way too seriously, creating gnocchi with a split identity: burned on one side, blonde on the other, unable to agree on what they should be.
But Jardín found balance in well-executed dishes that brought to mind other Dady ventures. If you like the hand-pulled mozzarella at Tre, it’s here at Jardín, firm and fresh with buttered toast. The deviled eggs from Range? Jardín lights them up with harissa chile paste. And the chef ’s a champion of Nutella, expressed beautifully in a torte served with a perfect yin-yang companion of hazelnut mousse.
At brunch, Jardín’s large-plate panache expressed itself in a deftly cooked lamb burger with tangy mayo-feta crema, a panseared salmon that fell away in coral flakes with couscous and apricot puree, and a Middle Eastern specialty called sabich, a kind of pita sandwich layered with eggplant, boiled egg, hummus and zhoug. A market salad married the flavors of shaved fennel, blackberries and goat cheese well, and we added a side of beef kefta kebabs that channeled the best of food-on-a-stick culture.
Jardín’s solid showing is remarkable for a couple of reasons. It opened in September, with pandemic restrictions hanging like clouds over the industry. It came just months after Dady temporarily converted his Alamo BBQ Co. into the HospitALLity House to feed restaurant workers free family meals.
And now, as the crowds flow
HHH½
555 Funston Place at the San Antonio Botanical Garden, 210338-5100, jardinsatx.com
Quick bite: Mediterraneaninspired food from chef Jason Jady in a restored carriage house at the San Antonio Botanical Garden
Hit: Smoked beef short rib, cauliflower mezze, hummus
Miss: Gnocchi, roasted chicken Hours: 11 a.m.-9 p.m. MondayThursday; 11 a.m.-10 p.m. Friday; 10 a.m.-10 p.m. Saturday; 10 a.m.-7 p.m. Sunday. Brunch 10 a.m.-3 p.m. Saturday-Sunday. Dine-in and curbside available. Price range: Appetizers and mezze samplers, $10-$23; small plates, soups and salads, $8-$19; pizzas, $14-$17; entrees, $25-$39; brunch plates, $11-$16; lunch plates, $13-$16; desserts, $3-$10 Alcohol: Cocktails, wine and beer
HHHHH Excellent, an almost perfect experience
HHHH Good, among the best in the city
HHH Average, with a few standouts
HH Poor, with a redeeming factor or two
H Bad, nothing to recommend
Express-News dining critics pay for all meals.
back for a seat at the table of normalcy, a staffing crisis makes managing those crowds even harder. But if there’s a storm raging behind the scenes at Jardín, you’d never know it, enjoying the breeze on the courtyard next to the gardens.