Junebaby Is One of America’s Best New Restaurants

Eater’s roving restaurant critic, Bill Addison, just released his 2017 list of the best new restaurants in America, and chef Edouardo Jordan’s Junebaby made the cut — no major surprise, given that in his recent full review, Addison billed Junebaby as “America’s next great Southern restaurant.”

Bill Addison/Eater

While Jordan’s first effort, Salare, offers a menu that showcases his diverse culinary influences (and won it a spot on Addison’s Best New Restaurants list last year, alongside Bateau), Junebaby is the place where he connects to his roots in Florida and Georgia, “mapping out a survey of the region,” Addison says. “Easy comforts like biscuits and pimento cheese segue to salads made with ‘swamp cabbage’ (Sunshine State lingo for hearts of palm) and pickled strawberries, oxtails in consomme made from the meat’s poaching liquid, and chitterlings jeweled with carrots and rice.”

Bill Addison/Eater

The chef went so far as to prepare a hefty encyclopedia of Southern terms to help Seattle diners better prepare for the culinary and history lessons they’ll consume at Junebaby, in an experience that touches on issues of race, class, and family. “This is personal, scholarly cuisine, and it distinguishes Jordan as one of the country’s most accomplished and farseeing chefs devoted to Southern food,” Addison says.

It’s quite a feat that Jordan has established Ravenna as one of the country’s dining destinations with his two establishments. Check out the full list of Addison’s Best New Restaurants 2017 here.