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JaBä Will Be an Upscale Stage for Taiwanese Street Food
Photo: Courtesy of JaBa
Even if most Americans recognize that tomatoes are, botanically speaking, fruit, they don’t treat them as such. This strikes chef Tony Inn as strange. “Why are tomatoes in salad — like, what is that?” he asks. In Taiwan, where Inn was born and lived until the age of 9, the sweet summer produce is found in ice-cream sundaes, tanghulu sticks, even cakes. Which is why, when Inn opens his first restaurant later this month, he plans to put tomatoes in their rightful place: on the dessert menu. At JaBä, he’ll serve his tomato granita with plum powder and soy sauce right alongside shaved ice that gets topped with mascarpone whipped cream and a crème brûlée made with sweet potato.
For decades, Taiwanese Americans in New York have flocked to their favorite joints in Flushing — like Main Street Imperial Taiwanese Gourmet — for a taste of home. And in the past few years, a youthful generation of restaurant owners have attracted diners of all backgrounds with Taiwanese staples like lo ba beng and fan tuan at hot spots such as 886, Win Son, Ho Foods and Wenwen. JaBä will bring another option: the arrival of Taiwanese cooking to the city’s fine-dining scene from a chef who, after more than 25 years behind the scenes, is at last stepping out on his own.
JaBä may be Inn’s first restaurant, but it’s hardly the first entry on a résumé that includes time spent working under Toshio Suzuki, one of the forefathers of the city’s sushi scene; at Morimoto; and at Masa. He was the executive chef most recently at Kin Jin, an izakaya on the Lower East Side, and just before that at Taru, a posh Japanese French spot in midtown that featured a $375 omakase counter and was an early pioneer of the dry-aged seafood that’s recently shown up more or less everywhere.
“I never thought I’d do a Taiwanese restaurant here, to be honest,” he says. “I never thought I could have this stage here. Maybe in L.A.? I don’t know. But in New York? If I can do it here, it’s time.” He moved to Queens as a child and started working in restaurants at 16, after getting kicked out of school. He got his first job as a busboy at Little Fu’s, a Chinese Japanese restaurant in Lynbrook, Long Island. One day, a cook called in sick and he was thrown on the line. He knows the story is a cliché, but he loved it nevertheless — the physicality of it, and of finally finding something that he was pretty good at. “It was probably the first time I got complimented for doing a good job,” Inn recalls. He went on to work at a 250-seat P.F. Chang’s in White Plains, went to culinary school, staged at Nobu, and never stopped. “I was never really a sit-in-the-classroom type of kid,” he says.
He didn’t understand much of Taiwanese cooking until he was in his 30s, well into his cooking career, and took a trip back to the island. Unlike Japanese, Chinese, or French cuisine, there is little in the way of formal dining traditions in Taiwan; the really good food is found on the street. Much of it is cooked in pork fat, but Inn hadn’t realized that each cook first infuses their lard with aromatics like onion, and spices like star anise, in a special blend that they guard like trade secrets.
“That was truly a revelation,” says Inn. “The way that it coats the back of your throat. You can’t get that from clarified butter.”
At JaBä, Inn will make ample use of his own infused lard, but ahead of the opening, he was unsure of whether it would advertise as such. Will New Yorkers think it sounds weird? he asks himself. (He has a few other decisions to make as well. For example, he’s still working on his version of san bei ji, or Three Cup Chicken, a Taiwanese classic.) A majority of the offerings at JaBä are variations on dishes, and techniques, that Inn has perfected over his career and are only now proudly showcasing their Taiwanese inspiration — like the sweet-potato dessert, a crème brûlée he first created at Kin Jin. The charred root vegetable is scooped and filled with shiro miso custard, a technique that reflects both Inn’s French-trained sensibility and his reverence for Taiwan, where smoky sweet potatoes roasted whole in a tandoor oven are a common snack.
Street snacks are a jumping-off point for other items on the menu, like stinky tofu (Inn plans to buy the product locally instead of stink up his dining room with home-fermented batches) and bawan (a.k.a. “savory mochi meat ball”) as well as larger plates like a dry-aged beef rib that’s rubbed with shacha sauce and served with steamed buns, pickled cabbage, and crushed peanuts to assemble at the table. That rib, designed to share, will run $75, but Inn is trying hard not to alienate price-conscious diners, offering some items (like bawan) for as little as $10.
When I visited the unfinished space in early April, Inn was peeling the plastic film from what would be the kitchen’s ice-shaving station. The dusty, unfinished dining room was milling with construction workers (a high-school buddy of Inn’s is leading the build-out), and the kitchen was filled with new stainless-steel appliances. There are two wooden Chinese lion figurines nestled into the wall, which were given to him by his mom for good luck. When I asked him what his family thought of his opening a Taiwanese restaurant, he was quick to tell me that his critical “tiger mother” thought he was wildly underqualified. “What do you know about Taiwanese food?” she’d said, balking at the prospect.
So he’s trying to approach everything with a Taiwanese sensibility, reframing familiar ingredients, including those tomatoes. “I’ve always had to defend myself, my nationality,” he says of his career so far. With JaBä, Inn wants to make sure his intentions are clear from the get-go — “Yes, tomato is a fruit” and such — but if JaBä manages to lure in the kinds of diners who might not otherwise make the trip to Flushing for bawan or oyster pancakes, he might not need to explain himself or his cooking much longer.
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