Jin Patisserie - Los Angeles
I finally got over to Jin Patisserie in Venice on Saturday afternoon, after a wonderful bbq lunch at The Outdoor Grill (quick review: their turkey chili, tri-tip sandwich, grilled chicken, and baked beans are outstanding and inexpensive–even if you have a view and sound effects of a car wash as you eat).
In contrast, Jin Patisserie is the essence of zen.
Enclosed by a high fence, its cafe garden is an oasis that is similar to that of Elixir in West Hollywood, but Jin is truly Venice-style–that is, bright and quirky. Their pastries follow suit. Elegant yet playful, classical yet unique, French with Asian influences. They are beautiful, and their taste mostly matched their looks. Many are of the mousse tradition — molded mousse with a filling atop a thin cake base on top of a thin golden cardboard serving piece.
I remember my favorite bite of this tart very clearly: I picked up that piece of chocolate on top, scooped up some mousse, and ate it as if it were a chip and a dip.
This is the Inspiration, with sea salt chocolate mousse, caramel filling, and hazelnut feuilletine. I appreciated the taste of rich chocolate and caramel, but I didn’t taste the salt. In cooking, salt is often used to enhance the flavor of food without adding so much that it actually tastes of salt, and with chocolate, salt is supposed to similarly bring out its flavor. So, it could have been a choice to include just enough salt so that it couldn’t really be tasted, but given the popularity of salted caramels nowadays, I think a stronger kick of salt would have been interesting. I liked the most chocolate cake layer on the bottom, too (such bases are often dry and purely functional) but would have been happy to leave the hazelnut feuilletine out. Feuilletine are crispy French wafers, and I think it detracted too much from the silky aspects of the rest of the tart; the contrasting texture just wasn’t necessary and it didn’t add much taste.
This is the Poire, with white and chocolate mousses filled with poached pear flambee. Light and delicious, with a liqueur-y aftertaste, this was fantastic. It also had a thin layer of gelatin on top that had a very potent Poire William flavor right up front, which became my most coveted part. I just wasn’t too crazy about the raspberry and strawberry on top. They look interesting, but they seemed like arbitrary additions to the rest of the tart.
The truffles were earl grey feuilletine on the left and caramel clove on the right. I know this now, but at the time, we got confused about which was which. I took a bite of the red-topped one, and thought it had a fantastic caramel and clove flavor; sure, their was chocolate in it, but it had a caramel-like sort of softness to it. The flavor was so clove-like and delicious. And again, feuilletine popped up (in truth, I just love saying feuilletine), but this time the feuilletine worked in the truffle. The blue top one was kind of bland in comparison, just like fudgy caramel. At some point, I discovered my mix up, and can say with a straight, if blushing, face that the earl grey feuilletine truffle (red) was a revelation while the caramel clove truffle (blue) was just average.
When I ordered the vanilla macaron, some anonymous voice inside of me piped up about dreading eating a boring tan pastry. So, I was jazzed when this splash of fuschia showed up. I took a bite, and the results were mixed. Although the filling had a stunning vanilla flavor, the cookie domes collapsed and fell away, leaving only the chewy sandwiched parts. Yes, chewy. Probably stale. Not like the lovely, light as air macarons that I love, and that I most recently had at Miette Patisserie. So, I scraped the filling onto my fork to savor, and went on with my life.
Jin also has an extensive tea selection. Chad has a preternatural ability to order what seems like the best that a restaurant or cafe has to offer, and he showed off his prowess with his request for the Green Vanilla Tea. It is made from two kinds of vanilla — bourbon and “tiny pieces of island vanilla pod.” Once again, the vanilla was stunning, and the flavor combination with green tea was invigorating. I had the Ryokucha Midori, because it was the tea drunk by samurai– low in theine and high in vitamins C and E, it is supposed to fortify intellectual and physical powers.
There were a lot of pastries and chocolates that I still want to try at Jin (such as the green tea mousse pastry and gingery Louvre shaped as a pyramid), so I can see myself going back and exploring more at some point.
