JoJo

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Makeovers are always a delicate business, but the questions surrounding the elaborate reboot of Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s original flagship restaurant, JoJo, are bound to be more delicate than most. How do you make a poky duplex townhouse space, once the epitome of dining chic when it opened almost three decades ago, seem chic again? How do you update an iconic nouvelle-cuisine menu while also appealing to a newer generation of vegetable-forward, fusion-loving Jean-Georges devotees? How, in short, do you make a restaurant feel relevant again while preserving that special alchemy that made it great in the first place? Judging from the clean, whitewashed lines in the new space and the familiar ABC Kitchen–style fonts on the menu, the answer seems to be to take different bits of alchemy from popular Jean-Georges ventures further downtown, jumble them together in the snug little space, and hope for the best. In a nod to JoJo’s loyal clientele, the updated bistro-style menu features a selection of “daily classic” blue-plate specials culled, like golden oldies, from the restaurant’s impressive backlist of nouvelle-cuisine hits. Unlike back in 1991, when JoJo first opened, the great chef isn’t out to shock the world. Like most makeovers, these recipe tweaks are designed to ease the patient into a wider, more modern age with a minimum of fuss and disruption, and for the most part, they succeed. The roasted salmon I tasted had the pale, slightly bland look of something a private chef would prepare but was bursting with flavor, and so was the roasted duck breast, which is sweetened with a precious, New Age combination of hibiscus, honey, and butternut squash instead of the classic sauce l’orange. Will the restless digital hordes who set the dining agenda in town these days be putting the new JoJo on their hot lists? Possibly not, although in a scattered, uncertain world where local dining is increasingly the coin of the realm, I’d be happy to have this new Jean-Georges outlet in my neighborhood. — Adam Platt

Lunch, $32; dinner, $38

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