It is with great sadness that I can no longer recommend Bistro Jeanty. We have been going for years and it was the perfect spot to have a light lunch before our French Laundry extravaganza. Usually, Bistro Jeanty has a line out the door by 12:30 – it was virtually empty at 12:30. We were the first ones in the restaurant at 11:30 and were completely ignored for 15 minutes. It seemed like everyone was moving in slow motion. We didn’t get bread until course 2 and that was achieved by a lot of hand waving and asking can we have bread?
The Blackboard menu
White wine
Deep-fried smelts with spicy aioli – For some reason the coating kept falling off .
Smelts from an earlier visit
Grilled Sardine with “pickeled” (sic) onion, fennel and parsley salad – This was good, but the sardine hadn’t been completely deboned and my husband had a bone stick in his teeth.
A beautiful sardine from Pilar. Unfortunately, Pilar is no longer in existence.
Homemade rabbit pate with a Celery Root Apple salad and Mustard Dressing
This was initially served without cornichons. Our server insisted that it was never served with cornichons. We asked for some cornichons; we plated the cornichons ourselves. The pate disintegrated into chunks when you ate it – it just wouldn’t hold together. The celery salad was just a shadow of what it once was – sloppy.
The rabbit pate from Jeanty from a visit last year.
Rabbit pate from another visit.
What a shame.
Hi Liz… hope your bay are trip this time finds you well. Last I visited Jeanty was 3-4 years ago and it was on the decline. The fabolous tomato soup was salty and the quiche forgettable. It’s a shame as here in NorCal we can always use a straight-fwd bistrot cooking. If you know a place that serves up these types, pls do let me know.
Will, it breaks my heart to see Jeanty decline, but the photos tell the story.