JOURNEYMAN: LOVE AND BUTTER

It may be the dream of every home cook who’s thrown a few successful dinner parties to one day open their own boutique, where they can share their talent and creative cuisine with the world. Yet, for almost all, the obstacles to fulfilling that dream are pretty much insurmountable. That didn’t faze the team of underdogs behind the new gastro-phenomenon Journeyman in Somerville’s Union Square.
Only a couple of years ago, Diana Kudajarova and her husband, Tse Wei Lim, along with longtime friend Meg Grady-Troia, were grad students in subjects as diverse as Soviet political history and comic books. The three had always cooked for stress relief, and when they launched a supper club for friends who would drop by to sample their creations, word spread quickly—soon, the crew had a waiting list to attend their gatherings. From there, serendipity seemed to take over, and they were off.
“There’s really no other way to describe it,” says Grady-Troia, the acting general manager. “At one point, we just said, ‘We really want to … so we’re going to.’ From there, we got really lucky and things just sort of started coming together. The perfect space [a former industrial kitchen space] just fell into our laps. We needed investors, and they fell into our laps. We needed contractors and construction people, and there they were. Things just kept going together to the point where we felt we were a part of something larger than ourselves, and we couldn’t not open it.”
The restaurant offers no à la carte selections, instead opting for three-, five- and seven-course tasting menus that change weekly, if not daily. This, says Grady-Troia, allows the chefs, Kudajarova and Lim, to “curate” the experience from start to finish using contrasting flavors, textures and temperatures, telling a story as the meal progresses.
The weekly menu is almost entirely “ingredient first,” meaning that items are procured based on freshness and seasonality at the beginning in the week with no plan as to how they’ll be employed. A selection of small-batch, mostly biodynamic wines and local microbrews rounds out the menu.
In addition, while the chefs’ autodidactic training is grounded in classical French cuisine, Kudajarova and Lim are not afraid to experiment to achieve the results they want.
“We don’t really focus on any particular cuisine, but we feel that there is kind of an Asian sensibility that creeps into the menu in terms of balance and philosophy, even though we tend not to serve much traditionally Asian food, and we’re certainly not fusion,” says Kudajarova. “In fact, many of the dishes are really just classic flavor combinations that we kind of try to make more interesting. A little while ago, we did an eggs and homefries that consisted of a bowl with a little bit of classic homefries at the bottom, topped with a scrambled egg foam and pearls of hot sauce that we set with agar-agar [a tasteless seaweed that acts as a setting agent].
“However, even though we do try to do interesting things,” says the chef, “we always put a much higher value on taste than being shocking or ostentatious.”

JOURNEYMAN
9 SANBORN COURT
UNION SQ.
SOMERVILLE
617.718.2333
HOURS: WED-SUN 5:30PM-10PM
JOURNEYMANRESTAURANT.COM