My first memory of Aubergine, Megan and Bjorn Jacobses’ forthcoming St. Paul restaurant, was this trout en croûte, the salt pastry molded into the shape of a big fat golden-baked fish, swimming in a burgundy red wine sauce with luminous spoonfuls of smoked trout roe beside it. I hadn’t tasted it (yet!) but had seen the photo surface on Instagram as the Jacobses’ orbit shifted eastward from Portland, where they’d been running Aubergine as a roving pop-up, back to the Twin Cities, where they made appearances at Bûcheron, Mucci’s, and Hyacinth as they searched for a permanent home. It’s the dish I held in mind as I met them at their new Selby Avenue restaurant, which opens on April 24. Trout en croûte: Technical and tricky, with roots nested deep in 19th-century French cooking, but also lush and fanciful and ultimately, very fun.
You might glance at Aubergine and think: French, traditional, finessed. These things are true, but I’m here to tell you that Aubergine is also a party, the kind you bring your best friends to for red wine; a two-pound côte de boeuf to pass around the table: pâte en croute, a rosy marble of pork and blood sausage smeared on house-baked brioche; a swirl of sorbet to end the night. At Aubergine’s early pop-ups, the party was sometimes overflowing; the restaurant is settling into a steadier warmth. “Our goal was always to create a fun, lively atmosphere in a fun, unpretentious way,” Megan says. “The early pop-ups were pretty crazy; we’d see a lot of people. We’ve dialed it back and refined it a little more. But the goal was always to create a fun atmosphere, more of like a social gathering instead of a dining experience. We wanted it to feel like you were part of something bigger as a diner.”
Bjorn and Megan met years ago working at Zelo in downtown Minneapolis—she was a bartender; he was a cook (Megan later moved into general manager roles). They dated long distance for a while when Bjorn moved to Quebec to work in the kitchen at Montreal’s seminal restaurant Joe Beef; Megan was at Spoon and Stable. Then they moved out to Portland, worked together at La Pigeon and separately at other restaurants, had a son together, launched Aubergine as a pop-up, and eventually returned to the Twin Cities. They’re expecting another child in a few months.
Bjorn was raised in Minnesota but born in Lyon. Sitting in one of Aubergine’s back corner booths, we dug into the misconceptions about French cuisine, which is often perceived as fussy and exacting when, traditionally speaking, French has less use for tweezers and much more for elbow grease. Aubergine’s menu is launching with 15 savory items, including the aforementioned côte de boeuf from Peterson’s Farm, a charcoal-grilled lamb mix dish with lentils, and wild lake trout served with crepes and a consommé of roasted trout bones and Hollandaise. Aubergine’s signature dish is Bjorn’s pâté en croûte, made with an ever-changing combination of meats; encased always in the same buttery pastry. It’s Old-World cooking, in short, and requires the curing of meats, the grinding of sausages, the patient lamination of dough. The appetizer platter, for example, is steak tartare, roasted bone marrow, and oeuf en gelée, a soft-boiled egg suspended in a meat stock that’s fortified with veal foot, which gives it enough collagen to gelatinize and hold its form. (Kind of intense! Love it! An oeuf in amber.)
“French just carries a pretentious label, but if you look at the bistros in Paris—it’s served hot, it’s not finicky, it’s not dolled-up,” Bjorn says. “It’s just real food that’s been around for a long time, and that gets me more excited than a 17-item garnished cold dish that was supposed to be served hot. The food of Lyon was historically more for the peasants. Offal was and still is a big part of Lyonnaise cuisine. There are a lot of cuts of meat—we won’t be making it here—but andouillette, for example. It’s not a ribeye, it’s not a New York strip, it’s not expensive, it’s something that was usually discarded, but it was made into something that is now generational.”
Sous chefs Walker Larson, Sam Lombardo, and Angus Dalbec will be helping Bjorn lead the kitchen. Aubergine doesn’t have a dedicated pastry chef, but it does have a soft-serve machine, which will have both a dairy and sorbet option daily, with the option to swirl. There will typically be a tarte and a puff pastry of some kind on the dessert menu, too. Spirits director Daniel O’Kane and wine director Alex Seide have taken Megan’s vision for the bar program and built it into what might be one of the most thoughtful curations in town: wine labels that focus on sustainability and ethical production; small spirits brands largely owned by women and people of color; a tight cocktail list featuring a gin martini, a Sazerac, and more. Aubergine won’t have a GM, but Megan will be overseeing the restaurant at large as operations director, even as she takes a couple months off for maternity leave.
If you’ve kept a close eye on openings this past year or two, you’ve likely noticed a number of new French restaurants appearing around the Cities; a little renaissance (or just naissance?) of our own. I’m especially excited for a French menu so visceral, literally—a rustic decadence of fat and marrow, bone and broth. 525 Selby Ave., St. Paul
Dining and Cooking