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An award-winning dish featured as a special on Frontera Grill’s menu stands out in its connection to the legendary Julia Child. The Chicago restaurant’s sous chef created a cassoulet inspired by the French food maven whom Javauneeka Jacobs considers one of her mentors.
“I love Julia Child. She was a tall woman with a funny voice. She didn’t let that stop her. Sometimes, when you watch her, she might mess up, but she just keeps going,” says the Chopped grand champion.
The Cassoulet Mexicano served through early March is an enhanced version of a dish Jacobs made on her way to winning “Chopped: Julia Child’s Kitchen.”
She uses mantequilla beans, roasted suckling pig, morita chili peppers and other ingredients to make Frontera’s cassoulet. It’s become one of the restaurant’s top sellers.
“It took us a week and a half to perfect the dish. We were quite surprised because it is a big dish. It has all those meats and components, and people are not sharing it. That’s really cool to see,” Jacobs adds.
Javauneeka Jacobs Becomes a Chopped Grand Champion
Long before she made her first cassoulet, Frontera Grill’s sous chef became deeply interested in food, cooking and Julia Child. She watched “The French Chef,” “In Julia’s Kitchen” and other television shows starring the famous chef.
As a young teen, Jacobs also tuned into the Food Network and the Cooking Channel while dreaming of cooking on TV someday. “Chopped was one of the shows I always watched. I thought it was super cool how these chefs could pull out a dish without knowing what the ingredients would be,” she recalls.
A Food & Wine festival trip with Frontera Grill owner, celebrity chef and award-winning cookbook author Rick Bayless kept Jacobs from accepting the first offer to join a Chopped competition.
So, instead of a Mexican food show, she competed in the Julia Child-themed tournament. During the finale, the Chicago resident said, “This is my time to shine. I’m more confident than ever before, and I’m ready to win it all.”
The Chopped competition tested the skills she acquired working under the tutelage of Bayless, a seven-time James Beard award winner, and other Frontera Grill staff. The tournament tasked 16 chefs with creating Julia Child-inspired dishes from a mystery basket of ingredients.
In hindsight, 27-year-old Jacobs admits she had doubts about competing against older chefs with more experience in French cooking. “All the chefs there were chef-owners and executive chefs. So, I was very intimidated. They had at least 20 years of experience on me.”
In the finale’s 20-minute appetizer round, Jacobs made a dish inspired by Child’s Escargot a La Bourguignon, using black garlic molasses, scotch bonnet peppers, pâté and wild burgundy snails from the mystery basket.
The three judges, all acclaimed chefs, were impressed. Scott Conan called her dish’s deep garlic and butter flavors delicious. He said, “When I go to a French bistro and order escargot, this is the expectation.”
Jacobs wowed the judges again in the 30-minute entrée round with a Child-inspired Beef Wellington made with venison. They praised the sous chef’s sauce and her use of the crescent roll dough.
Still, she thought her overcooked venison might get her sent home. “Everything else I executed very well because I do make all the sauces here at Frontera. I know how to make a very good sauce. That’s what won me that round. It was very close,” she admits.
The dessert round sealed the victory for Jacobs, who defeated chef Dan Fox, a Wisconsin restaurant owner and James Beard nominee. She baked a clafoutis, a French custard-like cake made with fruit.
Jacobs had to use the mystery basket’s dragon fruit, hazelnut spread, chocolate fondue and ice cream spheres. It was a take on Child’s Bombe aux Trois Chocolats, a layered dessert.
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“Honestly, I just stuck to what I knew and tried to execute everything to the best of my ability, and that’s what won. His ice cream was beautiful, but he made a cookie, and his ratios were off.”
About 50 colleagues attended a watch party hosted for Jacobs at Frontera Grill when the finale of “Chopped: Julia Child’s Kitchen” aired last December. “It was like super high-level energy in the room. They were cheering when I was on the screen and saying how creative I was when I was making my dishes.”
Chef Bayless is a Top Chef Masters winner and a Julia Child Foundation Award recipient. The restaurateur cheered for Jacobs, along with the rest of the sous chef’s supporters. “He was so excited and just so proud. He said I had so much poise and represented the restaurant well.”
So what does being a Chopped grand champion feel like to Jacobs? “It’s like I’m living my ultimate dream. And the fact that I won and one of my mentors inspired me, there’s no way to describe that. It makes me feel really good and very proud.”
Jacobs won a $25,000 Julia Child’s themed trip to Paris and Provence. She and her husband plan to make their first visit to France sometime next year.
“We’ll probably go to Le Cordon Bleu and all the restaurants that inspired Child. It’s all about Julia and everything she did in Paris. I’m excited about that.”
Culinary Journey From Le Cordon Bleu
Watching the beloved chef cook and reading Child’s books inspired Jacobs to attend Le Cordon Bleu in Chicago right out of high school in 2015.
“I chose to go to culinary school to learn how to cook because I love food and plants and stuff. It really worked out. I get my science experience, but I get to eat it too. I fell in love,” says Jacobs.
Chef Bayless gave the young chef-in-training her first job in a professional kitchen. She has worked in the four different Bayless restaurants located under one roof in Chicago’s River North neighborhood.
“I was Rick’s culinary assistant for a while during the pandemic. I had never done anything like that before, and he trained me himself,” explains Jacobs. “Rick taught me everything from the inside out and was never upset. I didn’t have a car then, and he would give me a ride. I thought that was very kind and very nice.”
One of the Le Cordon Bleu graduate’s achievements at Frontera Grill is the “Celebrating Afro-Mestizo Cuisine” menu she and two other cooks created last year. It was the first time the restaurant, which opened in 1987, featured food inspired by the estimated 200,000 West Africans enslaved and brought to Mexico’s coastal ports by the Spanish colonizers.
“We did a lot of digging and came up with some great things. We also had someone on our staff that was part of the Afro community,” says Jacobs. “We had him taste the things we were creating, and we didn’t sign off on them until he said, ‘This is what it’s supposed to taste like.”’
Jonathan Cisneros relied on memories of his grandmother’s Afro-Mexican cooking to help Jacobs and Richard James develop dishes representing the culinary contributions of Africans and their often mixed-race descendants.
The Afro-Mexican population, primarily residing in Veracruz and Oaxaca, was not considered a minority group or counted until the country’s preliminary census in 2015.
The grilled mahi mahi, black bean-stuffed plantain fritters and other Afro-Mestizo dishes offered at Frontera’s Grill blend African, Spanish and indigenous influences. The menu available again this year during Black History Month and early March represents a “vibrant and soulful” cooking seldom seen outside of Mexico, according to the restaurant’s description.
The chefs incorporate pungent garlic, epazote leaf and other big flavors associated with Afro-Mexican cooking. “They had yucca. Now you have yucca in Mexico. No one stopped to think that comes from Africa, like the peanuts and some red chilies,” says Jacobs.
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Exploring Culinary Curiosity
Chef Jacobs seldom makes Mexican food at home. Instead, she and her husband, Zach Steen, love to explore the cuisines of other cultures and countries. They met at Frontera Grill, where he is currently the culinary director.
“He’s so talented and has been cooking much longer than I have. It’s a wonderful work relationship,” says the Chopped grand champion. “My husband and I do this thing called summer pasta. We go outside and pick the eggplants, onions, herbs and tomatoes, roast them lightly in a pan and add them to the handmade pasta.”
Jacobs loves making pasta from scratch, especially ravioli with homemade ricotta. She also tries out Greek, Asian and Korean recipes. “I’m a super geek about food in general. I’ll go down a rabbit hole for six months, learning specific things. After you put together so much information, all the cuisines are very similar, depending on the ingredients they had access to,” she remarks.
The sous chef’s favorite Julia Child specialties, like the cassoulet and Beef Bourguignon, are sometimes on the dinner table. No matter what the cuisine, Jacobs enjoys the art of cooking. “I love how it is so intricate and so intimate. I love how you can take something and transform it into something that makes someone feel good. I love every aspect of it.”
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The Chopped grand champion’s aspirations for the future do not include opening her own restaurant. She would like to host a TV cooking show and develop a food product sold in supermarkets. At the moment, Jacobs appreciates the knowledge and experience she gains working with Chef Bayless, a mentor who values a nurturing atmosphere not always found at other restaurants.
“The most important thing I’ve learned is patience. Here, we have a culture of bringing people up, training them and mentoring them every single to create beautiful food. That takes a lot of patience.”
Catch up with chef Javauneeka Jacobs on Instagram @javauneeka_j. Find out more about Chef Bayless and his Chicago restaurants on social media @fronteragrill.
