Restaurant Review

Passionne

This Modern French restaurant occupies a spare, rustic space in Montclair.

When lulls permit chef/owner Michael Carrino to schmooze, he charms his diners with his sincerity. “This is where I belong,” says the Nutley native. “I’m a Jersey boy through and through.”

Carrino, 31, attended Bergen Community College’s hospitality program and the CIA. “My dad and I talked about opening a restaurant together once he retired from the post office in Jersey City,” Carrino says. “He passed suddenly, and I had to make it come true. I’d always looked up to the dining scene in Montclair, and when the space that had been Dolce opened up, I jumped at the opportunity. My mom came up with the name Passionné.”

Four years down the road, Carrino has stirred enough dining passions to make a go of his trim, 54-seat bistro. His food is good and his young servers warm (if forgetful at times). White-clothed tables are well spaced and comfortable. The bistro’s principal decorative touches are the dozen or so gilt-framed landscapes of European villages and vineyards evoked by Ocean Township painter Richard Yeager.

The chef’s CV includes kitchen stints at the North Maple Inn in Basking Ridge and the Millennium Hilton near Wall Street. Carrino aptly describes his cuisine as “lightened-up French technique…with a dash of adventure.” This takes the form of zesty, unexpected touches, often Asian, in French preparations.
Carrino’s menu changes almost monthly as well as “when I come across something great to cook.” Tasting menus of five or seven courses combine dishes on the menu with various small-batch recipes. But nearly every plate in my seven-course tasting menu—misleadingly billed as “experimental”—was disappointingly duplicated in my three companions’ orders from the regular menu.

Carrino, however, is serious about his menu slogan, “Know Farmers/Know Food; No Farmers/No Food.” He is passionné about seasonal provisions produced by Jersey family farms and grows his own tomatoes and arugula in a North Caldwell greenhouse. Beef appears on the menu only when he can buy a whole Jersey-raised steer. “I’d source everything in-state if I could,” he says. Carrino’s zeal for locavore seasonality can trump presentation, as when dish after dish emerged with identical garnishes such as the ho-hum shredded carrots in one of my meals.

The chef is especially adept with seafood. A silky, house-made raviolo encased succulent lobster meat flavored with ginger, cilantro, and sweet soy sauce. Steamed mussels from Prince Edward Island crowned a white-wine broth that was aromatic with coconut and lemongrass, rosy with saffron, and spicy with andouille sausage chunks. But the bright, stand-alone flavor of Vancouver’s Kusshi oysters was defeated by dual toppings of tart Calvados vinaigrette and all-texture, no-taste minced apple.

Snowy tilefish from Barnegat Bay was served with skin lusciously crisped. Cod, another sweet, mild fish, was pan seared, drizzled with beurre rouge sauce, and garnished with what Carrino calls a shallot fondue served with risotto made with a heritage variety called black forbidden rice. My table’s favorite seafood dish was skate wing, gently pan seared and blanketed with a shellfish reduction spiked with Thai curry and Jamaican allspice.

Carrino knows his fowl, too. His must-order Duck, Duck, Goose appetizer presents silky house-made duck-breast prosciutto, a ramekin of velvety duck rillettes (a schmaltzy spread of duck meat and duck fat), and a delectable crème brûlée loaded with foie gras. No less delicious is Carrino’s duck entrée: a soy-maple-glazed breast sparked by seven Asian spices. Carrino’s chicken, from the Griggstown farm, is superb. It consists of a seared breast nearly as rich as confit (“from the authentic texture and taste of the free-range bird,” says the chef), plus the dark-meat thigh, which he slowly smokes over hickory and shreds à la pulled pork. The chicken was pleasantly salty, but a few other dishes were, beyond a doubt, oversalted.
Carrino did not oversalt his delicious Ritz cracker-crusted pork Milanese cutlets, from L.L. Pittenger Farm in Andover. The chef butchers the whole hog himself. The dish’s rich, earthy allure comes from shaved Virginia ham and pastrami-cured calves’ tongue. (Passionné serves the whole animal, in fashionably frugal nose-to-tail style.)

Beef dishes range from lush tartare and carpaccio appetizers to various steaks. These are first slow-cooked sous vide—in hot water, in vacuum-sealed bags—then grilled. The result is intensified flavor with a charry grill finish.

Desserts range from French to fanciful. Summer brings Jersey blueberry clafoutis (a deep-dish baked custard), a wild-rhubarb tart, and other patisserie pleasures. Carrino makes his creditable chocolate soufflé with Belgian Callebaut chocolate and his thick butterscotch pot de crème with Callebaut white chocolate.

His house-made ice creams are produced, he says, “Philly style, without eggs.” Flavors rotate, but I found the roasted almond the most intense. Hardly French at all is the doughnut bread pudding made with Dunkin Donuts, a cheeky innovation that works.

Passionné often but not always ignites one’s passions. One of my meals strung together a succession of high points; the other kind of bumped along. Carrino’s heart is in the right place. He just needs to get that place to the table every time.