Jumon,
Unit 6 McAuley House,
Fountain Street,
Belfast, BT1 5ED.
028 9023 1394
A COUPLE of weeks ago, plant-based food manufacturer Beyond Meat announced it had taken a bit of a battering, and not in the good way to go with a pile of chips and a load of vinegar.
Instead, it was their profits, with the poster child for vegan burgers and sausages seeing quarterly sales plunge by a third.
Demand has dropped for a number of reasons, but one of those is the price. In a cost-of-living crisis, consumers are less likely to pay a premium for a fake beef burger that ‘bleeds’ beetroot juice when a very good example of real thing is much cheaper, while more traditional – and inexpensive – meat alternatives like lentils, beans and the like have also grown in popularity.
If you’re not eschewing animal products on moral or religious grounds, then having an actual burger instead of a pretend one mightn’t be all that bad. If it’s a good burger, then all the better.
Similarly, if you want, for whatever reason, to eat something vegetarian or vegan, then why have ‘plant-based’ when you can have actual plants?
There are a lot of actual plants on the plates in Jumon in Belfast city centre.
The closest to processed jiggery pokery is the tofu, which is hardly hipster new-fangledness given it’s been on the go for a couple of thousand years.
It’s a menu taking its inspiration from across Asia, with the decor going the same way with murals and prints covering just about every surface, giving off the feel of a tucked-away den of delights somewhere in Shanghai or Hanoi.
These delights are exclusively vegetarian and almost entirely vegan.
Putting “trust us it’s good” in brackets after a dish on the menu could go one of two ways, but it does the job of getting me to order it. So, will the turnip and doenjang dip actually be good or is the contents of those brackets protesting too much?
The mix of puréed root and fermented soy bean paste is so earthy, funky and bittersweet, it's a surprise Stevie Wonder doesn’t have a writing credit on it.
The glorious mix is set off with properly hot chilli oil, some greens, sesame seeds and the umami whack of furikake seasoning. A mound of crunchy poppadoms is there to scrape the plate with. It’s chips and a dip. But what a dip.
More chips, this time of the potato variety, come as their ‘JL chips’ (sorry, forgot to ask), what passes for 'loaded fries' at Jumon.
Thin, skin-on chips peek out of a bowl under fragrant mayonnaise, bursts of sweet and hot Thai salad, smoked cheese and a duvet of crispy shallots.
Things are going well, and they’re also increasing in size, as the £9 ‘Smalls’ give way to the £16 ‘Bigs’ and, as with the turnip dip, the menu isn’t lying. The Bigs are big.
On one side of the table is a paddling pool of loveliness masquerading as peanut curry, while on the other a chopping board, barely visible under three hefty tacos, stops the whole thing from tipping over.
The curry is as restorative as a bowl of vegetables can get with bursts of chilli and herbs, char-edged greens, chunks of pickled pineapple and little lentils floating around the sweet, warming peanut sauce and getting stuck among the noodles.
Jumon’s fusion stretches a little further with the Mandu tacos. The three tortillas need that board beneath them as they groan under the weight of stuff coming at you from all directions.
There’s Chinese-spiced aubergine, more greens, mushroom, avocado, salsa verde, truffle, rice, cheese but a lot is never too much.
There’s also a lot going on at dessert time with their ‘Full Moon’ featuring shards of coconut-dusted chocolate that are hefty and end up cloying but thankfully get washed delightfully away with the freshness of the lychee purée, yogurt sorbet and lime. The hot little boulders of sticky rice doughnuts do their bit too.
Better is the ‘Half-Moon’ with intense miso brownies and a bang-on raspberry sorbet. You could compliment it by saying you could never tell it’s vegan but Jumon isn’t in the business of pretending it’s food is something it isn’t.
Trust me it’s good.
THE BILL
- JL chip £9
- Turnip and doenjang dip £9
- Mandu tacos £16
- Hungley peanut curry £16
- Dark moon dessert £7.50
- Full moon dessert £7.50
- Jumon With Love cocktail £11
- Peach Better Have My Money cocktail x2 £11
- Lebowski White Russian £11
