The second and final turn of the evening is over, and Raphael Lunetta plops down into a chair in the dining room of his restaurant, JiRaffe. A deep sigh and relieved wide smile hint that he’s glad this evening is over.
Not that the shift was remarkably busy; it was just stressful. The bulk of the rush bore down on JiRaffe all at once, forcing 130 covers through the restaurant in under three hours, and Lunetta’s veteran kitchen staff had an uncharacteristically off night.
“Three steaks came back tonight,” Lunetta says, still surprised one of his best cooks so frequently missed the mark. “That never happens to him…and they probably shouldn’t have come back. They were ordered medium-rare, and they were medium-rarish at worst.”
That the cook was angry at himself about the mistakes reminded Lunetta his job was to encourage, not chastise.
“I’m not going to make him feel [bad] because a couple of steaks came back,” he says, pausing to take a lengthy draw from a cold beer.
By his own admission, he’s tough on his staff and never lets them forget his lofty standards. But he vowed long ago not to be a browbeating motivator; he’s learned that compassion and encouragement work better.
Leaning forward, he adds: “So he might have been off tonight, and so I’m going to get in his face? No. What I know is he won’t be off when he comes back to work Tuesday. He’s good.”
Such kindness likely explains JiRaffe’s enviable staff tenure. Two prep cooks have worked with Lunetta for 16 years, and the aforementioned grill cook has been there for nine. Chris Minutoli, Lunetta’s chef de cuisine, has logged four years at Lunetta’s side and known him nearly 20 since their days at Joachim Splichal’s critically acclaimed Patina, in Hollywood, Calif. It’s probably not a stretch to think such long-term loyalty among the staff engenders similar customer devotion to JiRaffe.
“Once your place gets past being ‘the place of the moment’ and gets a track record, people become very loyal to you,” says Merrill Shindler, editor for the Zagat Guide’s Los Angeles edition. “It’s such a pleasure to go to JiRaffe when he’s there because you see a guy who clearly loves what he’s doing. That comes through in the staff, too.”
Since its opening 12 years ago, JiRaffe—the name is a play on the co-founders’ names, Josiah Citrin and Raphael Lunetta—has drawn crowds seeking its elegantly fused French and California cuisines. A Santa Monica, Calif., native, Lunetta spent many summers at the home of a French aunt who introduced him to simple, pure food.
“Lunches would be hearty tomatoes, thyme, good olive oil, maybe some shaved Spanish manchego,” he says. “She would grill a lot of her food, like fresh mackerel, over discarded grapevines. It was so good.”
Lunetta met Citrin in Santa Monica while surfing, and the two became fast friends. Though originally drawn by their love of the ocean, food became the core of their comradeship. As a successful caterer, Citrin’s mother brought home leftovers from her jobs, which the boys devoured. On weekends the boys stayed with Lunetta’s father, who cooked large meals for them. Though not even pre-teens, the two were foodies before their time.
“We eventually started selling our second-hand records to get money to go out and eat Thai food, and we were only in seventh grade,” Lunetta says, laughing. “We drank iced coffee and ate steak and eggs for breakfast; no kids our age were doing that.”
When they graduated from high school, Citrin moved to his father’s homeland of France to pursue a culinary career, while Lunetta set out to become a professional surfer. The two stayed in touch, and soon Citrin was urging Lunetta to come to France. The promise of European travel and ample surfing eventually drew Lunetta to join Citrin when they were 19.
“We’d surf and travel for the summers, and then in the fall, we’d go work in restaurants in Paris,” Lunetta says.
For three years the pair followed their summers-off, winters-on pattern until Lunetta says they returned to Santa Monica virtually penniless to “get serious about our careers.”
Clearly, both had learned much more than how to catch waves. After taking a job at Broadway Deli in 1990, Lunetta quickly was made executive sous chef, overseeing the entire food operation and making $33,000 a year. Two years later, a pantry position opened up at Patina—paying a whopping $8 an hour. The pay cut would hurt, but Lunetta knew he had to take the job if he was going to continue learning.
Patina “was a scary place to work,” he recalls, because “Joachim was a fanatic.”
“It was probably the hardest kitchen in the city to work in,” he says, “but a lot of great chefs came out of Patina.”
Lunetta says the lessons he learned from Splichal were invaluable to JiRaffe’s eventual success, but the experience also taught him exactly how he wouldn’t treat future employees.
“Joachim would break cooks, busboys and servers,” he says. “It was a very stressful place to work.”
Citrin and Lunetta reunited for stints as co-executive chefs at two restaurants before opening JiRaffe in 1996. Within the restaurant’s first year major press regarded them as rising stars in the culinary community, and customers came in droves. But in 1999, Citrin and Lunetta decided they needed a break from each other, and Citrin left to open Melisse Restaurant, a highly regarded fine-dining French spot. Five years later, the pair rejoined their efforts to open Lemon Moon, a breakfast-centered concept.
Citrin praises Lunetta for building upon what they started in JiRaffe.
“To keep your restaurant going like he has and keep creating food and making things new like he does is amazing,” Citrin says. “After so many years it can become a grind, and you have to keep pushing. That’s not easy.”
Minutoli, JiRaffe’s chef de cuisine, calls his boss “driven and creative,” and says that “drive and ambition motivates the rest of us to work hard, too.”
“He comes at this with a passion to make everything as good as it could possibly be every time,” Minutoli adds.
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Lunetta regularly visits Santa Monica’s expansive farmers market to meet local purveyors who supply “the pure and simple foods we want.” Great ingredients, he believes, often are best when allowed to speak for themselves, especially seafood. A trio of seared diver scallops arrives plated atop its sauce, not below it; the positioning allows guests first to appreciate their inherent richness before blending them with other flavors.
Still, Lunetta is just as comfortable with multilayered combinations, such as JiRaffe’s legendary roasted beet salad. On the plate is a squat tower of perfectly diced beets and dried Bing cherries crowned with tangy goat cheese and caramelized walnuts. A ginger-laced vinaigrette amplifies the cherries’ tartness and brightens the earthiness of the beets.
Citrin says creating such captivating dishes can be both fun and frustrating for a kitchen staff as talented as JiRaffe’s. When chefs spread their wings to try something new, customers often claim to want the favorites to which they’ve grown accustomed.
MENU SAMPLER Roasted beet salad with caramelized walnuts, dried Bing cherries, goat cheese cream and Banyuls-ginger vinaigrette $14.50Sautéed tiger shrimp with baby arugula, tomatoes, white beans, shaved baby fennel and a lemon balsamic olive oil vinaigrette $16.50 Caramelized pork chop with wild rice, smoked bacon, apple spiced chutney and cider sauce $29.50Pan-roasted 16-oz. bone-in rib-eye steak, twice-baked Old Amsterdam Yukon potato, sautéed greens, confit herb tomato, port, shallots and green-peppercorn veal reduction $42 Crispy Scottish salmon with parsnip purée, white-wine-braised fennel and an aged balsamic nage $31 Meyer lemon soufflé with sautéed blackberries and blackberry sorbet $9Warm chocolate truffle cake with vanilla ice cream and chocolate sauce $9
“It’s difficult to change things when you have a signature restaurant like JiRaffe,” he says. “They tell you they want new, but they want the old,” nearly making you a victim of your own success, he adds.
JiRaffe’s reliability as a restaurant rests on the fulcrum of its consistency, says Anthony Dias Blue, restaurant critic for CBS Radio affiliate KFWB in Los Angeles. In a town where eateries compete fiercely to become the dining scene’s hot spot, JiRaffe has made its mark living up to Lunetta’s own vision of sublime reliability.
“By doing something consistent and solid like Raphael does, maybe it’s not going to pull the Hollywood set—though I think it does—it’s going to do better in the long run than trying to grab the brass ring like so many others,” Blue says. “It’s become a given that Raphael is right on the money, that his concept is always fresh but never overwrought. It makes sense from a textural and flavor standpoint, and that’s hard to do over such a long time.”
Blue says JiRaffe’s extended run also has made it one of the most hospitable restaurants in town. Its understated decor keeps it California relaxed, though the service and food are constant reminders that guests are in for an exceptional experience.
“It just feels good, feels natural; it’s like home in a way,” says Blue, who visits JiRaffe a half dozen times a year. “There’s no attitude, and everyone seems to be intent on making your meal experience extra-good. I think Raphael goes out of his way to get really good people who know how to do that, and that produces a very friendly environment—not to mention a consistently popular restaurant.”
