Dallas Chef Junior Borges Comes Full Circle With Meridian, a Celebration of His Native Brazil – Texas Monthly
Junior Borges never intended to become a chef. If you had asked the now forty-year-old Brazilian twenty years ago what profession he would like to pursue, he would probably have said a dietitian. “Eating was a big part of my life,” he admits, but at the time cooking was not considered a rewarding career in his country. “Medicine, law, engineering – that meant success,” he says. He studied nutrition and thought he could instill his love of food into a job advising clients on healthy eating. But it didn’t satisfy him and he eventually dropped out of school. In 1999, for loose reasons, he decided to take a long vacation to visit his sister, who lived in the city of dreams: New York.
He ended up getting a work permit – he’s now a US citizen – but he still felt disoriented. Then one day he rode the subway with his mother, who had moved to New York to live with his sister. As the train dragged along, she pointed to an advertisement for a cooking school and said, “You like to eat and are always in the kitchen. Why don’t you do this? “The proverbial light bulb went on. In the restaurant-obsessed United States, cooking could be a profession.
From that moment on, Borges had a goal. He started learning English and learned everything he could find about cooking and eating. “I went into that big bookstore in Union Square and sat cross-legged on the floor reading cookbooks,” he recalls. He couldn’t afford a cooking school, so he watched chefs on TV shows. “Emeril Live and Molto Mario were my favorites,” he says. The kitchen scientist Alton Brown was Borges’ first contact for technology.
After training his skills, he persuaded an upscale restaurant to let him work for free and then switched to paid jobs. One of his greatest thrills was when the late Anthony Bourdain (then host of the Travel Channel’s No Reservations) visited the Brooklyn Diner, a popular restaurant where Borges worked. “He was outside smoking a cigarette,” says Borges, “and I just went up to him and said, ‘Do you think this is a good place? What do you really think now that there are no more cameras? ‘ He put his hand on my shoulder and said, ‘You are in the right place at the right time.’ ”
The yuca coconut cake.
Photo by Brittany Conerly
Chef Junior Borges.
Photo by Brittany Conerly
His self-confidence was boosted and Borges eventually attended and graduated from the French Culinary Institute. After thirteen years in New York, including the renowned A Voce and Amali restaurants, he was recruited by Austin chef Tyson Cole, founder of the innovative Japanese restaurant Uchi, to open the restaurant’s third location in Dallas. That eventually led to an opportunity to lead the state-of-the-art FT33 in the nearby Design District, followed by other senior positions. But in the back of Borges’ mind the conviction grew: he didn’t want to work for someone else. “I always dreamed of making my own space,” he says. He even made a sketch of his ideal kitchen in a notebook.
Now, two decades after arriving in New York, Borges is the sole director of an elegant North Dallas restaurant that serves the cuisine of his homeland. It turned out that he had never consulted his sketch, but “funny enough,” he later told me, Meridian’s spacious open kitchen is strikingly similar. From his vantage point, he can see both the sleek, modern lines of the 80-seater dining room and, through a glass wall, the shaded outdoor terrace.
The guests in these squares are those who would have liked to visit Brazil in pre-pandemic times but are now happy to take a chair tour including dinner. You are in for a horizon-broadening experience. The menu reflects Brazil’s varied indigenous and immigrant cuisine, but is also ambitious, comparable to the menus of leading restaurants such as Lasai in Rio de Janeiro and Mocotó in São Paulo. “My travels to Brazil in recent years have opened my eyes,” says Borges. “What they do is traditional, but also extremely modern.”
Although very original, the menu at Meridian feels friendly and approachable. I would strongly recommend that you start with something that is a purely Brazilian tradition: the grilled “beach cheese” on a stick. A favorite of Borges’s, the grill-kissed trunks of mild, bouncy Queijo-Coalho are a crazily-popular snack sold by roaming vendors by the sea. Here the clean cheese skewers are placed on a small brazier, drizzled with honey and sprinkled with oregano. You arrive with the heavenly scent of glowing rosemary sprigs.
Other snacks and small plates are more upscale. One that I loved was a novel treatment of beef tartare with finely chopped wagyu spiced up with an umami bomb made from black truffle, shavings of country ham, various dried seafood, and sherry vinegar. The meat is then shaped into individual bites and placed in dark green shiso leaves. “Hmm,” said my friend Ron, dutifully chewing one of the thicker, sawtooth-shaped leaves. “It’s like kissing a cat in French.”
Less prickly, the Kohlrabi Caesar is as beautiful as a flower. The fat, round vegetables have been miraculously planed into graceful, fresh curls that are sprinkled with ripened pecorino cheese and prepared with an aioli tapped with anchovies, which is made from an egg with the sunny side up instead of a raw one (“So much more aromatic “, Says Borges). Another starter, a spongy, nut-brown maitake mushroom, comes with its large, curled surface, covered by a wafer-thin lardo wrapper, and ends with a classic onion sauce.
It’s easy to get stuck with starters at the Meridian, but there are other areas of the menu to explore, including pasta. At first, our foursome was surprised to see it, but as an easy-going, well-trained server explained, a good portion of the Brazilian population (an estimated 15 percent) has Italian roots. Tatted (think round ravioli) come filled with pancetta and ricotta and with chanterelles on the side; Fusilli Verde is a soothing bowl of corkscrew pasta with spinach in a meaty, tomato-rich rag.
In the dining room with a view of the terrace.Photo by Brittany Conerly
If you happen to be on a date or just celebrating life, the menu has some serious Wagyu steaks. The one we went for, picanha – basically a sirloin and a favorite in meat-obsessed Brazil – came sliced, tender, and grilled to an exact medium rarity. If it gets even more festive, there is also a fine duck breast in a complex jus, tinted with ginger and mustard seeds and enriched with guava paste. For my palate, the slightly tart sauce could have been a little more fruity – corn Goiaba, por favor.
At some point, however, you’ll definitely want to immerse yourself in Brazil’s glorious coastal cuisine, and this is where the beautiful blue shrimp and plantain moqueca comes in. Fruit of the dendezeiro palm. For me, the oil’s subtle taste bears a temporary resemblance to that of saffron – very apt for Brazil’s bouillabaisse.
Once you’ve wandered this 3.3 million square mile (3.3 million square mile) country with Borges’ menu, you’ll likely be ready for the homely, humble, high-carb home cooking that is possibly the most ubiquitous dish in the country, and that is farofa. Made from gnarled cassava root (also known as yuca), it falls off a bit like finely textured grains. Here Borges combines it with a hearty, pork calabresa sausage and a sauce made from light green, onion-like pickled ramps. It’s one of the simplest and most soulful dishes on the menu.
But if moqueca and farofa epitomize something distinctive – even patriotic – Brazilian on Meridian’s menu, two desserts could have the most personal meaning to Borges. The first is an extravagant chocolate cake, rich in layers of hazelnut pralines, chocolate mousse, and a sweetened condensed milk ganache. It was inspired by the popular Brazilian candies called Brigadeiros, which are tiny chocolate-sprinkled fudge balls made from cocoa powder. “At every birthday party,” says Borges, “my mother put them out as a treat in small cups.”
The second is the Bolo de Aipim. “The simple cake was always on my grandmother’s table,” says Borges, ready for sugar-addicted grandchildren. Here he made the recipe a star by turning the cake from freshly grated yuca and coconut flakes into sweet, bite-sized cubes that are frozen with lime ganache and embedded in a luscious vanilla sauce.
He is happy with the reaction from customers; His interpretation of his grandmother’s humble cake is one of the restaurant’s signature desserts. But beyond this satisfaction, the approval answered a question with which he had always struggled: What balance should he find between Brazil and the USA? Between nostalgia and ambition? After all, he had lived exactly half of his life in each country. And then one day he had his answer when a Brazilian customer turned to him and said, “It tastes like home, but different.” After that, he stopped worrying. He knew he was right.
This article originally appeared in the September 2021 issue of Texas Monthly, entitled “From Brazil to Big D”. Subscribe today.
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