Since May of 2019 The Blue Bears restaurant has been serving European food and pastries in Princeton, at the shopping plaza on Harrison Street. The restaurant provides jobs for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Blue Bears serves as a teaching environment and a place to build self sufficiency and confidence.
But it all still comes down to the food.
Upon your first visit to the Blue Bears kitchen you will be delighted in the fact that your experience will remain simple. The only thing complex about this restaurant lies not in the culinary talents of their artistry, but the hearts of every staff member there.
Chef Eric Wimmer and Chef Marco, two culinary greats that have made their way around Princeton and yet stand to serve their community at this restaurant. Blue Bears: Special Meals serves simple food with high class techniques, resulting in a dining experience that can barely be described through words.
Start with the soup and salad. Like most restaurants, these dishes are meant to prepare the diner for the rest of the course, but Blue Bears already proves themselves as elite with this starter plate.
The lentil soup is rich and hearty especially for a vegan soup, but the star of this starting plate is the Cevenole Salad. The cevenole salad is essentially a fig salad. The dish consists of five ingredients; arugula, balsamic vinegar, croutons, goat feta, and black mission figs. As individual ingredients they shine on their own, but it’s in combination that they transcend as an all star dish.
As you eat this dish you taste fresh arugula in partnership with the tangy homemade vinaigrette. Following this delightful pairing you will be met with the salty, crunchy croutons as well as its opposing textured partner in crime of the creamy feta cheese. The ingredients all come together with the true star, the black mission fig. It is vibrant and sweet, and when combined with the other ingredients creates a harmonious symphony of flavor that can be compared to their entree counterparts.
If you are interested in something heartier then look no further than the Lasagna. Chef Marco describes the lasagna as a collaboration of the most simple raw ingredients baked into a single dish. The beef will smack your taste buds straight into the chunky tomato sauce. The tomato sauce is rich, but its acidic notes are balanced by the slightly bitter spinach. It’s only then you realize the swiss cheese is not overpowering, but a back seat flavor to the mouthwatering beef. All this only to be dressed in the decadent bechamel sauce that is absolutely to die for. Chef Marco describes it best “each ingredient speaks for itself.”
After a fresh salad and hearty beef lasagna try the perch fish cooked in browned butter and capers served on a bed of the best spinach. It will be the best preparation you will have ever experienced.
The weight of the fork tears the perch so tenderly, revealing its succulent meat, rich in brown buttery goodness. The anticipated bite will dance atop your taste buds in the most elegant way until you bite the capers. The capers are tiny bursts of salty bombs, pairing excellently with the fish. This fish is exquisite, perfectly seasoned and balanced.
Below is a bed of spinach that rounds the dish to its building crescendo. This spinach soaks up the brown butter and capers into an entirely different combination of flavor, but there is still one more pairing yet discovered. The perch and spinach, these two in combination serve as the greatest flavor combinations to come.
The flavors jumble back and forth across the tongue until they marry into a cohesive bond, it is absolutely spectacular. This plate is more than underrated, it is an underdog dish that should be revered through all of Princeton, New Jersey and further.
What is a food review without dessert to tie it all together? Try the almond flour pineapple cake. Thinly sliced bright pineapple slices layered between puff pastry and baked in butter. What else could you want? It’s sweet, salty, creamy, and so much more. It was the best dish possible to finish a meal such as this one.
The Blue Bears has proved to create some of the best dishes in all of Princeton, but how are they planning to grow in the future with the trials of being a young business during COVID-19?
After facing a depleting market of traffic customers Blue Bears decided to start online orders. They are even preparing themselves for the winter, ready to take their dining to a heated outdoors so people can still experience the restaurant. If you are looking forward to a new menu then you are also in luck.
Blue Bears changes their menu every day according to the season and ingredients, but the most exciting news is what they want to accomplish for their menu. The Blue Bears staff explain how they want to introduce a world of different flavors to the restaurant.
Chef Eric proudly proclaims “We are not an Italian restaurant. We are not a Chinese restaurant, we are not a French restaurant. We are an everyone restaurant.”
