The Jimmy features a menu inspired by the Mediterranean coast— "Italian fare meets French flair” is its motto. While you could say that this is the latest Southern restaurant from Jim Noble, you’d be talking about a very different type of South.
At many of Noble’s acclaimed North Carolina restaurants, mostly in Charlotte, dishes like fried chicken, barbecued ribs, and mac and cheese serve as reminders that you’re in a region with a distinctive culinary history. At The Jimmy, which soft-opened recently in Myers Park, one of this burgeoning city’s more upscale neighborhoods, Noble looks across the Atlantic. Pizza, pasta, salads, and wood-fired meats and fish make up a menu that doesn’t stray far from Italy.
Why the detour from a man whose most other recent openings include a fried chicken joint (Bossy Beulah’s) and a serious BBQ smokehouse (Noble Smoke)?
Besides Noble’s idea of creating a relaxed, Mediterranean-style neighborhood restaurant, The Jimmy owes part of its provenance to the arrival in town of executive chef Jason Neve, who previously oversaw the Las Vegas restaurants in the B&B Hospitality portfolio—that’s Batali and Bastianich, the group that splintered after Mario Batali’s #MeToo reckoning.
Noble brought in Neve as executive chef at the flagship Rooster’s Wood-Fired Kitchen in 2019, and the dynamic duo has now created an exciting menu at The Jimmy, with Neapolitan-influenced (but not wood-fired) pizza, pasta dishes that utilize North Carolina seafood, vegetables, and meat, and salads and sides that play up the Mediterranean connection, from grilled octopus to burrata with basil pesto. Those looking for fried chicken will need to look to another of Noble’s restaurants (namely, Bossy Beulah’s) though there is one nod to the Southern U.S. location: among the pizzas is a “stone fruit” option with peaches, arugula, sweet onion, and stracchino. Yes, a peach pizza.
Stonefruit pizza, topped with peaches and arugula, at The Jimmy. Photo: Courtesy of The Plaid Penguin
Here, Noble tells La Cucina Italiana about the inspirations for The Jimmy and more, in an interview that has been condensed and edited for clarity.
All right, are you ready to talk about Italian food?
Yeah!
Why did you look to Italy for your latest restaurant?
Well, actually, as initial intent it was Italian, French, and Mediterranean, which opens up a lot of doors for us. Also. I particularly love pizza. I love pasta. I love wood-burning grills and stuff like that.
And you had some help?
Yes, it's a collaborative effort. I got an executive chef with me, Jason Neve. He worked at Italian restaurants in Vegas for 10 years. We did the Jimmy and mainly the showcase is really Italian pasta—not Americanized, but really what you might have when you're traveling in Europe and Italy, particularly. And the pizza is sort of Neapolitan in style. It’s our own dough recipe but a lot of the same procedures. We're not trying to be recognized as a Neapolitan-style pizza, to be graded on it. We're not even using a wood-burning oven for the pizza.
How did you come up with this style of pizza for The Jimmy?
I was inspired by Delfina pizza in San Francisco. A good friend of mine, Ben Barker, who had Magnolia grill in Durham, North Carolina for many years, his son Gabe went to work in San Francisco and ended up at Delfina pizza, then came back and opened Pizzeria Mercado in Carrboro, NC, and I love that place. We wanted to do something like that here in Charlotte. But it's not just a pizza place. We do handmade pasta and high-quality dried pasta. We have a wood-burning grill. I always love cooking with wood.
Chef Jason Neve (right) at The Jimmy. Photo: Courtesy of The Plaid Penguin
Why not use the wood-burning oven for the pizza?
Because it can fluctuate and it’s so temperamental. The pizza we're looking for has a good firm bottom on it where you can hold it out and it doesn't flop.
The Jimmy's décor looks like it has a kind of Mediterranean vibe to it. Was that natural?
We had the concept in our head back in the summer of ‘19. And one of the ideas was to make it a throwback to the 1950s, after World War II. Before World War II people used to take cruise liners to Europe, then all of a sudden they started flying. And you had things like James Bond movies coming out in the early ‘60s. It was a really good era, where people were happy the war was over. We wanted to create a place that was sort of like Mediterranean, France, or Italy. I worked with Bill Johnson and The Johnson Studio, which does a lot of our projects. They wanted to make it light and clean and airy. It's a neighborhood restaurant. People bring their kids and they come on date nights
It’s an easy-to-like menu too. You’re not going for a real regional approach or anything, right?
If I was executing the menu every day, I might use a little bit more French influence in there. Now this is probably just a mental fairytale in my mind, but what was it like when Italians came into the South of France and Avignon when the pope came over [during the Schism in the 14th century]? And all of a sudden there was a lot of Italian influence on the Rhone and in Avignon and the South of France. Recently, I’ve gone online and looked at menus from Avignon and it’s French-inspired, Italian-inspired.
I was reading that you're offering $1,000 to new staff members? Is this the staffing issue that much of a problem?
Yes, it's pretty tough everywhere. In the past year and a half since the shutdown, we've worked real hard on our culture and trying to make our restaurants a great place to work. One of the things in our vision statement is to be one of the best restaurant groups in the southeast known for two things, one being a great place to work and two giving back to the community. So we work hard on that. And I think if you're in the top 50%, you probably gonna get a better chance of hiring people than others. But it's been where people are coming on board, but I wish it could move a little faster. And it's just an incentive to get people to move. They gotta last six months to get it.
Orecchhiete with lamb ragu and rapini. Photo: Courtesy of The Plaid Penguin
The Jimmy has only been open about a month, but what are some of the standout dishes that you're really really happy with so far?
Well, they named the mushroom pie the Jimmy Pie because I'd come into Rooster's all the time and we have a smaller dough there that's a little bit more Tuscan in style, and I'd say, “Make me a dough and a half and give me extra mushrooms.” So that became the Jimmy. I love that pizza. The orecchiette that Jason makes is beautiful, with lamb ragu. Pappardelle with a brisket ragu. Right now we're just executing the dinner menu, and we added breakfast. This will be a great place to have espresso coffees and pastries from the bakery. Right now we're Tuesday through Saturday, but soon we’ll add Sunday. And then we'll start lunch, and we basically plan on having three meals a day, seven days a week.
Now is the brisket ragu made with brisket from your Noble Smoke?
No, but it's the same beef. We have a supplier, Creekstone. It's one of the suppliers for Franklin's Barbecue in Austin.
Lastly, I just wanted you to talk about Copain, your bakery.
The word originally meant with bread, and it became a nickname in France. Like a real deal friend is a copain. It meant like you broke bread with friends. You know. We've been baking bread since ‘84. And I had a retail bakery for a little while in the late ‘80s but ended up putting it back in the restaurants and just internally producing our bread and pastries. In the last three years, we've made more of an effort to be a wholesale bakery, picking up other accounts and doing a little retail store that we're playing with. My main focus is artisan bread and baguettes. And you know, I love bread. It's such a staple of life, breaking bread at the table.