Last Bite - Farro & Apple Salad with Crispy Pork Belly at Le Bon Jour
It’s often best to turn to local sources when you’re trying to glean information about area eateries. For this Last Bite, we turned to our own copy editor extraordinaire, Jessie Gunnard, for some local intel about places around Falmouth. One place she mentioned really piqued our interest. Tucked in off the road in a small plaza at the traffic lights on Route 28 in the Davisville area, Le Bon Jour serves up a surprising array of international flavors in the form of bowls, salads, street food and smoothies, primarily for take-out, although there are a handful of tables and soft drinks available so you can enjoy your meal there. The menu does run the gamut with Mexican, Mediterranean, Thai, Indian, and Italian bowls. There’s arancini alla vodka and even a gumbo soup on the menu. All worthy choices to savor, yet Jessie’s suggestion (“I highly recommend the Farro and Apple Salad with pork belly”) won the day.
There are a lot of flavors in this one mighty salad. The farro is toasted and tossed with mixed greens, apples, roasted sweet potato, Craisins, pecans, shaved Parmesan, and crispy shallots. The apple cider vinaigrette is just the right binding agent to tie all the flavors together. The addition of an optional protein – in this case cubes of crispy pork belly – adds a savory heartiness to the salad to fuel you up without leaving you feeling stuffed. The taste combination with every forkful is so gratifying, you’ll be scraping the sides of the biodegradable bowl for every last bit. If pork belly isn’t your thing, you can choose from other protein additions such as chicken, salmon, crispy flounder, lamb, or falafel.
Mamadou Ly and Mamadou Diop first met while waiting to board their flight to the United States from their homeland in Senegal. They were both on their way to attend Wichita State University (Ly for computer science and Diop for political science). Their shared road eventually led them to Cape Cod in 2014. “We came for a summer, and ended up staying,” Ly remembers of the familiar tale to which many wash-a-shores can relate. Ly didn’t begin his culinary career until he landed in the kitchen of Pain D’Avignon in Hyannis. “That’s where I learned to enjoy cooking,” he says. Stops at the Naked Oyster, where he rose to the rank of Chef De Cuisine, and Water Street Kitchen in Woods Hole (with a six-month stay in Houston mixed in), exposed him to a world of flavors. Ly explains where the inspiration comes from, “Because I had never cooked before, I just wanted to learn from everyone. Working with different people from different places, that’s why you see it on the menu.” He goes on to explain how he arrived at the menu, “I just told myself, ‘I’ll just do the couple of things from each country that I like and try to focus on those.’”
Le Bon Jour offers weekly specials in the cooler months, but the menu doesn’t change and that’s just fine with the devoted following Ly and Diop have developed since they opened the doors of Le Bon Jour in 2019. “Sometimes people get used to certain things, and if you change anything, you might annoy them,” Ly chuckles. “That’s why we have the specials.” Whether you choose a special or one of the international flavors from the menu, one thing that leaps to the fore is the unmistakable taste of freshness. Open year round and seven days a week until 8 p.m. in the warmer months, Ly and Diop arrive to prepare the ingredients for the day starting at 6 a.m. Where did Ly come up with the blending of ingredients for the Farro & Apple Salad? “That’s my own creation,” he states, flashing a smile of pride. Any one item on the menu at Le Bon Jour could have fit the bill for this page. We know because we ordered just about everything in our thorough “story research” on that scrumptiously good day.
Le Bon Jour
420 East Falmouth Highway, East Falmouth
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