About Us | Favorites Bistro Bar

Downtown New London had plenty of places to eat dinner and grab a drink. What it did not have was a scratch kitchen where comfort food stops being predictable, where the dishes you think you know show up remade by a family that spent 20 years earning the town's trust before they ever lit a burner. Favorites Bistro Bar is Majan and EJ Pierre's answer to that gap. The menu reads like comfort food until it lands on the table. Oxtail braised into crispy rangoons. French onion soup next to jerk chicken next to Beef Bourguignon, and none of it feels forced because the kitchen treats every dish the same way: built from scratch and plated with the confidence of someone who learned technique in one tradition and flavor in another. Forbes featured the Creole Snapper. NBC Connecticut put Majan on camera. The press came to them because the food was already doing the talking.

● Comfort Food That Never Lands Where You Expect It The kitchen at Favorites does not cook from a single tradition. It cooks from a single palate: Majan's. The French technique decides how the oxtail braises. Caribbean instinct decides how it gets seasoned. And her judgment alone decides whether it ends up in a rangoon, on a bed of black rice, or folded into something the menu did not have last month. Oxtail gets braised into crispy rangoons. Plantains become tacos. Beef Bourguignon sits on the same menu as jerk chicken, and the menu holds together because the palate behind it is consistent even when the influences are not. The result is a comfort food menu that rewards curiosity. Guests who order the Rasta Pasta because it feels familiar come back for the Epice Braised Short Ribs because the first visit proved the kitchen can be trusted. The food does not demand that anyone study its lineage. It just asks them to eat, and the surprise takes care of itself. ● Service That Feels Like Someone's Living Room, Not a Dining Room Guests feel the warmth at Favorites before they read the menu. It comes from a team calibrated to the same instinct: treat this room the way you would treat your own house. Staff get mentioned in reviews by name, which only happens when the people working the floor feel personally responsible for the table, not just assigned to it. The waterfront-adjacent setting on Bank Street adds atmosphere, but the warmth is not a function of location. It is a function of a family business where the kitchen and the floor operate on the same frequency. Guests describe feeling at home, a word that gets overused in restaurant marketing and almost never earned. At Favorites, it is earned because the family running it built the culture first and let it radiate outward. ● A Story That Starts With 20 Years of Showing Up Before the First Plate Majan and EJ Pierre did not start with a restaurant concept. They started with a cleaning company, a real estate portfolio, and two daughters they raised in Ledyard. For 20 years, they were neighbors, business owners, and community members. The restaurant came last, not first, and that sequence is the reason Favorites does not feel like a concept dropped onto Bank Street. It feels like it grew out of it. A restaurant opened by someone the neighborhood has never met has to prove itself through food alone. A restaurant opened by a family the town already knows starts with trust already in the room. Forbes featured the Creole Snapper. NBC Connecticut and Connecticut Magazine put Majan on camera. None of it was pursued. All of it followed a kitchen that had something most restaurants cannot manufacture: credibility the community had already granted before the doors opened.