June 5, 2008
By: Brian Freedman
bfreedman@aroundphilly.com
I don’t use the term “underappreciated gem” lightly. It’s too often applied to fair-to-middling spots by people with personal interests in seeing seats filled and plates licked clean. But I cannot think of another restaurant I’ve visited so far this year that gets so little credit for such surprisingly overachieving food.
And while that may sound like a back-handed compliment, it’s merely an unfortunate statement of fact. In this town—in any city, really, with a flourishing restaurant culture—a failure to make an impression at the get-go is just as likely to result in mediocre financials as it is a premature closing.
And it would be a crying shame if Peppercorns fell victim to such a fate. Unfortunately, this is a restaurant that, since its opening several months ago, has failed to generate much buzz. Maybe it’s the location: The corner of Moyamensing and Reed isn’t exactly the epicenter of Philadelphia’s dining community. Of course, the London-brown bricks and single-letter signage spelling out the name of the spot are just as unlikely to lure the city’s young and foodwardly mobile to these reaches of South Philly.
The menu at Peppercorns is, admittedly, all over the place, and encompasses dishes as varied as buffalo wings and crab cakes and mussels and pastas. But that’s not where the restaurant’s center of gravity lies. For that, wait for the server to begin rattling off the day’s specials, a long litany of intricately concocted dishes that evidences a sense of ambition far greater than the humble menu items imply.
Noting the disparity between the two, I asked the waitress what the deal was. Simple, she said: The chef creates the specials based on what he’s able to find fresh at the market that day. To which I replied to Ms. Martini after she left, it must be a hell of a market where he shops.
Indeed it must have been. The soup of the day, a deceptively simple tomato number, demonstrated not only a solid grounding in traditional combinations of ingredients, but a deep respect for the limitations of cooking seasonally. In other words, while far too many chefs insist on serving Caprese salads this time of year regardless of how depressingly pale and mealy the raw tomatoes are, the kitchen here coaxed out the maximum amount of flavor from the ones that were available by roasting them first, not only imparting a decidedly caramelized note to the resulting soup, but also setting what inherent sweetness they did have in much more dramatic relief than is typical this time of year.
All of that pure, unseasonably sweet tomato flavor was buttressed by a dollop of traditional pesto—slightly crunchy from the pine nuts—and a sly little grilled-mozzarella sandwich halfway submerged in the bowl.
Grilled calamari didn’t quite achieve that same level of either sophistication or flavor—a slightly heavier hand with the salt would have helped it along that road—but it nonetheless also demonstrated the kitchen’s way with heat. Coaxing such tenderness from those finicky little pieces of squid is more difficult that you might imagine. What really stood out was the tangle of pickled vegetables off to the side, which, when added to a forkful of calamari, brought it to vivid life.
Underseasoning was also an issue with the short ribs, which, while possessed of all the falling-off-the-bone tenderness and gum-sucking richness that you’d expect from beef braised for hours and hours in Barolo, didn’t quite plumb the depths of meatiness that a more well-seasoned preparation would have. Still, much like the pickle salad served alongside the calamari, these short ribs benefited enormously from small hidden pieces of dense, grilled polenta that had soaked up some of the meat’s flavor while still retaining its own telltale sweet-earthy notes.
Mahi mahi, however, was a stunner, especially given its status. Ms. M put it best when she said that she tends to associate that fish with overambitious home cooks who want to use a fancy-sounding ingredient and then proceed to cook it until it has achieved the vague texture of stale bread.
Here, however, the center of the brick of flesh was every bit as moist as its skin was crispy. The real revelation of the preparation, however, was the bed of pineapple fried rice it arrived upon. That rice was so chock-full of vegetables—asparagus, haricots verts, slivers of sweet-pungent onion—that each forkful was likely to contain as much of them as it was nutty little grains, and toed the line of sweetness without teetering over the edge. And the rice found its well-considered counterpart in the snappy-charred skin of the fish itself. Fabulous.
Desserts were split along similar lines, with the lemon tart falling just short due to slight undercooking and the bread pudding soaring as a result of its sense of easy sweet character and nutty density.
Much of this success, it seems, is also due to a real sense of self-knowledge. When we asked about the wine list, our waitress warned us that it was currently being redone, and that the selections were just so-so - a brave and all-too-rare instance of honesty in the vino department. (How many other, more prestigious spots, after all, try to pawn off cheap, uninspiring, famous-label bottlings as acceptable pairing partners for their otherwise smartly conceived menus? To many. Far too many…) I just hope the wine list, once completed, does the food justice.
Because this is a restaurant that deserves far more credit than it’s currently getting. Exterior issues aside, Peppercorns is a winner, its dining room quaint in a vaguely suburban sense, its music so 1980’s terrible as to be charming (Billy Vera and the Beaters was a personal favorite one recent Friday evening). If you’re a wino, I’d give Peppercorns a few weeks to solidify its list. But if food alone is enough to convince you to get in the car and head on down to South Philly, this is one little gem worth seeking out. Sometimes, the best surprises pop up where you least expect them.
