Supper Class

South Street's "urban farmhouse" is almost as delicious as it is ambitious.

by Trey Popp

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Published: Dec 11, 2007

Michael T. Regan SMEAR CAMPAIGN: Supper's tangerine-carrot soup, touched with coconut marshmallow, is art you can eat. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

With due exception for the Last one, Supper is a label that doesn't usually suggest gastronomic wonders and daring culinary feats. Supper is warm. It's familial. It's homespun. Even the star-studded affair in biblical Jerusalem was pretty humble, what with a menu of bitter herbs, unleavened bread and wine that lost its bouquet so fast that some suspected the hand of God.

But homey, hearthside cooking is not what Mitch and Jennifer Prensky are serving up at their new restaurant on South Street. They aren't using the name Supper to signal century-old recipes and all-day stews. If anything, they're using it as a provocation.

 

That fact is not immediately apparent when you walk in. The restaurant's hammered copper entrance couldn't strike a cozier note. Throw in a handsome bar and an open kitchen, and the understated ground-floor space hits the "urban farmhouse" vibe on the head. The atmosphere is somewhat diluted on the second floor, which boasts another bar, a ton of table space and picture windows that frame a serene vista of Whole Foods across the street.

It's tempting to interpret that view as a sort of inside joke, because Supper's food is more engineered than whole. That much became clear with the first thing that arrived at our table, a tangerine-carrot soup in a bowl bearing an abstract-expressionist smear of coconut marshmallow along one side.

It would be possible to write a thoughtful review of the Prenskys' restaurant focusing on this one dish alone, but a paragraph plotting out a few binary relationships will do just as well. An earthy root squares off against the lightest, airiest member of the citrus clan. The bright acidity of their combination meets the fatty sweetness of the marshmallow swoosh. The cool-season crops of North America lap up against coconut, the fruit of eternal summer.

I liked this dish as much as any I've had in recent months — especially when I dredged up one of the little lumps of tangerine hiding at the bottom. But like much of so-called molecular gastronomy, which proceeds from the premise that regular food is just too boring to leave the house for, Supper's pleasures were often more intellectual than gustatory.

Conceptual cuisine can be delicious as well as entertaining, but it demands a lot more skill (not to mention trial-and-error, plus a dash of pure luck) than traditional cooking does to make it so. I thoroughly enjoyed eating at Supper, but as more plates came, the kitchen's limitations started to emerge.

Take the squash gnocchi, which came heavily under the influence of guanciale — cured pig cheeks. It was all about bold juxtaposition: the sweet flavor of the pasta set against the (overly dominant) richness of the pork. So it went with some splendidly large and flavorful prawns, whose spicy coating — not quite blackened, but satisfyingly close — clashed loudly with a tart lemon gel traced across the plate in a glossy slick. A "S'mores" dessert did a fission job on the campfire treat, presenting a brick of chocolate, graham-cracker ice cream and an off-putting slab of thickened marshmallow in place of the flavor-melding essence of the original.

You know those car-stereo fanatics who ride around with their treble and bass frequencies absurdly overcranked, showing off the dynamic range of their $10,000 amplifiers by hollowing out the middle registers? Something similar was true of many of the things I ate at Supper. On one hand, accentuating the extreme ends of the flavor spectrum can make for a pretty heady experience. Yet in cooking as in music, the middle registers are where the soul resides.

That's not to say that Supper's food is soulless. It's just that soulfulness isn't the main point. The recipes I liked best were the ones in which those middle registers were more fleshed out. A tenderloin of Wagyu beef, for instance, was unbeatable. Sous-vide preparation resulted in an almost buttery tenderness, and the accompanying guajillo chili sauce was less about combative counterpoint than adding a different kind of depth to an already sumptuous dish.

 

Intellectual cooking begets sharper-than-usual criticism. But verdicts deserve a proper context. When Supper fell short for us, my wife and I found ourselves reaching into memories of transcendent meals in Spain to describe the shortfall. So even if the restaurant doesn't belong in that class, its ambition and occasional triumphs place it in rare company in Philadelphia. If you can put your hankering for an old-fashioned supper aside, you just might find something that excites you in a whole new way.

(t_popp@citypaper.net)

Supper

926 South St., 215-592-8180, supperphilly.com

Appetizers, $4-$7; Plates, $8-$29

Reservations recommended. Wheelchair accessible.

 

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