Big Love

The Kibitz Room is a beacon of culinary gigantism.

by Trey Popp

Jessica Kourkounis GENIUS ON RYE: The "Glutton for Punishment" section of the Kibitz Room's menu features sandwiches like this corned beef, tongue and turkey behemoth.

[ review ]

"It's so big!" a woman gushed.

"Who can open their mouth that wide?" someone murmured.

If lunch hour at The Kibitz Room sounds like the dialogue on a porn set, it's not by accident. Billing itself as a New York delicatessen "where size does matter!" — exclamation point theirs, not mine — this Cherry Hill import, which came to Locust Street in April, is a temple to conspicuous engorgement. Sandwich meats come stacked thicker than dictionaries. The matzo balls could knock down bowling pins. I took home a cookie big enough for a game of peek-a-boo with my toddler. If he were older, we could have used it for Frisbee golf.

Indeed, it's easier to contemplate hefting or hurling a lot of this food than it is to imagine actually eating it. How do you attack a sandwich that's twice as tall as the space between your front and bottom teeth? Get ready for an epic fail. You'd have better odds trying to eat a sloppy joe with chopsticks. By the time I was done, I might as well have been wearing mittens made out of corned beef and turkey slices.

And just when you think you're going the safe route, like a guy at my table who ordered a simple cheeseburger, wham! — they hit you with a second, entirely unanticipated beef patty.

"That's the Kibitz cheeseburger!" a jovial waitress chirped to the patron. He should've seen it coming. After all, The Kibitz Room also advertises itself as the "originator of the 20-ounce pound."

Still, I hope he didn't make my mistake of ordering a chocolate cigar for dessert. The conical pastry was longer than a liter-sized Nalgene water bottle, fatter at its blunt end than the barrel of a baseball bat, and filled with what seemed to be an entire bag of melted and re-hardened chocolate chips. The thing actually frightened my wife when I brought it home. You could have used it as a barbell. Or a murder weapon.

So total is The Kibitz Room's dedication to culinary gigantism that, to really do it justice, this review should devote itself to nothing else — cataloging humongous lunch plates the way wide-eyed sailors told tales of sea serpents and colossal squid. But all food must pass the tongue before it can stretch the stomach. And in the taste department, there is both more and less to The Kibitz Room than meets the eye.

It should go without saying that you're not going to go hungry here — especially since sandwiches start at $9 per "half." (Unless your goal is to cackle maniacally while contemplating hungry children in Sudan, you don't need a whole.) But just in case, Kibitz includes an all-you-can-eat pickle bar. This is a great perk. Sours, half-sours, green-tomato pickles, chili-pepper pickles, tangy cabbage and carrots: There's a ton to choose from and not a loser in the bunch. The spicy cucumber pickles were my favorites.

The other high points of my lunches hinged on a couple of ingredients that will probably never get their due: beef tongue and chicken fat.

Parchment-thin slices of the former, each one traced with tightly marbled whorls of pink and white, were the crowning jewels of a sandwich whose lower decks featured turkey and corned beef. The full-flavored beauties touched my own tongue like silk. A sandwich featuring nothing else would be all right by me.

Chicken fat came into play with the kasha varnishkas, as the frying medium for the onions, as tradition dictates. Kasha — toasted buckwheat groats — is something else that doesn't exactly top anyone's list of favorite foods. But this version got it right: the forestlike aroma wafting up from bow-tie pasta, the nutty flavor melding with those savory browned onions. Seven bucks is a bit steep for pasta topped with hulled grains, but it buys a deep bowl of comfort here.

Thick slices of sablefish made for a pricier sort of comfort. Mine were a tad on the salty side, but they were almost creamily luscious, and the giant scoop of sour cream was more than enough to cut through the sodium.

The further you step away from niche dishes like those, though, the less Kibitz shines. The absurd thickness of my turkey/corned beef/tongue sandwich (which, to be fair, was listed in the "Glutton for Punishment" section) meant that the tasty cole slaw and Russian dressing topping it off was obliterated by the mountain of meat underneath. Form, in other words, trumped balance. The corned beef was also a little on the dry side for my sandwich druthers — though it worked better in a superb corned beef hash at breakfast.

The oversize pastries and cookies are also less impressive on the tongue than they are to the eye. A cherry-cheese kugel had that been-in-the-case-a-while texture. That giant cookie inevitably lost my attention after about two normal cookies' worth of bites. And chocolate chips make a less-than-inspired filling for that chocolate cigar.

But as with any place with a menu as sprawling as this one, The Kibitz Room does enough well to merit the merry crowd that fills it between 11 and 1. The service is quick, the staff cheery, the patrons in uncommonly high spirits. And there's something contagious about that merriment, as people gaze up from their sandwiches and matzo balls to ask the stranger a few seats away, "How do you eat one of these?"

Just don't look at me.

(t_popp@citypaper.net)

The Kibitz Room | 1521 Locust St., 215-735-7305, thekibitzroom.com. Mon.-Fri., 8 a.m.-9 p.m.; Sat., 9 a.m.-9 p.m.; Sun., 9 a.m.-8 p.m. | Appetizers, soups, salads, $3-$19; deli sandwiches and wraps, $7-$17.50; steaks and burgers, $10-$12; smoked fish sandwiches and platters, $14-$27 | Wheelchair accessible.