Are You High?

Don't count on perfect execution at Daniel Stern's lofty R2L.

by Trey Popp

Neal Santos LOFTY EXPECTATIONS: The Velvet Rope cocktail (rye, falernum, orange bitters) and the bacon/scallop potstickers are two highlights at R2L, perched 37 stories above Center City.

[ review ]

By now you've heard about the 37-story elevator ride to R2L. You know you might catch a glimpse of Cole Hamels at the end of it, tucking into a ribeye beside a blimp-ride vista. Or a gander at Heidi Hamels, perched on a zebra-striped banquette right out of a Playboy spread. Sandwiched between the penthouse millionaires and corporate brass of the Liberty Two building, Daniel Stern's new restaurant has the neighbors and novelty to guarantee buzz that echoes. Philadelphia hasn't paid this much attention to a high-elevation happening since Rick Mariano went AWOL on the City Hall observation deck.

Unlike the former city councilman, who just wanted a little alone time before the feds rung him up on felony corruption charges, Stern comes to his room-with-a-view with reputation well intact. His résumé reads like a Horatio Alger story. Self-trained cook lands New York gigs under Daniel Boulud and Jean-Georges Vongerichten. Comes home to Le Bec-Fin, which then regains its fifth Mobil star. Opens a little neighborhood spot, Gayle, where Food & Wine dubs his deconstructed veal stew one of the best dishes of 2006. Signs on as star tenant of the Cira Centre, where now it's Esquire's turn to fawn, naming Rae one of the best new restaurants in America.

Rae and Gayle are no longer. But they're not forgotten, since R2L reprises many of the dishes that appeared at the earlier restaurants. Gayle's veal stew is back, as are Rae's venison cheesesteak nibbles, et cetera. The menu layout is equally familiar: terse descriptions, main courses divided between "signature" efforts and simply prepared ones, and entrée prices that look like Kobe Bryant point tallies. A wine list deep in blue-chip varietals hits its stride somewhere around a half-decent bowling score.

Supposing everything were executed to perfection, this setup may appeal to well-heeled, risk-averse diners. It offers a sort of survival-of-the-fittest smorgasbord, in which yesteryear's experiments have been winnowed down so that the most successful ones remain. You can't have three courses for $42 like you could at Gayle, but theoretically R2L's heftier price tag might insure you against culinary overreach.

But perfect execution is not something to be counted on at R2L.

A recent weeknight dinner began full of promise. There was pair of perfect Manhattans, perfectly made. The more newfangled Velvet Rope, which took falernum out of its usual rum ghetto and married it with rye, came off less like a curiosity than a classic. A vast fleet of almost eerily silent servers glided down private-room-flanked corridors like blank-faced statues on conveyer belts, but our waitress was practically ebullient with unfeigned cheer.

There was a squadron of shareable snacks, cute as buttons, the kind of things Mamie Eisenhower might have had as passed hors d'oeuvres if she'd known about microgreens. Stern's versions come with a wink. Scallops aren't toothpicked into bacon wraps, but puréed and tucked into quarter-moon crescents of bacon-impregnated potsticker dough. Those outshine their point of reference, melding scallop sweetness and savory pork fat into a flavor-soaked package the original rarely achieves. Beef and lobster mini hot dogs were almost as vivid, if a tad too precious to really enjoy, the skinny franks capped with pastry discs too stiff to swaddle them.

Elsewhere, delicious flavors ran up against core ingredients that were disappointingly indistinct. Rabbit taquitos came with an assertive jalapeño mousse and blade-leafed cilantro shoots as intense as they were slender, but the ground rabbit itself fell with a flavor-challenged thud. Bite-size sections of cheesesteak swapped out fast-food grease for a supple mushroom and cippolini glaze — and I'd take them over any other version in a flash — but the actual taste of venison was missing. Stern's cooking has always been on the heavy side, and it has a pitfall that trips up R2L's kitchen staff too frequently. Sometimes his ideas add up to intricately layered creations; sometimes they eclipse the ingredients at their center.

When the flourishes are yummy enough, that's a minor quibble — so there's enough to like about the appetizer course to recommend R2L for a solid feed at happy hour. But dinner was a parade of humdrum dishes sometimes marred by startlingly basic mistakes. The ribeye was draped in a béarnaise so acidic it made you pucker. A crabcake plate might as well have been a deconstructed salt shaker; the sodium content of the "Chesapeake mousse" and mustard sauce (not to mention the crabcake itself) was up there with emergency rehydration salts.

Pancetta-topped beef short ribs were a rich and tender improvement over those, yet they tasted faintly of organ tissue. That was a welcome complexity for some and an unwanted distraction for others, but a little odd considering that the kitchen's veal-stock braise doesn't call for it. There was nothing wrong with a "signature" striped bass except its $34 price tag, which ought to buy something more memorable than a modest filet that plays second fiddle to a square of pork belly.

Some of the trickier things worked better. Chickpea-battered shiitake fries were molten and subtly flavored on the inside, crispy at the edges. Dessert, though it took far too long to arrive, also offered a couple of spirit-lifters. Fried balls of basmati rice pudding were leavened by puffed rice and orange-blossom foam. A vanilla cake couldn't have looked more plain-Jane — until its fragrant cream gushed across the plate the way molten chocolate does at other places.

Philly has plenty of other restaurants that can craft a more consistently compelling meal. R2L's special-occasion pricing buys some bar-snack fun, but dinner recalls uneven country-club fare for a captive market. Not the end of the world for Liberty Two's high-fliers, perhaps — but not the top of it, either.

(t_popp@citypaper.net)

R2L | Two Liberty Place, 50 S. 16th St., 37th Floor, 215-564-5337, r2lrestaurant.com. Dinner Mon.-Thu., 5-10 p.m.; Fri.-Sat., 5-11 p.m.; Bar2L Mon.-Wed., 5 p.m.-1 a.m.; Thu.-Sat., 5 p.m.-1:30 a.m.; closed Sun. Soups and salads, $6-$10; chilled, hot and raw bar, $12-$20; snacks, $10-$16; sides, $5-$8; mains, $20-$48. Reservations recommended. Wheelchair accessible.