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Ever since the announcement at the beginning of the year that Philadelphia Chutney Company would open in Center City, I have patiently been anticipating the arrival of a casual place to get my dosa fix in Philly, a city strangely lacking in Southern Indian cuisine. Besides the linen-topped dining at the fabulous Palace at the Ben, which only serves dosas during their Southern Indian Sunday brunch, I'm not aware of another place in the heart of the city to grab a dosa.
Philadelphia Chutney Company is a bright, small, fast-food style restaurant smack in the middle of Center City, that conveniently does take-out for workers that need a fast meal. Delivery up to 10 blocks will also be available soon.
For those unfamiliar with a dosa, it's a large, round crepe made from a fermented rice and lentil batter, with ultra-crispy edges and a soft center folded around various fillings. Dosas are usually just shy of 2 feet long, and can be a meal in themselves.
Philadelphia Chutney Company's dosas are delightfully thin and crispy, but, with any dosa, are best eaten immediately before losing it's crisp. The masala dosa filled with potatoes spiced with turmeric, curry leaf, and mustard seed is right on.
The curry chutney veggie chicken dosa with slightly wilted spinach, and sweet balsamic roasted onions flirts only lightly with Indian flavors. There is enough spinach to make one feel healthy, and the veggie chicken is sparse enough to not weigh one down. While I adore traditional dosa fillings, I can get behind the fusion.
Cilantro, curry, mango, tomato, or coconut chutneys come with the dosas, but be sure to pipe up your preference, as the coconut chutney or cilantro chutney seem to come standard.
At $2.50 for an order of two, the samosas might be the best deal on the fairly priced menu which tops out at only $8. About the size of a large man's palm and packed full of spicy mashed potato filling, an order of crispy, fried samosas with sweet tamarind chutney will leave you full all day.
If you like spice, be sure to order the gobi Manchurian appetizer, an Indo-Chinese cauliflower snack surrounded by a thick, fried batter and smothered in a spicy, faintly sweet, Indian tomato sauce. It's like Chinese sweet and sour pork but with a vegetable and Indian twist. By far, the favorite dish of my visit. (If I were a dosa newcomer, I would have said Masala dosa was my favorite.)
The hot masala chai was weakly spiced. Sugar comes on the side, and can be added as you see fit.
There had to be at least a pound of noodles in the $4.75 order. They had carrots, sprouts, and scallions on top, with a good coating of sauce. Unfortunately, the sauce wasn't mixed in at all, and I was forced to play Goddess of Salad Shaking and mix with two forks and an eventual interpretive dance. The sprouts were off. They tasted too earthy and bitter, and I eventually ended picking them out. The carrots gave nice color but little else to the overall composition of the dish, and the onions mixed well with the sesame flavor..JPG)
Sesame noodles are my favorite lazy food. It's like eating spaghetti with peanut butter mixed in, as Frank Bruni would tell us, and what's not to love about that? In this case, the sauce, which seemed inadequate, was enough to coat all the noodles and give them a creamy, nutty flavor. The noodles were thick and perfectly cooked and soft, just the way I like them. I'd order this sans greens the next time, but it's perfect for multiple meals or a light supper with friends. Zhang's Kitchen is the best combination of quality and quantity in the Pioneer Valley. I'm hoping to try some of their more exotic selections and see what they can bring to my table. Er, desk.
The burger is truly a sight to behold. Between a hard roll, a burger with the works contains a hefty ten ounce Angus patty, multiple thick slices of bacon, American cheese, sautéed ‘shrooms and onions, a slice of tomato, and a few leaves of lettuce. It is truly a burger for men and winners, ladies and losers need not apply. The only gripe I have with this burger is that it may be too big. (And yes, that’s what she said!) When attempting to eat it, at times one would have to unhinge their jaw in order to get a good cross section bite of the burger. People who are not hybrids of snakes often end up with bites of the burger containing a few of the many ingredients.
The beer battered fries on the other hand are absolutely perfect the way they come. They are cut to the perfect lengths ranging from two to four inches, and beer battered to have a crisp savory outside and a soft inside. Try hard enough and you can taste the light hint of the beer taste from the batter of the fries. Adding ketchup to these fries will ruin the crisp and slightly salted taste of the great batter and is an act that should be punishable by revocation of man card.
We started out with an appetizer of crab cakes, two delicate, fluffy cakes with a nice outer crust and a delicious, peppery flavor. These cakes were almost entirely crab with little to no filler at all, and the vegetables in the cakes lent a spicy and sweet flavor, never bitter, and perfect. The remoulade made the cakes creamy, and they were a perfectly satisfying and indulgent start to our meal.
My entree decision was a no-brainer. Buttermilk fried chicken with mashed potatoes? Don't mind if I do. And with the wind blowing in on the river, it was a perfect choice for a chilly evening. We smelled it before it even came out, and when it was presented in front of us, looked like absolute heaven. Three large chicken breasts, fork-tender and incredibly juicy, were covered in a crispy cornmeal batter on top of cream cheese mashed potatoes, with a duck gravy and corn succotash spread on top. Holy cow, was this decadent.
Have you ever had a dish that was so rich and amazing, you were full after a few bites but still wanted to keep eating? That's the catch-22 at The Gypsy Apple. The entrees are so good, but so filling, and it's a rather Sisyphean task to put down your fork and await the next course.
Mixed with the potatoes, which were creamy and smooth, with no lumps at all, and the duck gravy, drinkable if not for its incredibly rich flavor, this was a perfect meal. The corn succotash on top added a nice, fresh texture and another layer of sweetness to the meal. Perfectly seasoned, perfectly cooked. There is absolutely nothing I would change about this dish.
Keepitcoming Love also enjoyed her entree, sea scallops with pesto on a bed of Parmesan, lobster and truffle risotto, and found the presentation to be gorgeous. The scallops were tender and the risotto was very rich!
For dessert, we shared the same thing we'd enjoyed on our last visit- profiteroles. These beauties were perfectly portioned scoops of vanilla bean ice cream in between pastry shells, drizzled with a deep, dark chocolate espresso sauce, and dotted with little golden raspberries. Mmmm. Starting with the berries, which were piquant and perfectly sweet when dipped in the sauce, we moved onto the delicious pastries.The pastry shells sopped up all the tasty sauce, which was rich and slightly bitter, and melted into the ice cream while still maintaining their crispy exterior and light, fluffy texture. It was an excellent end to a perfect evening, and I couldn't have been happier to spend my birthday at a better place with such an incredible girlfriend.
Also, check out my birthday cake. Bread Euphoria does it again with a chocolate stout cake, covered in espresso buttercream and ganache. NOM.
South Street's casual but upscale, farm-to-table Supper got me in the door last year with their deviled egg happy hour (so good, they still do it), and this year they got me in the door for their brunch — specifically their Southern-themed Dixie biscuit with pimento cheese, and their red velvet waffles.
The tender, buttery cat head biscuit (named so because it's the size of a cat's head) was perfect. The scrambled egg inside the biscuit was perfect (ham was omitted), as well as the side of grits, even though, for $13, the portion was small.
The red velvet waffles are topped with an airy, sweet, cream cheese frosting, accentuated with pecans and god-awfully-good, bourbon-soaked cherries. (Wish life was a bowl full of these cherries!) Only waffle in shape, the red velvet waffles are doughy without crispy edges, like cake batter poured in a waffle iron. I would have preferred a tried-and-true, crispy waffle recipe made red and with a bit of cocoa powder thrown in than Supper's more literal interpretation.
Been on a hush puppy kick lately, what with the Southern restaurant revival going on all over the nation, so had to give Supper's a try. Their light, crispy, fried cornmeal nuggets topped with grated Parmesan are great, and are leading the pack of the few I've recently tried in Philly (Cooperage's are misguidedly paired with sweet jam; and Catahoula's are too gritty, especially when served undercooked). I'm still waiting for someone to make hush puppies with diced onions, though, to match my hush puppy traditionalist expectations.
We got our sandwiches and tried to put the worst behind us, like a bad date with a small penis and halitosis, and tried to focus on the good aspects. And tried. And tried. And tried. Problem was, there was nothing good about the atmosphere, and the food sucked even worse. Our sandwiches were pressed paninis, usually a good sign, but were so riddled with grease and old burnt butter that Keepitcoming went inside to grab some napkins. She came out with an utterly horrified look on her face, leaned over to me, and whispered, "I think the napkins are used. They're cloth napkins and they don't feel clean." Yes, that's right. Even our napkins had that not so fresh feeling. It appears that the management didn't even provide the proper receptacles for clean and dirty napkins, leaving patrons to play a horrible guessing game while they eat. But after a few bites, it was utterly essential to use them, so we grabbed some of the greasy, filmy napkins and ate some more.
I assumed this was a fluke until we encountered the same thing with Keepitcoming's sandwich. (The Happy Hen, if you must know.) Again, there was a mediocre amount of vegetables, including those Heirloom tomatoes that have practically surpassed Uggs in popularity, but a sparse smear of chevre and a few spotty pieces of chicken breast made this completely unpalatable. An alternative name for this sandwich could have also been, "Girl with a mixed breed," because to add insult to injury, Keepitcoming found a long, straight dog hair in her sandwich. DNA tests to follow.
Wrong again. Our raspberry bar had a disproportionate amount of wrinkly baked jam to crumbly bland tart, with a buttery flavor and a relatively boring texture. It was so mediocre that we didn't even care to finish it, and we are girls who love desserts. With our average at best iced Chai, we left Wheatberry with heavy hearts and sad, empty stomachs. There are far better area restaurants that have better selection, prices, and portions and won't try to impress us with organic and sustainable ingredients to make up for poor quality.
That something special ended up being cornmeal pancakes with butter and syrup, with Nitty Gritty cornmeal muffin and pancake mix. It was pretty easy to make the pancakes, and while I was a little worried that the batter was lumpy at first, it quickly smoothed out and yielded tasty, robust pancakes.
One small gripe we had was that the instructions found a way to complicate the recipe process, using three or four bowls when two would suffice. But aside from that, their ratios were perfect and one batch served us at three pancakes apiece with a few small ones leftover. 
I personally prefer cornmeal pancakes over buttermilk because I like that textural differentiation and heavier feeling, and find them easier to customize. We weren't in the mood for experimentation last night, but we might like to try these with grilled jalapeno pieces and a whipped honey butter.
The most fun part of eating these was breakfast this morning. With some leftover sausage, shredded cheese, and paprika sour cream, we made a fantastic and easy cold breakfast.
