I don’t mind traveling far and wide for food. A memorable meal, a great dish, a flavor combination that tastes like it was pulled straight down from the heavens—these are like love, worth traveling to the ends of the earth for, braving whatever obstacles fate throws in your way just for that taste.
I once made Ms. Martini sit through a five-hour lunch immediately following a six-hour flight to Madrid, just because I heard a restaurant called La Broche served the best bacon ice cream anywhere. And I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve dragged my hangover-wracked head out of bed for a curing dose of Sang Kee’s roasted pork and duck noodle soup.
Indeed, there are some meals that justify, by virtue of their very presence on this planet, Herculean efforts to get to. Sadly, the new Dock Street Beer on 50th and Baltimore is not one of them.
The beer is good, of course. Any local suds-head with three functioning taste buds knows that. And, also of course, it’s as fresh as can be. The white amber was bright with the zing of orange; the “great pumpkin” smelled like the kitchen of some sort of Platonic New England home in October, all warm-gourd richness and brown baking spices; the rye I.P.A. was a rich, almost heady mixture of sweet and bitter; and the dark cherry ale reminded me of nothing so much as a super-ripe cherry rolled in coffee-scented chocolate.
But the food, at every turn, failed to live up to the promise of those brews.
Pizza, which took more than half an hour to arrive, was a letdown, especially considering the way I had built it up in my mind while waiting. Much like rock stars make you sit breathlessly between the departure of the opening act and the dimming of the lights that herald their arrival on-stage, I had begun to think that all this time had passed because some sort of unusual TLC was being lavished on the pies we’d ordered.
Was there a team of magical Neapolitan elves in the back tossing those erstwhile crusts into the crispy, perfectly symmetrical rings of the gods? Was there some Mario Batali look-alike carefully, oh-so-carefully stuffing natural casings with the ground sausage meat of the ether? Was some world-weary nonna pulling and tugging at recalcitrant balls of proto-mozzarella, all in an effort to ensure that the food was just so before wending its way to my table?
Alas, no.
I think those pies took so long because they were busy being, well, burnt back there. Which is unfortunate, because it seems as if there’s some real potential in the pizza department. That sausage pie, for example, was thoughtfully topped with a pleasantly acidic tomato sauce, caramelized onions, roasted peppers, mozzarella, and garlic. (There was also rumored to be crème fraîche and fresh herbs, though both seemed to be MIA.) And the barbecued chicken pie, with red onion, a super-sweet barbecue sauce, and just the slightest flutter of cilantro, was reasonably well-balanced and possessed of a depth of flavor I hadn’t expected. Sadly, however, both pies were burnt to the point where any flavor the crust had at one point possessed had long since (perhaps 15 minutes earlier, midway through their sojourns in the ovens) succumbed to forces far greater than they could withstand.
The four cheese pizza was the only properly-cooked pie, but it suffered from overly sweet caramelized onions that obscured any sense of nuance the gruyere, fontina, parmesan, and mozzarella would have brought to the carb-party.
The space itself, a converted firehouse, is basic – decorative flair seems limited to the Dock Street bottle-labels plastered onto the columns—but cheery. And there’s always something comforting about seeing the fermentation tanks where the beer you’re enjoying was born. It’s like meeting your special someone’s parents: You get a real sense of what they’re all about.
But the service, while cheery as well, was scattered at best. And this early in the game, it seems to me that that’s not the fault of the waiters and waitresses, but of the managers. Sending unprepared servers out onto the floor is neither fair to the customers nor to the employees.
That having been said, it does seem odd that we were never asked how we’d like our burger cooked. (Haven’t all Americans, from the moment their first teeth came in, been at the receiving end of that question a million times before?) But I’ll give Dock Street points for consistency: That underseasoned patty, charcoal-black on the outside and darn near sawdust-textured within, was as overdone as those pizzas.
When in doubt, apparently, go well-done.
Fish and chips, while also a bit on the tough side, were the highlight of the meal (at least the non-liquid part of it). The crust was thick and crunchy, and the meat itself, while not the most moist I’d ever tasted, certainly wasn’t the mealiest, either. As for those fries—save the calories and order another beer. They were good, but mainly in a Proustian sense, as each oddly dry bite brought me back to the snack bar at the swimming pool I spent my summers at as a kid. If only that cute lifeguard was there, I might have had a better time…
The dessert list was notable only for its deep-seeded sense of anachronism: Chocolate cake (sensible), tiramisu and cannoli (perplexingly, alluringly out-of-place). And like a jack-knifed tractor-trailer at the side of the highway, I had to stop and take in the carnage. In this case, it took the form of an oddly spongy pastry shell that had been filled with a mixture that tasted like the spawn of a threesome between chalky ricotta, chocolate chips, and a bit of sugar. Free love is great, but not with my dessert.
The great crooner-philosopher Meat Loaf once said, “I will do anything for love, but I won’t do that.” My gustatory life follows that maxim: I’ll fly across an ocean for bacon ice cream and suffer through a bleary-eyed morning-after for some fatty, oily soup. But schlep across the city for a meal of surpassing mediocrity and an overall experience as disappointing as the beer was exhilarating. Like the big man sang: No no. I won’t do that.
Visit Dock Street Brewery
AroundPhilly Staff
