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Review: Chima
September 4, 2008

By: Brian Freedman - bfreedman@aroundphilly.com

I’ve never been a fan of looking at my food in cost-units. There’s just something irredeemably tacky, for example, about trying to figure out how much you paid per shrimp at the all-you-can-eat seafood bar, or what ingredients to stack your plate with to get the most food at the cheapest price at the pay-by-the-pound salad bar. So I don’t make the following statement without a full and sober understanding of the fact that it goes against so much of the foodlosophy by which I live my life. But some things just need to be said. So here goes:

A recent meal for two at Chima, including tax, tip, two desserts, and two glasses of red, cost just over $3 per minute. Three dollars per minute!

Now, I’ve noted before that a great dining experience occasionally transcends the money required to have it. An epic of a lunch at New York’s L’Atelier de Joel Robuchon a couple of Januarys past was worth every one of the 35,000 pennies it cost to indulge in it. The food and service were so magnificent, so calming in their seemingly effortless precision, that the bill was beyond fair. In fact, it was almost beside the point.

Why? Because the restaurant was dealing in good faith. The price was justified by every impeccable ingredient, every perfectly seasoned forkful, every supremely elegant detail of the service.

But Chima—well, that’s an entirely different story. Because I’m still trying to figure out where that $180-plus was spent on the restaurant’s side of the equation.

Much like Fogo de Chao, the other big-box Brazilian in town, the meal here centered on a studio-apartment-size salad bar and roving gauchos slicing more than a dozen cuts of meat by the table. And while I understand that some of that exorbitant price is necessary to offset the sheer gluttony of a certain type of visitor who is determined to do his or her best impression of the first poor sod that the Kevin Spacey character offed in Seven—has any one of us ever been able to look at bulk-buy tomato sauce the same way again?—that $49.50 per person crosses over into the realm of the offensive when it becomes apparent that the meat itself often isn’t all that good.

Beef rib possessed a distractingly aggressive mineral note that obscured any other aspect of the flesh and rendered each bite nothing more than an iron-y monolith of underseasoning. Rib eye, too, suffered from too little salt and even less deep meat flavor. Flank steak, which had the almost slippery texture that its melted fat typically provides, lost steam (here we go again…) because it was underseasoned. Leg of lamb only hinted at the telltale gaminess of the animal.

The pièce de résistance for me, though, was the pork loin with parmesan, which had the arm-pitty aroma of cheap grated cheese and industrially-raised pork. In that first regard, its aroma reminded me, uncomfortably enough, of certain roommates I’ve had in the past. Whereas so many of the other offerings were merely fair to middling, this one was actively off-putting, more test-of-manhood than anything I wanted to take a third bite of.

Dining Tip

A glass of velvety, very
drinkable malbec is
a stellar pairing partner
for the variety of steaks
on offer here.

Not every entrée option failed as miserably. Though wrapped in oddly flavorless strips of bacon, chicken breast benefited from actual poultry flavor and a pleasant sense of moisture. Salmon, especially with its briny caper sauce, was one of the highlights. Butter-textured top sirloin was very good indeed, an all too rare instance of proper seasoning carrying the day.

As for the salad bar, its mediocrity, in hindsight, was actually the best part of the meal (aside from a couple of workhorse desserts). All the clichés were there, offering a sort of strange sense of comfort.

The mammoth, phallic asparagus spears whose aggressively thick, vegetative tumescence made me blush;

tomato slices that managed to achieve the icy texture of frostbitten sherbet despite the fact that it’s, you know, tomato season right now; calamari salad whose blandness was so sure-footed that it was actually a sight to behold; sad, water-logged shrimp that exhibited all the character and intricacy of what you might legitimately expect from the lead actor in a fifth grade production of a work by Chekhov (which is to say, none whatsoever); a vaguely frightening blue cheese mousse that looked like one of the dishes that Ricky’s mother served the French exchange student during the iconic dinner scene in the great old John Cusack movie Better Off Dead…the list goes on and on.

Even the rolls, remotely gougères-looking things, were filled with a cheesy goo that had more in common, from a textural standpoint, with those fabulous bean-curd candies you occasionally find at Japanese restaurants than with anything I could easily imagine having come from a cow. And the meat fritters, sad little Irish potato-looking balls, held promise only in their visual reference point; the flavor, on the other hand, was like nothing so much as sawdust.

And I was out of there in less than an hour. To put this in context, I’m a fairly slow eater; my average dinner lasts somewhere in the two-hour range. I love exploring the flavors on the plate and the chef’s vision on the menu. I love the slow dance of wine-lubed dinnertime conversation. I love the choreography of well-calibrated service.

But while the service at Chima was friendly and competent; and while the decor itself, in all its Fleming’s-like linearity and what I’d call boardroom-on-a-dimmer-switch lighting, was executed well; and while the crowd—lots of dates and a couple of bigger groups yukking it up—seemed pleased, I couldn’t help but feel trapped, hemmed in by the sad understanding that, unless I ate my weight in meat, I likely wasn’t going to get my money’s worth.

As we were leaving, a gaucho showed up at the table next to ours bearing a skewer of sausages stacked one on top of the other. The girl made some vaguely suggestive comment to her date and let out an embarrassed little guffaw. And while I’m sure that her laughter had everything to do with the flirtation that had been going on the entire meal and nothing whatsoever with the food itself, I’m glad she broke the spell I was beginning to fall under. Because personally, I just wanted to cry. And maybe remortgage my home to pay for the meal.

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Avril: Reviewed
Video: Firecreek Review
In Tequila Verdad
Dining at Dettera
VIDEO: Stop Worrying About Money; Enjoy A Steak

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