In one of the classic episodes of Seinfeld, a neighbor of Jerry’s named Babu Bhat, recently arrived from Pakistan, opens a restaurant on the Upper West Side and spends much of the show waiting, in vain, for the customers to come. His menu, it turns out, is just too wide-ranging for the restaurant-goers of the time: Italian, Chinese, American, Mexican—who would eat at such an unfocused place?
The answer, of course, is this: The twenty-first century foodie. Because in the 15 or so years since that episode first aired, a deep-seeded belief in global eclecticism has gone from Achilles’ heel to point of honor.
The shrinking of the political world may have proven to be truly dangerous. But the shrinking of the culinary one has, in general, been downright delicious.
Sonam seems to be the next logical step in this evolution, a hip South Street emporium of self-described “global dim sum” whose pan-national inspirations and apparent zeal for experimentation provide mostly exhilarating dishes that, even when they don’t work, still afford us a glimpse of something new.
Sonam is post-modern dining par excellence, an experimental whirlwind of styles and flavors, the food equivalent of the work of Pynchon or Fellini.
Like the dim sum-style dining it takes as its inspiration, Sonam’s portions are small. But like the best of those Sunday-morning Chinatown destinations, these diminutive, sharable portions are also filling, and their cumulative effect sneaks up on you quickly. Chef-owner Ben Byruch recommends seven dishes (excluding dessert) for a table of two, though I personally found my pace flagging after sharing dish number six. Best to order three per person and then reassess the situation.
Nothing I tasted lacked a sense of boldness, but the dishes that worked best did so as a result of their balance and clear, clean delineation of flavor.
Seafood sliders—tender chunks of lobster knuckle and claw meat with clarified butter; crab cake with a pomegranate chutney spruced up by the clever, surprising addition of raisins, shallots, garlic, and Thai basil; and a shrimp-mousse cake framed by a cocktail sauce-inspired aioli—were all one of a kind in their surprising sense of seemingly paradoxical lightness and richness, as well as their exquisite balance between protein and bread (Metropolitan Bakery’s sesame-seed brioche). They proved to be an unexpectedly exciting study, in terms of both flavor and texture, of ingredients most of us take for granted.
S’mores, a savory-sweet assembly of a lightly brûléed goat cheese “marshmallow” and a sweet-but-not-cloyingly-so fig reduction, could put a smile on even the most avowed curmudgeon’s face. The only misstep was the poppy-and-sesame crackers in which they were sandwiched; they threatened to overpower the flavors of the filling. A plain whole-wheat cracker would have worked better.
Thin slices of cinnamon- and allspice-crusted salmon, tucked into a tangle of green tomatoes, golden raisins, toasted pine nuts, and salad greens smartly dressed with an orange vinaigrette, managed to taste both vaguely exotic and undoubtedly American. The highlight of the dish, though, were the boursin croutons, an irresistible indulgence if ever there was one: Who among us really has the willpower to turn down fried cubes of creamy, garlicky cheese?
Three buttery scallops impaled on a lemongrass skewer were helped along by the Mediterranean flavors of a pretty crimson Bouillabaisse-inspired sauce. Here, too, the flavors of Southeast Asia made unexpected and successful appearances (along with the traditional seafood stock, tomato sauce, and saffron, chef Byruch added lemongrass and Thai basil), though a bit more salt, and perhaps some hint of a peppery kick, would have made this well-considered dish really sing.
But then there were others that, for one reason or another, just didn’t work as well. Hamachi nachos, while intellectually appealing, would have had more of a presence on the plate had the house-made tortilla chips over which the yellow tail was draped been less oily. That oil, unfortunately, distracted from the rich pico de gallo oil anointing it all, and as a result minimized it.
Buffalo falafel, though the flavors were accurate in terms of their mimicry of wings—the telltale tang of the hot sauce (Byruch uses Frank’s Red Hot) hit me as soon as the waiter put the plate on the table—suffered from an over-pureed consistency. This rendered the texture of the falafel almost seitan-like, and not necessarily in a good way. Ms. Martini put it best when she said that it tasted like a vegan dish (the italics are hers, not mine).
And the cheese steak terrine just fell flat, its downfall a perplexing mousse of filet, mushrooms, onions, and sharp provolone that, unexpectedly, was the major weakness of a dish whose accoutrements sang with a gusto the ostensible focus did not. The duxelle of throat-tingling hot peppers, the tangy-sweet homemade ketchup the texture of a chutney, the homemade sharp-provolone “cheese whiz” (essentially a provolone-spiked sauce mornay)—all of them deserved better than that gray-brown terrine.
But that was really the only egregious misstep, and every other dish, even the less-than-stellar ones, possessed qualities that were redeeming enough to make me feel confident about Sonam’s prospects. The meal, in fact, could be summed up neatly by the chocolate gelato and pork rind dessert: It was an unabashedly high-low preparation, the gelato hearty and velvet-textured, the deep-fried pig skin salty and almost feathery-light, the combination perhaps a bit over-rich but nonetheless exceptional for the thought process that led to it.
It takes a certain sense of self-confidence and intellectualism to put a dessert like that on the menu, as well as a faith in the guests that they’ll “get it.” And I think that they will; I think this restaurant, as it continues to evolve, will begin attracting a crowd that’s willing to veer off the received-wisdom path of restaurant dining and onto a sort of gustatory terra incognita. And that, it should fill every food-lover in Philly with pride to say, is a culture we’ve really begun to cultivate here.
Sonam is supremely of the day, and its willingness to venture into new and unexplored food forms—even if they don’t always work perfectly—is both laudable and, I’d predict, a harbinger of tasty things to come. Personally, I’m optimistic, and looking forward to seeing where it all goes. Wherever it ends up here, I’m confident it will be a tasty, rewarding journey.
